This is the third part of a three-part series. Part one, part two are available for perusing. I finished up the last book of the year at 10:20 PM on 12/31/2011, just barely meeting my self-imposed goal of sixty books for the year. I did National Novel Writing Month for November, which slowed me down […]

Alright, so I was cruising reddit the other day and found a python script that mines through your comment history and pulls all that information into a text file. I immediately did so. One small downside of this is that only the last three months of comment history are stored for access from your comment […]

First, some definition of terms. When I talk about brain uploading, I mean making a copy of the brain with virtual neurons, virtual chemicals and virtual chemical receptors. I’m also starting with the premise that this virtual copy contains that nebulous quantity I’ll dub “youness”, though obviously that’s up for debate. I consider it to […]

Superman has always bugged me. The idea of dressing up in a special outfit and going to fight crime I can sort of understand, but it makes more sense for Batman than for Superman. Batman devotes nearly his whole life to fighting crime; even those token times spent as Bruce Wayne serve mostly to provide […]

I’ve gotten through another twenty books since last time. This puts me about a month ahead of schedule in my reading, which means that I might just have time to read Infinite Jest after all. The Magicians by Lev Grossman – Cynical and somehow still wondrous, and offers a nice variety of emotional impacts. Bossypants […]

Let me be upfront: this whole blog post is about how much I hate the phrase “Life begins at conception”. The problem is twofold. First, it’s incredibly ambiguous. “Life” can mean a whole bunch of things. I believe when pro-life people use the term, they mean it in the sense of “continuity of identity”. To […]

Okay, so this year I’m trying to get through 60 books, which I think it a reasonable goal that will keep me reading without getting sick of it. At year-end, I’ll throw the list up along with some graphs about what my genre tendencies tend to be, authors I read, etc., but for now here […]

I keep having this same dream where there’s an alternate ending of Pulp Fiction which everyone hates and I find absolutely hilarious. The actual details of this alternate ending aren’t important, because like most dream stuff, they don’t actually make sense in the context of reality. Just imagine me laughing my ass off in a […]

So I’ve been checking out a lot of the the videos and commentary on Adobe’s new Content-Aware Fill. I find several things about the online discussion to be fairly amusing. Firstly, there are the people who claim that this is fake. I can sort of understand this, as it was originally posted around April Fool’s. […]

It used to be that kings actually were better than everyone else. This was because of their diet; a prince or dauphin growing up would receive a lot more meat than a peasant child, not to mention how much more varied their diet was. So when they finally got to be king, they would be […]

Alright, so I just got done with Assassin’s Creed, and while jumping across the rooftops of Damascus and stabbing people in the throat is great fun, what I found really interesting is the story. Spoilers Follow for Assassin’s Creed and Bioshock The story in Assassin’s Creed is about a guy wandering through the 12th century […]

I’ve always said that one of the great and terrifying things about the internet is that it allows all of the niche people to find each other. This means chat rooms and message boards that 99% of the population can’t relate to, and online stores where you can buy pretty much anything. Cannibalism, for one […]

So I was watching the latest episode of Caprica, which features a digitized person trapped inside of a computer chip. The computer scientists were talking about why they were unable to make a copy of the chip, and the reason that they come up with is that the chip encodes something analog instead of digital. […]

If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog, you probably know that Duluth is in the running to become a test city for Google’s proposed ultrahighspeed bandwidth test. At first, I really liked the idea of living in a city with 1 gigabit connection speed, aside from the fact that Google has no […]