February 2012
1 post
“February 20, 1962: The USA launches John Glenn into Earth orbit. Something...”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
January 2012
5 posts
“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism...”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Let's talk about SOPA
SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act. For all those living under a hole for the last month or so, it is a law that, if passed, has the potential to destroy the internet as we know it. SOPA was created by the House, but the Senate has an equivalent of this law, the PIPA, or Protect IP Act, that has virtually the same provisions as SOPA. In protest of this law, I will be joining Reddit, Cyanide and...
A year in review
Happy 2012 everybody! 2011 has been quite a year, but rather than recap the events of the year, which I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of other sites do countless times over, I’m just going to throw some statistics about my site this year out at you. Why? Well, mostly because I’m a narcissistic bastard who thinks that other people care about how many visitors my site had in...
November 2011
4 posts
“If only they enforced bank regulations like they do park rules, we...”
– Estelle Weyl
Football and the Church
As many of you know, the college football world is currently being rocked by scandal. Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State’s football program has been sacked after allegations of covering up an alleged child molester. The public has almost unanimously approved of the firing, saying that it is morally reprehensible to protect somebody who takes advantage of children. Whilst Paterno did nothing...
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that...”
– G. K. Chesterton
October 2011
8 posts
7 billion
Well, we made it. According to UN estimates, the world now holds 7 billion human beings. 7 billion people. And what a journey it’s been. From less than a 15,000 individuals on Earth 70,000 years ago after the Toga supereruption, to 1 billion people in 1806, all the way to today. I just want to take this post to give you an idea of the amount of people we’re talking about here.
In...
WatchA fantastically intriguing talk that proves empirically that the well-being of 1st world societies (mental and physical health, average lifespans, child mortality rates, literacy and happiness levels, etc) are directly related to income equality (or the lack thereof) and not GDP or average income. Even more surprisingly, it reveals that both the poor and rich fair better off under societies with...
“The revolution will not be televised. It will, however, be livestreamed.”
– Anthony de Rosa
The average distribution of letters in the English...
This weekend happened to compose of one more extra day than usual, for we had that archaic “holiday” of Columbus Day off. So, what did I decide to do for those three days of school-less bliss? Attempt to calculate the average distribution of letters in the English language of course! To begin the study, I started off by measuring the amount of letters in this paragraph (you don’t...
Thoughts on Steve
I never had the pleasure of seeing Steve Jobs give a keynote. I never knew him personally. But Steve Jobs touched me in a way I can’t fully describe in words. He was a visionary. He was a genius in every sense of the word. He founded the most influential tech company in the world, was fired by that same company, took it back over six months from bankruptcy, and turned it into the most...
September 2011
12 posts
Gliese 370b's surface gravity
It’s happened again. For just the third time in our history, humanity has found an exoplanet that exists in the habitable zone of its star. The previous two, Gliese 581g and Gliese 581d, I have covered previously. I calculated the surface gravity of Gliese 581g here. For both Gliese 581d and Gliese 581g I calculated the size its star would look in the sky. You can view those posts here and...
The other 9/11
On this day 10 years ago, terrorists from the Muslim extremist group al Qaeda launched a coordinated and planned strike on America soil, killing 2,996 civilians. This is a story virtually everybody on the face of the Earth is familiar with. Today, there will be a myriad of posts commemorating its anniversary, so I thought that me throwing another one into the mix would contribute virtually...
“Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to...”
– Spencer Windes
What our legal drugs tell us about our society
As many of you already know, I am for the legalization of all recreational drugs, for it is not a government’s place to regulate what one can and cannot do with their own bodies. Conversely, I am opposed to anybody taking them. Of course, I cannot legally forbid them for it would contradict my first point, and I respect everybody’s right to choose whether or not they want to do drugs,...
“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule...”
– Douglas Adams
August 2011
14 posts
“I can’t stop protesting. Every protest is a story. We finally can shout....”
– An anonymous Syrian activist. Read the full interview from the Atlantic here.
Thoughts on a hurricane
Hurricanes are monsters of nature. These mammoth beasts have brought down entire civilizations, and have been feared for millennia. The Chinese called them the “Great Wind.” When the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean during the 16th century, hurricanes were a new phanomenon for them. Therefore, they took the natives’ word, huracan. Huracan in the Taino language (a...
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap...”
– Steve Jobs
Why I cried at the ending of Bastion, and why I'm...
Every once in a while, a game will come by that will make you think. It will take you on a journey to another world, make you care for characters that don’t exist, and get you involved in a story that could never happen. Recently, that game was Bastion. Bastion is a indie action-RPG, developed as the debut game of a new studio, Supergiant Games. And it’s fantastic. The art style,...
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is...”
– Jack Layton (1950-2011)
Steve Jobs’ resignation is big news. But to put things into context, read this article by John Gruber about the future of Apple.
Reading around the web an hour ago, looking for confirmation of the then-minutes-old news that Steve Jobs had resigned as CEO, I repeatedly encountered and bridled each time at use of the adjective “shocking” to describe the announcement. But my initial...
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or...”
– Carl Sagan
“I am incarcerated, in these dark walls
I see nothing, coerced to smell
Filthy,...”
– As I Die by Jasim Hamid
July 2011
4 posts
The Beautiful Game, and why it doesn't need to be...
Ever since the Women’s World Cup defeat of the United States at the hands of Japan in penalties, there has been quite a buzz about the need to “fix” soccer. People on a variety of sports shows and blogs have called for the end of penalty shootouts, in favour of an open-ended overtime with no time limit. In particular, this blog post on One Foot Tsunami has been cited as a good...
The Curious Case of Sean Hoare
Today, a very curious development indeed occurred in the News of the World phone hacking scandal. To those of you who live under the rock of ignorance, News of the World, an English tabloid magazine owned by the Rupert Murdoch and his evil empire, was found to have hacked numerous phones to get voicemails of the British Royal Family, 7/7 London bombing victims, relatives of deceased British...
““Is a broken man an outlaw?”
There are many sorts of outlaws, just...”
– Septon Meribald (from A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin)
June 2011
4 posts
The untold story of Bar Sauma, the Marco Polo of...
The story of Marco Polo is one that is widely known across the Western world. His book was a bestseller not only in our time, but in his time during the 13th century as well. The tales of his travels ignited an exploring craze in Europe, eventually leading to the discovery of the New World and the colonization of the better part of the entire world by European adventure seekers. A lesser...
“God is what happens when humanity is connected. Humanity connected is God. Each...”
– Jim Gilliam (from The Internet is my Religion)