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I think Dave Foster Wallace writes excellent non-fiction but I cannot stomach his fiction. I don't like his style in general but I appreciate the intellectual ambition. He is not afraid to sound smart and he covers interesting topics from a point-of-view I can identify with. The non-fictional...

Damn it, late again. Anyway, here's a link with pictures: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/02/colossal_squid.php

But why? Diamond Age is Snowcrash Part 2 with nanotechnology in place of virtual reality. I don't remember if we mentioned Bruce Sterling yet (that other cyberpunk author). I like him. He is really dense and intense. Hundreds of little nuggets to chew on sprinkled in the stories. He really...

I am from Baltimore. I am not really a part of any scene but my impression is that it is really segregated. You just don't hear about Club music in the sorta white/art student/hipster mileu. Baltimore really has three scenes and they don't mix together as far as I can tell. There's the black...

Man, this thread certainly covered a lot of ground. Nomadologist, what are you studying that you have to take all these weird classes?

Wait a second, what is this axis that he is talking about? I don't think he defines axis by how the climatic zones run but by the geometric shape of the continent. Africa is long in the north/southd dimension and short in the east/west direction. So there is more land/people/resources...

My recollection of the book is a little hazy at this point but I want to address the North Africa issue. It is treated as part of Eurasia because it is connected to it and crops/animals would have no problem traveling to or from there. The rest of Africa is surrounded by ocean and separated...

Atwood's "Oryx And Crake" was so good.

Of course victim's testimonies shouldn't be automatically suspect. Wouldn't a perpetrator typically have a history so that many women could come forward? But again, you have the whole stigma thing. I don't think the courts can really change anything until the culture as a whole changes. Do...

The difference is that in a murder trial it is used to find someone guilty where the criteria is "beyond a shadow of doubt" not to lend credence to someone's statements. The other difference is that in a murder trial the victim isn't there to provide testimony.

But you can't really use "what is my motivation to lie here?" as supporting evidence because that has nothing to do with what really hapenned. Maybe the accuser is lying and now regretting it but it's too late to change things so best to keep going. It's just not how I see justice working.

Ah awesome. I should have know it'd be something like that. We had Hisham Mayet in town a couple weeks ago showing his great film "Musical Brotherhoods From the Trans-Saharan Highway" and he had a table with all these Sublime Frequencies CDs/DVDs there. A local owner of the record store El...

I am not hopeless. I just realise the odds are stacked against us. It's like those guys who are besieged but still fight to the last man. I am not saying we should give up at all. I am just trying to point out the tragic dimension here.

Oh, yeah, no doubt it needs to be tackled. I am just saying that we are fucked anyway. Isn't that heroism? Fighting even though you are doomed?

link to .ogg file What is this and where do I find more like it? I am not even sure of the region of this music, much less the artist/title/compilation source/genre ... I got a few other tune id's there if you want to take a crack at them.

Ethanol is absolutely terrible as a car fuel. It's very inefficient to produce (for each 1 unit of energy you put in to produce it from corn you get out something like 1.5 at best...figures vary on this). The other big problem is that there's just nowhere to grow all this extra biomass. I did...

It's hapenning awfully fast though. We are talking decades here not geological time. Also...it could be both! What we are doing definitely isn't helping.

Not soon enough and worse than we think. Why do we need the Pentagon to tell us how bad things are? I know that things can get very bad but I don't really feel it in my gut. We are too comfortable and nothing we can do can prepare us (well...maybe travelling to some parts of Africa or similar...

There's nothing really sci-fi about the Fountain. It's some kind of philosophical thing on death, loss and living in the present. Anyway, while it looked gorgeous (especially if you like murkiness and gold/brown palette) it was just ridiculously sentimental. It was embrassing watching it. I...

There's also the opening minuites from Dune though that uses drawn images. Best part of the movie.