Jodi Foster is one. She seems normal because she aggressively stays out of the public eye. This is interesting given that Howards Huges self-imposed isolation was seen as anything but normal. On the other hand, that seems to have been borne out. Lately I have been reading the blog WWdN: In Exile. This is the blog of Will Wheaton, most well known to people as the character Wesley Crusher on the television program “Star Trek, The Next Generation” and also, like many, I came to wish the same fate on the character Crusher as many Star Wars fans wished in the character JarJar Binx. …
Category: Mass Media/Pop Culture
Well I’m not blogging either, so there.
Cindy’s not the only one not blogging. Here are a few things I’m not writing about:
1)Transparency. Mark wanted me to write about it ages ago, and I’ve thought about it, and don’t know what to say. Part of what troubles me about HTS is the overt lack of transparency (does that make them transparently opaque?), in the name of national security. Is this just a question of degree? Because, really, none of us who do or who have done research among our fellow human beings are completely open books.…
Living in Exponential Times
I promise I won’t post youtube videos with every single post (haha). However, this time I will. One of my professors posted this video on our blackboard discussion board and I found it really interesting. There is also a wikispace that further discusses the statements made in the video. If all the statements made were statistically sound, then my generation and future generations are in for some really amazing changes. That statement might make you say “duh” but seeing it in numbers and within some sort of timeline makes the point really hit home.…
According to the Discovery Channel, the Earth hates you… it really really hates you.
I think I have mentioned before how much I enjoy the pseudo- science claptrap on Discovery, The Learning Channel and Animal “If its alive, it wants to kill you” Planet. Hell, I WANT to be one of the talking heads spouting the claptrap. Casting Agents can contact me via this website. There are a number of programs that I really enjoy: Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, and um…. okay, its a small number.…
Tak and the Power of Publicity
Yesterday morning my four year old daughter begged me to watch a tv program she had seen advertised earlier this week on Nickelodeon, entitled, Tak and the Power of Juju. For better or for worse, I was popular culture savvy enough to know that the characters and setting of this cartoon are based on a popular set of video games.
Here is my understanding of the show, cobbled together from my one episode and a little reading on their website: Tak (voiced by Hal Sparks of Talk Soup fame) is a teenager of indeterminate age who lives as part of the Pupununu tribe in a jungle setting including at least one volcano (“lava rock” was referred to multiple times in the episode I saw).…
Have I mentioned how much I like Anthony Bourdain and his show “No Reservations”?
Yes I have indeed mentioned it before. I like it so much because he starts at a place that anthropologists are trained to not go: the sheer love of the unexpected. We are trained to avoid being Indiana Jones, we are not just globe-trotting dilettantes, we are scientists! Well, that really takes the fun out of it doesn’t it? Boursain makes no claim to be anything more than a chef and writer that really digs food, people and instructional misadventures.…
Your Life as a Map
How many people are like me, so enamored of the latest technical plaything our personal sense of risk and reward is totally out of whack?
In what I am readily recognizing as my continuing quest to give up all privacy, I have been playing with Google My Maps feature that lets you create and make public maps that reflect your own interests. In my case, it is the start of my autobiography in map form.…
I am quite twtter-pated!
It's always interesting to turn questions around to ask the mirror-image. People are very concerned about the power of a connected world to threaten our given notions of privacy. But what about the mirror image of that question, what do we ask about the internet exhibitionists, like me?
You name the new on-line doohickey and I promise you I have a profile on it. From Friendster to tribe.net…
The New Atheists invent hell
This month in Wired there is an article called “The Church of The Non-Believers.” Written by Gary Wolf, he seeks out the people he believes are making the most cogent arguments for atheism. He speaks with people such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett. Unfortunately it is a piece that speaks more too bigotry cloaked in scientific rhetoric. The core of the “new atheist”, and I am not sure how new this really is, is more than simply that there is no God.…