I was talking yesterday with my friend Petr, who has recently launched Expert Decision, a news and commentary site covering issues facing his native Russia. The site being in Russian, and my Russian skills being limited to a couple words, it’s been necessary to resort to the translate tool in Chrome.
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David Lynch inspired a generation of genius TV. And a moment of unfettered silliness.
Read moreThe 2017 remake of the manga classic is marvelous to behold, but not especially filling emotionally. Went to see Ghost in the Shell the other day. In IMAX. IMAX 3-D, to be precise. Initial impressions: 1) It’s just fucking gorgeous. The designers have studied the classics, from Blade Runner on down, and they create a world that does justice to the
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No, famous people won’t stop dying on January 1. But we lost too many bright lights this year and we hope that 2017 will be better. Here’s a list of noteworthy people who died in 2016. For the past several months a lot of us have been saying we can’t wait for this damned year to be over. 2016 gave us
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Can new procedures tell us who killed the child pageant queen? Were there multiple murderers? According to NBC News, “new DNA testing is planned in the unsolved murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.” The news was first reported by NBC affiliate KUSA in Denver, Colorado, and by the Boulder Daily Camera. The two news outlets did a joint investigation in October
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The once and future first daughter’s bout of reefer madness notwithstanding, please remember: “anecdotal evidence” is another way of saying “no evidence”… Chelsea Clinton, who has been out on the stump a bit lately “helping” her mother’s campaign, recently dove face first into the muck by saying that pot can be fatal. “…we also have anecdotal evidence now from Colorado
Read moreWith the 1962 World’s Fair, Seattle asserted itself as the city that invented the future. Seattle Center, home to the Space Needle, Key Arena, the Pacific Science Center and other Jetsonesque architectural wonders, gave us a stunning Mid-Century Modern vision of our presumed technotopian future. In 2000 the EMP Museum opened, inserting a postmodern generational overlay in the form of Frank Gehry’s gripping postmodern
Read moreThen In 1993, during my first year in the PhD program at the University of Colorado, we had a guest speaker in one of my classes. The subject was information technology and the Internet. He explained that at that moment, the largest repository of stored electronic data on Earth was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, about four miles away.
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We all love freedom and the Constitution. But is it really that simple? I’m a huge fan of a good debate. And by “debate” I don’t mean the sort of ginned-up scream-lie-and-spinfests we have come to associate with the term in the past few decades. No, I mean spirited, intelligent, thoughtful exchanges between parties with honest, good-faith disagreements. Lucky me, I tripped across
Read moreIn their fascination with technology, are Libertarians really just seeking certainty? I just finished reading George Packer’s remarkable, if not especially uplifting, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. One of the people he considers in his biography of the modern US is billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Thiel is, among other things, a diehard Libertarian. Packer is … not.
Read moreP-51 Mustang
Read moreEsquire blog discusses a famous brewer’s secret for staying (relatively) sober. We test it out. You may have seen Aaron Goldfarb’s recent Esquire blog entitled “How to Drink All Night Without Getting Drunk.” Great headline, and how cool would that be, right? I was skeptical, for obvious reasons, but it turns out that what is proposed is an idea developed
Read moreIt may seem like a small thing, but if you write for one of America’s premier tech magazines, you have a responsibility to understand how probability works. Earlier today Wired published an article on how a new Quantum theory could explain the flow of time. Great stuff, and really interesting. Definitely give it a read. But in the course of
Read moreYou know how schools sometimes have assemblies where outside speakers or entertainers put on a show for an hour? Right. Well, when I was in first grade my school, Wallburg Elementary in sleepy little Wallburg, NC, had a musician come in. I don’t remember much about the show, except for this one thing. He said he was going to do
Read moreThe brain updates memories to make them more relevant and useful. It isn’t trying to accurately remember what happened. So, what do you remember that’s wrong? Science has long known that human memory is far less reliable than most people imagine. For fun, Google [memory not reliable] and when you get a few spare minutes work your way through the
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lullaby pit 