All Thoughts Being Equal

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing My rating: 5 of 5 stars Shackleton's doomed voyage―an attempt to cross the Antarctic continent―pretty much can't be described in any other way than "incredible." The preface to the book tells us two remarkable facts: first, that what Shackleton and his expedition were attempting to do would not actually be accomplished until the 1950s, with the full gauntlet of modern machines and electric heat; and second, that no human being died or even suffered grievous physical injury over the course of the entire ordeal. Then we dive in to the narrative itself, and as soon as the Endurance becomes ironically trapped and crushed by ice floes, it's just one damn thing after another. Even having been assured by the preface that everyone survives, you swear up and down, even shout aloud, "No! Someone's going to die! Nobody can survive that!" Reading what the expeditionary force end...

Amazon just built its own physical bookstore in the University Distric of Seattle. What a twist! So why do I think it's pointless for Amazon, and indeed any "corporate" bookseller, to operate a physical storefront? And why do I think that the only worthwhile brick-and-mortar bookstores are the "anything and everything" used bookstores? Simply put: serendipity versus suggestion. You may think that my ideas about the philosophy of bookstores are unorthodox, but if you agree, you might also like... Recently New York Times Magazine ran a story about the fascinating gutter-market for ultra-cheap used books sold on Amazon.com. You know, all those books that are priced at $0.01 (+$3.99 shipping)? Turns out they're often rescued from the landfill—sometimes literally. Sort of like donations to a food bank, libraries and thrift stores often get far more donations than they can properly deal with: [Thriftbooks] , along with several other enormous used-book-sellin...

I'm only a few pages into Daniel Loxton's Why Is There a Skeptical Movement? (available in PDF here ) and it's already fascinating. I think I had heard a bit about how Harry Houdini leveraged his experience as a stage magician to combat the "spirit mediums" so common (and so fraudulent) in his day. What blew me away, though, was how far back these skeptical roots went. P. T. Barnum offered cash prizes to any psychic who could "pertinently" answer questions he had sealed in envelopes and stored somewhere else. Okay, you know your game's crooked when P. T. Barnum thinks your "humbug" has gone too far! Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, and M. Guillotin served on a special commission to the French monarchy to investigate "animal magnetism" healing touch quackery. Sort of like an 18th c. Justice League, but for science! and mostly French.   This stuff goes back yet another century, to the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of Sir Tho...

Apparently the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, publishes a perennial blog post called “In Defense of Scrooge.” Yeah, as in Ebenezer Scrooge, the infamous miser from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Scrooge has become a byword for foul-tempered penny-pinching and disdain for those worse off than oneself. Yet the LvMI post claims exactly the opposite: that Scrooge is an exemplar of a free-market employer. Shocking to hear, at first, but this is the Mises Institute’s modus operandi . They are what you might call “market fundamentalists,” and believe that any ‘problem’ with markets is really a problem with government rules restricting market forces and causing inefficiency. Never mind the fact that neoclassical economists (otherwise known as “everyone but the LvMI”)  agree that certain natural markets will always break down if left to their own devices. If anyone can fish for salmon and everyone thinks about himself, the rational thing to do is to catch as many sa...

Disclaimer: This post may not sit well with you, as it deals with a topic that some people find sensitive and/or personal. While my response to that is not quite "Deal with it," you have been warned. I'm not going to pull any punches. Every year, Western Washington University selects a book for its "Western Reads" program, which is supposed to "promote intellectual engagement, community, and conversation" according to the website. The other time I actually read one of these selections, I definitely had a conversation... but it was a somewhat frustrated, somewhat snarky conversation with a friend about the poor quality of the writing. That was the 2008-2009 school year, however, and this is now. The 2011-2012 Western Reads selection is Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't , by Dr. Stephen Prothero, and it's an entirely different book bag of worms. (Incidentally, the terribly-written book I didn't finish readin...

Contra this op-ed piece in the New York Times : Technology Provides an Alternative to Love . Read that, then get back to me. Now back to that. Now back to me. Okay, one more thing, said by me on Facebook: Interesting, but that guy's writing style ground on my nerves. The message is cloyingly earnest but it doesn't stick to a single point. He starts off with tech-culture specifically but shifts to consumer-culture in general and then offers h is anecdote on birdwatching (which, how the hell does birdwatching do anything for conservation except as a preliminary step?) and offers a meek "well, try it sometime" conclusion. Even that title annoys me. Clearly the thesis is that the erotic/consumerist nature of technology is WORSE than love; why didn't they title it "Technology Prevents Us From Loving Things"? THAT'S a killer title. That was my first conclusion: namely, that the article itself was all over the map and fairly poor-quality overa...

Too late for that plea , apparently, but here’s why basically any video game based on A Song of Ice and Fire,* George R. R. Martin’s gloriously grimdark Take That to the heroic fantasy genre and real-life medieval romanticism, is doomed to failure. The issue comes with the psychology of video games themselves. A video game is meant to be beaten , to at least give some sense of accomplishment for putting time and (rarely more than minimal thumb-twirling) effort into it, whether five minutes beating the next level of Peggle or fifteen bajillion hours grinding towards Blizzard’s latest glass ceiling in World of Warcraft . Even when a game is fundamentally depressing (rarely) or at least a big mind screw you can at least say “well, even if the ending was shit/confusing/nonexistant I still figured out Puzzle X” (*ahem* Braid and Limbo, otherwise quite excellent games). No specific spoilers, but A Song of Ice and Fire is far and away not conducive to that kind of narrative. It becomes...

It may or may not be a secret that I am a huge fan of the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, and the other writers of pulp fiction who knew him. In contrast to more modern creators of horror, who legitimately frighten with in-your-face monsters and death (but not too obvious)—I'm thinking of the movie The Descent along with Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot , very much inspired by Lovecraft actually—Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" conveys that sense of bleakness in the face of a universe that very much does not give a fuck about you. The realization that mankind's petty notions of morality, our flimsy models and scientific pretexts, all fail to grasp the true unwavering indifference of the rest of reality... that's a pretty weird feeling. And while I don't accept Lovecraft's philosophy that the universe is ultimately unknowable—science marches on!—it's easy to see the creeping horror of just how much of the universe is hostile to human life, or barely co...