Bill O'Reilly takes on all those pinheads who think that gravity is enuf. But in a fantasy smackdown with Richard Feynman, who fares better? Videos after the jump.
Read More »Opinion & Commentary
Unevenly Distributed: Gadget Blogging, The Human Centipede
If I were to equate gadget blogging to some occupation in a slice of modern cinema, the film that most immediately comes to mind is The Human Centipede: First Segment. That 2010 parable, directed by Tom Six, focuses on the misadventures of three people who, through a wacky series of missteps, are each sewn... shall we say... input-to-output to one another. Gadget blogging, you see, is primarily an act of chain digestion.
Read More »Unevenly Distributed: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The @
I start this column with only one aim. I would like to try to impart my love for one of the oldest, and most impenetrable, and aesthetically unattractive, and sociopathic and schizophrenic genres of computer game to a reader who will doubtlessly hate it for all of those exact reasons. I'm talking about rogue-likes, so called because of their ancestry in a progenitor called Rogue. Let's see how I do.
Read More »240-Year Catastrophe
A wintry forest looks picturesque, but slow-motion violence hides in the frame rate.
Read More »Wikileaks and the End of Stolen Kisses
Slavoj �i�ek says that Wikileaks is hated not because of the secrets it has revealed, but because it exposed the cynicism of a system that has long stopped believing in the values it imagines itself to uphold. It's a problem not only for diplomacy and governance, but for the eroding distinction between public and private life.
Read More »Everlastingly Strange
G. K. Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth."
Read More »Unevenly Distributed: What Gremlins Says About The 80s And Its Tech
Even before the viewer catches a glimpse his first Mogwai, Joe Dante's Gremlins establishes the link between the titular goblins and malfunctioning technology by way of Randy Peltzer and his many incompetent inventions. It's a film very much of its time, with many fascinating things to say about the way Reagan-era Americans looked at technology. It's also a movie that would be impossible to remake today, for one big reason: the smartphone is our Bathroom Buddy.
Read More »Unevenly Distributed: How Online Pizza Delivery Makes America The Best Country In The World
According to sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's how I feel about American pizza delivery. It's all about an obsession with convenience bordering on the quantum, and it's what makes America the best country in the world.
Read More »Battle of the Memory Palace
In the age of the ebook, a ruminative turn to the inner work of building palaces of memory.
Read More »E.O. Wilson: The Lily Pads Are Getting Worried
In an interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, E. O. Wilson's warning: evolution has its times and its textures, and we risk making out its patterns too late.
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