Generally, I don't consider myself a gun enthusiast. In fact, I generally try to distance myself from people who are, figuratively as well as literally. On the other hand, I don't think that enthusiasm for weaponry is bad in and of itself, and while I do strive to be non-violent in my personal life, I'm not exactly a pacifist, either ( Read more... )

If I were the headmaster of Hogwarts, I would make the first day of class in potions consist of learning how to smelt iron from iron ore, and cast it into the shape of a cauldron ( Read more... )

I recently read a book called The Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. In this book, Kaku essentially examines a wide variety of science fiction cliches and determines the extent to which they are possible within the bounds of physics. Specifically, he creates levels of impossibility: level I impossibilities are extremely difficult with our ( Read more... )

The three books I've recently read are not three I would have picked out for their thematic similarities. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic poem that chronicles the adventures of the heroic king of Uruk, The World Without Us, an alternatingly hopeful and heart-breaking thought experiment which illustrates the impact of our species by ( Read more... )

Disclaimer: I was about to write a long, thought provoking essay, complete with links, sources, and philosophical pontification, on this subject. Then, coincidentally, I spent some time going over old entries from college, and arrived at the following conclusions: 1. My livejournal is already full to the brim with bullshit theories, and 2. I'm ( Read more... )

In the process of reading A Short History..., among other things, my mind has been continually retracing topics which skirt the boundaries between science, philosphy, religion, and so on. For want of a better term, I'm going to refer to this as metascience, although parascience may be more accurate. It all sort of depends on how you define ( Read more... )

Statistics are generally a bunch of meaningless numbers, but even more so when you're talking about ideas that are vague to begin with ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about the word Master a lot over the last couple days. Why, you ask? Well, to be fair, you probably don't ask, but I'm going to tell you anyway, so deal.

I've just finished Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. For those of you who haven't read it, I will give a few details and hopefully will not spoil the plot to any who are ( Read more... )

Earth is not a very stable environment these days -- politically or environmentally -- and it follows that a fair number of end-of-the-world predictions are being made.

That being said, history has seen several periods of political or environmental unrest in the past, and yet, here we all are.

In any case, some of these things are interesting:

( Way too much information, but some of it might be worthwhile )

this is from this siteThe human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long, so half of that is in each spermatozoa -- 1,560,000,000 base pairs ( Read more... )