In the eight years of his presidency, George W. Bush will never detonate nuclear weapons, not as a test, nor as a demonstration, nor as an attack on America's enemies. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, the Iranian government will detonate them as a test, as a demonstration, and as an attack against Iran's enemies--probably fulfilling all three purposes with a single blast--within eight years of developing them. If the Iranian government detonates a nuclear weapon, the American left will...

Protestant theologian C. S. Lewis subscribes to the idea of a cosmic battle between Good and Evil. According to this idea, the Forces of Good have for some reason chosen us--humanity--as the front and final line of defense in this battle. Developing the military metaphor, Lewis proposes that the faithful are not tested by misfortune as a punishment for their sins, but as a "reward" for their faith. Just as you train your troops hard, so that they will perform well on the battlefield, s...

WARNING! I am about to say something morally repugnant. If you are offended by things like Holocaust Denial and thought experiments depending on extreme examples of moral relativism, stop reading now. Okay, so the problem with the Theory of Evolution is that it leads to conclusion that the Holocaust, which killed many of undesireables such as Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals, is no more evil than the Bird Flu, which kills many birds of various types. According to evolution, both ...

Had another dream last night. This one started out on a desert island, with vague undertones of Gilligan's Island. Don't ask why; I don't know. It's not like I've watched Gilligan's Island in, like, the last twenty years or so. Maybe it's a Lost thing. But then it turned out that I had Learned Too Much about the Conspiracy. Goons promptly abducted me into the underground complex (on the island, so it probably is a Lost thing). At this point in the dream, things were going pretty ...

So it occurred to me that there's phsyics, and then there's metaphysics. As the prefix "meta-" implies, "metaphysics" is about things that are beyond the power of physics to describe. Now, through constant study, physics is able to describe more and more things. But it will never be able to describe everything. In fact, advances in the realm of physics depend on logical tools that clearly establish the limitations of science to describe everything. But that's not my point. My p...

With Network Television, you pay for shampoo, and the shampoo company pays for your television entertainment, and you get shampoo commercials. With Premium Cable, you pay for shampoo, and you pay for your television entertainment, but there's no shampoo commercials. With Basic Cable, you pay for shampoo, and you pay for your television entertainment, and there's still shampoo commercials.

So yestreday was a Lab Day, in class. Which is pretty fun. Only sometimes? Not so much. Anyway, the instructor unlocks the cabinets and hands out handfuls of equipment: routers, "consoles" and enough cabling to put on a good tentacle monster hentai scene. The "consoles" are ancient Toshiba laptops, good for nothing more than running Windows 95 and Hyperterminal. The cabling? Well, there's the serial cables (one for each router), the console cables (one for each router), the ethe...

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "who is Peter Pace?" Peter Pace is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I'll let the man speak for himself.

I had an extended dream last night, about zombies. The dream was vaguely reminiscent of Day of the Triffids , I book I have read but a movie I have not seen. In my dream, the zombies would suck out your soul, turning you into one of them. They accomplished this by raising up their arms in the classic zombie pose, extending their fingsers, and drawing out your soul as thin black and red wisps of... ectoplasm, I guess. Don't ask. Dream metaphysics. Anyway, they could do this from s...

Okay, so get this: George W. Bush, with the help of his brother Jeb and Big Oil, stole the 2000 Presidential Election. This was the Democrat's big chance to build on the success of the Clinton Administration, save the country from the horrible effects of the Dot-Com Crash, roll out free healthcare for everybody, and put the finishing touches on a new era of international cooperation and tolerance. But stupid old "Dubya" had to go and mess all that up. At first, the liberals (and th...

So I watched the new War of the Worlds movie this weekend. Spoilers! As far as I can tell, the best part of the movie comes at the very beginning. Tom Cruise is working in a shipyard, using a crane to move giant shipping containers around. It's hard, exacting work, and he seems to be incredibly good at it. When his shift ends, at the end of the scene, his foreman pleads with him to stay and work another shift, since he's the only crane operator that can keep up with the workloa...

So when I was a kid, I read two and half books. Well, I read a lot more books than that, but two and a half from a particular series: Jim Dunlop and the Wingless Plane . Now these books were old when I got them. They must have been written in the Fifties. Set in a typical midwestern American town, these adventure novels chronicled the exploits of Jim Dunlop and the Wingless Plane. Obviously. The stories were arranged in the Hardy Boys way: Jim and his friend would run around ...

#3 by STRES2 Tuesday, December 13, 2005 Things are not what they may first seem. Read it and you might understand what i'm saying. people are too rushy rushy, give things a little bit of time and you will be rewarded with understanding. This blog is not for deaf ears. If you are not willing to take the time to understand what is being written then this isn't for you. There is a rule that undermines all yours. it's called freedom of speech. and if my words fall on deaf ea...

To me, there's a clear difference between "science fiction" and "space opera". The latter may be set in a futuristic or high-tech setting, but focuses on aspects of the story that are independent of the technology involved. Star Trek, for all its amazing gadgetry, was never really about exploring the impact of technological advances on human society. The gadgets, from Warp Drive to Phasers to Transporters to Holodecks, are all just convient brain-candy plot devices for putting the charac...

So the Vatican is evil because it won't advocate condom use as a means to counter the spread of AIDS. Instead, Catholic doctrine teaches that using a condom is a sin. If they really cared about stopping the spread of AIDS, they'd encourage people to use condoms. Right. Because I'm sure there are a millions of good, devout, Catholics out there right now, saying to themselves "I'd totally use a condom before committing adultery with this promiscuous, high-risk sexual partner, but out ...