Monday Night Miscellany

  • Like real-time strategy games? Like science fiction? How about a real-time strategy game where you (and your units) can time travel. Imagine sending future units back to fight alongside themselves against an enemy in the past… you thought keeping track of your units and tech tree was a headache, wait for the fourth dimension. Maybe before you get too interested in that you should master a simpler version of the same idea, in web-crack flash game form.
  • Who reviews a movie 22 years after its release? Ebert does apparently–but I’m OK with it because it’s a relatively high quality review of one of my favourite movies.
  • I’m all for people attempting to philosophically engage with questions of beauty, especially as it pertains to art, but seriously, you don’t get to just go back to Kant as if nothing had happened in aesthetics since his day. Santayana, for example.
  • Narcissism is tied to leader emergence. Shocking. So much is explained about both politics and corporate hierarchy.
  • Those poor, poor Kiwi bastards. They have my utter sympathy for their plight.
  • They call him “infinitely smart”, they say he is “extraordinarily powerful”, they also call him “unassuming” and “modest”. That’s pretty good billing. Of course now some people are calling him “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset”, and “a mad scientist” because he is disagreeing with conventional global warming theory. This guy is not a right-wing denier crank, he’s more of a genius, and in the spirit of open-minded enquiry it might be worth thinking over what he’s saying. Being old doesn’t mean being ignorable.
  • Speaking of real smart dudes who are getting on in years, I’m always happy to see another Chomsky interview. I wish some of the information in the “On the elite’s view of the poor” section were more common among our societal “received wisdom”. Along those same lines I’m shortly going to write something about the current economic conditions and some contributing factors that don’t often get discussed: the descent of organized labour, the social acceptance of usury, and the financialization of the economy. Or maybe I’ll just point to this month’s cover feature in Harper’s that covers that ground nicely.
  • And since these things come in threes, how about another very talented gentlemen of a certain age, previously discussed on this blog, being interviewed?
  • I was quite amused by the new song Amanda Palmer whipped up for her label.
  • Way to go quantum mechanics: ruin the whole ‘warp bubble’ idea, why don’t you?
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This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.