I ran across a new article in Wired about Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about immortality — using technology to transform ourselves into everlasting containers of our essential being — and it occurred to me that the concept behaves much like the horcrux from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Maybe Arthur C Clarke was right about […]

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This is a terrific article: The Believer - Interview with Jonathan Haidt
Haidt makes some thought-provoking points: the evolutionary origins of morality; why some people find some things repugnant and others not; the difference between moral pluralism and moral relativism; and other great stuff.
He also reminds us not to objectify people with whom we may […]

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Ok, I posted about this because it sounded so convincing, but then read criticisms of it (such as this one) … I’m leaving my original post up below here because, well, it’s what I posted, but I’m really curious to see what else comes up about this — some of the criticism seems to focus […]

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And yet, there are still news reporters standing out there in parkas with nerf-covered microphones.
Louisiana - Non Precipitation Warnings
AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO […]

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The Onion nails Intelligent Design with this bit of satire. What I find disturbing is that the story sounds completely believable, which only illustrates how crazy the real situation is to begin with.
The Onion | Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational […]

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ACM Queue - A Conversation with Alan Kay - Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk—and much more.
He’s the guy who says great stuff like “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” as well as this chestnut that describes so perfectly the phenomenon so many of us experience in corporate life: […]

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My daughter and I listened to Hitchhiker’s Guide and some of Restaurant, read by Douglas Adams, on our car trip this week. It made me think a lot about who this guy was and what genius he had at explaining perspective, relative meaning, etc.
In the current climate of “intelligent design” claptrap, I thought this a […]

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I’ve been pondering lately how complex something can be with only a few facets of adjustment. How very simple choices or factors can render near-infinite sophistication. And then I see this:
Wired News: Humans Aren’t So Complicated
A refined map of the human genome shows that humans have even fewer genes than previously thought — less […]

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How is it that I’ve gotten so out of the loop that I missed this book? I ran across a link to it in Peter Morville’s excellent article (itself worthy of a few thorough readings) and was glad to see somebody else putting into much better and more complete expression something I’ve been inarticulately grunting […]

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Probably the prettiest Google logo I’ve seen yet… it’s the one that happens to be up today, and it links to an image search of julia fractal patterns. Yum.

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Please visit the OmniShrine Wiki!
Rather than commenting on this blog, where hardly anyone will ever see what you said or asked, why not post your thoughts in a space that’s more suitable?
Try the OmniShrine Wiki!
I set it up so that fans of Omni can share information, and also be able to subscribe to comments […]

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Kind of a nice counterpoint to meme-boy Richard Dawkins’ strident claims about religion. An interview with Bob Russell, director of the Berkeley-based Center for Theology and a physics Ph.D. was part of this special on PBS, in which Dawkins was also interviewed.

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