A couple days ago, a longtime friend told me to go fuck myself over my interpretation of the Fermi paradox ( Read more... )

Society would be markedly improved if everyone were curious and eager to learn. Of course, that's as far-fetched as any other utopian fantasy: We might be able to stimulate some degree of curiosity in some people, but there will always be a substantial number of people, possibly a majority, who are content to live their tiny meaningless lives with ( Read more... )

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People without a scientific background might be surprised by how little scientific information is actually available online ( Read more... )

I'm feeling a little bit less Chicken Little today. I mean, the Senate voted to permit the military to indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil without trial or charge, and the Senate will soon vote on whether to permit media corporations to shut down websites based merely on content sharing allegations, without a review process, and ( Read more... )

My whole life I've been a liberal. More recently (after the events of 2009 showed how badly corporate money, neo-liberal economics, and unrestricted lobbying interests had damaged the apparatus of American democracy), I've begun flirting with socialism, but I'm not sure if it's going anywhere. Both liberalism and socialism are ideologies of ( Read more... )

Before this gets entrenched in pop culture mythology, I'd like you to hear about it from me ( Read more... )