I have written before on a couple of occasions about the Fermi paradox. To recap, the idea is: if life is plentiful throughout the universe and there are many sapient, industrial species, where is the evidence? The sky should be filled with radio waves and other telltale evidence ( Read more... )

It is never too late to re-invent yourself ( Read more... )

I first went off to college in 1984. (I say "first" because I've had a somewhat checkered college career, with many false starts.) On the occasion of my going off to school, to learn (or so I thought) computer engineering, I got myself a programmable calculator: a Radio Shack EC-4004 ( Read more... )

I got the idea to do a blog post for each contribution we got on the Thorntree Press crowdfunding site yesterday evening, while zaiah and I were driving home from the Humboldt Anarchist Bookfair in Arcata, California. "It will be a great motivator to write!" I said. "Sure, it'll be a lot of writing, but how hard can it be ( Read more... )

Should you ever find yourself in Las Vegas, I suggest... Well, to be honest, I suggest you don't find yourself in Las Vegas. It's a sad, desperate place, filled with people trying much too hard to convince themselves that this thing they're having is indeed fun, and not some other thing, like not-fun (which, I must say, is more often the case). And ( Read more... )

If you've been part of any poly community online for more than...oh, about 400 milliseconds or so, you've unquestionably seen someone post the "polyamory is wrong" T-shirt. You know the one I mean:


( Read more... )

There is a rather delightful little book on Amazon, available in Kindle edition for free. It's called The Ladies' Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners or, Miss Leslie's Behaviour Book, and it's a book about proper manners written in 1864 by Eliza Leslie ( Read more... )

The balance of nature. This is a thing that people talk about, and every time they do, I cringe.

Wikipedia has an entry on the balance of nature, which has this (among other things) to say on the subject:

The theory that nature is permanently in balance has been largely discredited, as it has been found that chaotic changes in population levels ( Read more... )

There is a book called Worry and Nervousness: The Science of Self Mastery. I don't know a thing about the book or its author, except that its author must not own cats ( Read more... )

I had, many years ago, a friend who tended to cheat on her partners ( Read more... )