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 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 Human Family Tree – National Geographic

The Human Family Tree is a 2-hour documentary that explains why race is an optical illusion.  The show will be repeated 09/06/09 at 1pm, but is also available on Netflix now.  Because of the wonders of DNA and genetic markers, scientists are able to trace the migrations of human populations back to their origins in [...]

Making SETI Chit-Chat

Humans have been playing galactic wall-flower, afraid to make first contact with our alien neighbors, but what happens when a neighborly little green alien sends us an interstellar text message, what will we type back?  Linguists aren’t even sure if interstellar communication is even possible, but let’s say we overcome the language barrier rather quickly.  [...]

How to Introduce Physics to Your Friends?

My friends know I’m a bookworm and often greet me with, “What are you reading?”  This past week I’ve been causally replying, “A book on physics.”   To which all my friends give me a strange look that asks, “Why the f#@* would you want to do that?”  Last night, when Janis asked, and gave me [...]

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953.  I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways.  First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole.  [...]

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is the 1959 Hugo award winning novel that was recently produced as an unabridged audio book by Audible Frontiers, the science fiction and fantasy publishing imprint from Audible.com.  The book is wonderfully narrated by Jay Snyder.  When I became addicted to audio books back in 2002 I constantly [...]

The Economics of Inefficiency

During bad economic times people seek ways to get more for their money – in other words they try to become efficient spenders.  The trouble with that thinking, it’s bad for the economy.  What we want is a thriving economy where there’s a chicken in every pot and the future is rosy.  Woefully, a thriving [...]

Do I Embrace The Negative?

I told my friend Janis I had written what I considered a funny post called, “Retirement from Sex,” and she quickly replied, “Who’d wanna read that!”  I told my friend Marty at work about the movie Young @ Heart, a charming story about old people, and she quickly replied, “Who’d wanna see that!”  I love [...]