All Thoughts Being Equal

The man (Dude?) has been rather prolific of late. I first saw him in Iron Man , where he played Obadiah “TONY STARK! BUILT THIS! IN A CAVE! WITH A BUNCH OF SCRAPS!” Stane, the bad bald guy who likes making money off of things that blow up. I have never, regrettably, seen The Big Lebowski , but that’s just a result of my slowness in watching Cohen brothers movies. (I watched No Country For Old Men only a couple weeks ago; it was excellent, excellent, excellent.) Okay, speaking of the Cohens, let’s start with the good news: True Grit . Again I have not had time to tap the source material(s), either the original movie or the original-original book, but I did watch my roommate play Red Dead Redemption so I feel qualified to judge this 2010 remake on its modern Old-West aesthetic.

Speculation time is over, friends. The future has jumped us like a ninja in the night. There's been talk of eventually and gradually transitioning to autonomous automobiles, but of course the going has been slow since one flaw in a driving algorithm could needlessly cause a bunch of collisions. Well, surprise surprise: Google has outfitted a fleet of seven cars with self-driving software . Yep, these cars have been driving without human hands for the past 140,000 miles . To be fair, there were still people in the cars, so they weren't entirely unmanned, but that was just in case of emergency. You might have heard about the discovery of Gliese 581 g, the best candidate so far for an Earth-like planet within a habitable range of its star (the "Goldilocks zone"). Maybe you heard it from me. Well, as it turns out, alien life might be much more close to home. The Japanese Hayabusa probe, that was sent to collect dust from the asteroid Itokawa, might have recovered s...

Oh, it's been so long. As it turns out, summer wasn't actually the optimal time to keep updating this space with musings and especially links to things (although I managed to plurk a few). Now I feel like there's a very good reason for me to keep up, namely, my almost certain lack of literature classes this quarter. So while it's not November (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month) I will be jonesing to write creatively and think with the right side of my brain. But to quickly catch up on an amazing development: Astronomers have found a planet in the 'Goldilocks' zone of its parent star . What's more, this planet is somewhere between 3.1 and 4.3 times the mass of Earth, meaning that it's probably of a rocky composition and the absolute most Earth-like planet discovered so far... other than Earth, naturally. The 'Goldilocks' zone, by the way, is an area around a star at which water will exist as a liquid, and is therefore assumed to have the best ...

or, Something from Nothing Last week, I attended a presentation by Dr. Kim Yong-Taek, my professor for Japanese 302 during winter quarter, called “Linguistic Descriptions of the Same Event in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English.” A talk about how we do things with words! Okay, so it wasn’t about performatives per se , but it did make me think a lot about language in general, and continue to pester me with thoughts of linguistics study even though most of it makes my eyes glaze over.

Welcome; welcome to this, my as-yet unfollowed blog. Let the navel-gazing commence! I won't bother telling you (that vague "you") about myself because chances are, whoever reads this will know me already. It's a statistical fact, I think; the Interwebs do more to connect us with those we already know than to connect us with the great unknown masses. So, suffice to say, my name is Stephen, and I'll be your blogger today. That's all you need to know, unless you already know more. In that case, I probably know you personally. Otherwise, you're probably an Internet predator and Chris Hansen will be talking with you shortly. Now, about what I will do with this blog, since doing, after all, is what defines us, especially in the Wild West of anonymity that is the Internet. I think ( think ) that this blog will be mostly for my commentary on issues brought up elsewhere, like other blogs or that pesky construct known as "reality." Because, you know, I...