Pale Blue Dot

I discovered over at Mike Brotherton’s blog that today, 11/7/9, is Carl Sagan Day, and Mike makes some interesting observations about Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the public’s attitude towards their atheism.  For awhile, Carl Sagan was the face of science to the general public, sort of like Stephen Hawking is today.  Any second rate [...]

NOVA – Becoming Human

The PBS show NOVA began a three part series called Becoming Human that is an excellent roundup on the science exploring the evolution of humans.  The show aired on Tuesday night but most PBS stations repeats NOVA throughout the week, and you can also watch the episode online.
Evolution is a controversial topic in this country, [...]

Prayers for Atheists 1

Why would atheists want to pray if they don’t believe in God?  Let’s make a theoretical assumption that tomorrow we all wake up and it’s obvious to everyone that God doesn’t exist.  Do we just throw away all the sacred books, bulldoze the churches and forget religion completely?  Or would we recycle the components of [...]

Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them.  At nineteen I felt like a grownup [...]

The Purpose of Science Fiction

Why do you read science fiction?  Do you read science fiction purely for entertainment, or do you want something more from science fiction? I’ve always expected a lot more from science fiction then maybe I should have, and that might be unfair to the genre. I never wanted SF to be merely [...]

“Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss

Generally, my reading of short stories are unfair to their authors.  I read them quickly, like gobbling down chocolate chip cookies, with little thought other than immediate gratification.  I want to change that.  I want to slow down, read each story twice, and put some contemplation into figuring out what the author’s ambition was when [...]

Rethinking Interstellar Travel for Science Fiction

If you read science fiction we live in a small universe, but if you read science, the universe if horrendously huge.  There is no way with words to convey the immensity of space – even math fails to give us a feeling for the size of reality.  If we drove over to Proxima Centauri in [...]

The Loneliness of Facebook Friends

We all know people who tell us they have hundreds of friends on Facebook, but do people really have that many good friends?  Friends that would pick them up at the airport or take them to the doctor’s when getting a colonoscopy?  Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe Facebook is a marvelous invention [...]

The Invention of Lying

The Invention of Lying is the funniest movie about our society since Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.  Oh yeah, that would be a lie.  I was more excited to see this new Ricky Gervais film than any other film in a long time, but at one point I wanted to walk out because of boredom, and [...]

The Good Wife – Dating a New TV Show

The best TV is evolving, becoming more sophisticated, especially when comparing today’s shows against those from decades past.  Imagine a science fictional time signal sending The Sopranos, Big Love or Deadwood back in 1969, and what a contrast those shows would make to viewers of The Brady Bunch and Marcus Welby, M.D.  Most of my [...]