John Scalzi recently wrote up a post on the California Ballot initiative to ban newly legalized gay marriages in the state. Those trying to push through a constitutional amendment are angry that the ballot wording will actually reflect the intent of the bill rather than being called something like “the protect marriage from corruption [...]

I’m actually sort of surprised that someone already hasn’t done this.

After reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it’s easy to start thinking of things in Whuffie. I was going through my blog and flickr stats, noting how few hits I get on a daily basis, and thinking my online Whuffie is low.

Then [...]

I’ve plowed through Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I’ve always thought Doctorow was far too shrill in his screeds against technology companies, but I thought I would give his fiction a shot.

Good: 1. Likable if someone cliched characters 2. over-all decent exploration of the impact of radical technology changes on [...]

Undoubtedly, most of you who read my blog have already seen the links to Clay Shirky’s “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” and here’s the video link.

I avoided it for a little while as I haven’t always been a huge fan of his thinking. But I have to say that this presentation is a very [...]

If you haven’t seen it yet, PBS’s documentary, “Bush’s War” is a very detailed walk through of our current War in Iraq.

While it’s a long show at 4.5 hours, it’s definitely worth watching.

While I won’t go into exhaustive detail, I wanted to share my high level observations.

I have new respect for Bush and Cheney and [...]

The Times has a short piece up on the new Apple announcements with a fun quote from Jobs on the Amazon Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last [...]

This is an incredible article detailed how profoundly the media failed us in the 2000 presidential campaign.

Bottom line message: Gore was really smart, and came off as a pious know-it-all. He couldn’t boil his campaign and political views down to a simple one line slogan for stupid Americans. Gore wasn’t buddy-buddy with [...]

Recently I’ve been thinking about what new and exciting things I want to explore in my own personal development.

I’ve posted a bit on Derren Brown and his show mind control. I’ve long felt that people are far too easily manipulated, and I’ve recently become fascinated by the process of how we humans influence each [...]

Not to get too into it, but…

Why don’t we just simply disallow all public campaign finance? You can’t accept money from anyone for any reason. Campaigns are financed from a general fund, and capped at a reasonable number like 10m for presidential candidates. You must get enough signatures to be on the [...]

This is just a loose observation, and not a constructed argument, and I’ve got a headache, so take this for what it’s worth.

Sam Harris recently gave a presentation to the Atheist Alliance. Read it here. In it he makes a good point, that atheists shouldn’t be labeling themselves as such. Read the [...]