Idle conjecture on two subjects crops up continually in the blogs I frequent: the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and mechanisms of competition among and within species. Beyond the basic frameworks, arguments tend to proceed with astonishing confidence that by virtue of a mere thought experiment, often extrapolation from some scientific report also based on conjecture, we can [...]
Archive for April, 2011
Tech-Derived Self-Esteem
Posted: April 27, 2011 in Blogosphere, Consumerism, Education, Idle Nonsense, Nomenclature, TechnophiliaWe’re all familiar with the term false modesty, where someone feigns humility but really has none. Usually the faker knows he’s faking, but not always. (The best liars lie best to themselves.) Is there a mirror term for people who believe they possess skills not really acquired? One might suggest fool or idiot but those [...]
This YouTube video is rather startling: There is a reason why the entire room is screaming continuously: they’re scared! And they ought to be. It took me a little while to spot the human legs in the middle of the dinosaur, which has probably been rescaled to fit the operator. We tend to focus on [...]
I made the mistake of watching Battle: LA. Save yourselves from this utter waste of effort before seeing it. I have complained in the past about CGI festivals — films whose primary purpose is to showcase technical effects. Similar movies include Blackhawk Down, District 9, Children of Men, and Independence Day. The last three in [...]
Neologisms and archaic usage have always intrigued me. While I’m slow to adopt every hip, new coin that finds its way into use, my vocabulary is nonetheless always expanding, which I believe confers greater expressive and emotive power, even if that power is lost on most readers and interlocutors. Indeed, finding a young punk teenager [...]
A movie trailer functions not as a synopsis, digest, or distillation but as an advertisement for the film from which it is drawn. As such, trailers often make films appear far more tantalizing than they turn out to be. My initial assessment based on a trailer doesn’t usually lead me astray, but from time to [...]
This is the second of two posts (the first is here) where I delayed blogging about an idea long enough that someone else wrote it first — and probably better than I could. I have no pretensions about being either a journalist or academic, nor do I spend my days writing for a living. Accordingly, [...]
I sent this link to an online discussion group in which I participate (never mentioned here before) along with the brief comment below. I wrote: It’s not quite over yet, but the brief era of manned space flight is drawing to a close. Perhaps we’re finally ready to admit that everything else out there is [...]
