{"id":2478,"date":"2009-04-06T23:52:45","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T03:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=2478"},"modified":"2009-04-07T17:31:46","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T21:31:46","slug":"monday-night-miscellany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/06\/monday-night-miscellany\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Night Miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Like real-time strategy games? Like science fiction? How about <a href=\"http:\/\/achrongame.com\/\">a real-time strategy game where you (and your units) can time travel<\/a>. Imagine sending future units back <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=z4L3J_bfjLU&#038;feature=channel_page\">to fight alongside themselves<\/a> against an enemy in the past&#8230; 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/packed.com\/games\/chronotron\">web-crack flash game form<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Who reviews a movie 22 years after its release? Ebert does apparently&#8211;but I&#8217;m OK with it because it&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/rogerebert.suntimes.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20090325\/REVIEWS08\/903259987\/-1\/RSS\">relatively high quality review<\/a> of one of my favourite movies.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m all for people <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2009\/mar\/21\/beauty-roger-scruton-art-books\">attempting to philosophically engage with questions of beauty<\/a>, especially as it pertains to art, but seriously, you don&#8217;t get to just go back to Kant as if nothing had happened in aesthetics since his day. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/etext\/26842\">Santayana<\/a>, for example.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/psp.sagepub.com\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/34\/12\/1663\">Narcissism is tied to leader emergence<\/a>. Shocking. So much is explained about both politics and corporate hierarchy.<\/li>\n<li>Those <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stuff.co.nz\/national\/295808\">poor, poor Kiwi bastards<\/a>. They have my utter sympathy for their plight.<\/li>\n<li>They call him &#8220;infinitely smart&#8221;, they say he is &#8220;extraordinarily powerful&#8221;, they also call him &#8220;unassuming&#8221; and &#8220;modest&#8221;. That&#8217;s pretty good billing. Of course now some people are calling him &#8220;a cesspool of misinformation,&#8221; &#8220;an old coot riding into the sunset&#8221;, and &#8220;a mad scientist&#8221; because he is disagreeing with conventional global warming theory. This guy is not a right-wing denier crank, he&#8217;s more of a genius, and in the spirit of open-minded enquiry it might be worth thinking over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/03\/29\/magazine\/29Dyson-t.html?partner=rss&#038;emc=rss&#038;pagewanted=all\">what he&#8217;s saying<\/a>. Being old doesn&#8217;t mean being ignorable.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of real smart dudes who are getting on in years, I&#8217;m always happy to see <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikinews.org\/wiki\/Interview_with_US_political_activist_and_philosopher_Noam_Chomsky\">another Chomsky interview<\/a>. I wish some of the information in the &#8220;On the elite&#8217;s view of the poor&#8221; section were more common among our societal &#8220;received wisdom&#8221;. Along those same lines I&#8217;m shortly going to write something about the current economic conditions and some contributing factors that don&#8217;t often get discussed: the descent of organized labour, the social acceptance of usury, and the financialization of the economy. Or maybe I&#8217;ll just point to <a href=\"http:\/\/harpers.org\/archive\/2009\/04\/0082450\">this month&#8217;s cover feature<\/a> in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harpers.org\/\">Harper&#8217;s<\/a> that covers that ground nicely.<\/li>\n<li>And since these things come in threes, how about another <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bookslut.com\/features\/2009_04_014319.php\">very talented gentlemen of a certain age<\/a>, previously discussed on this blog, being interviewed?<\/li>\n<li>I was quite amused by <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.amandapalmer.net\/post\/91440565\/a-song-for-roadrunner-records\">the new song<\/a> Amanda Palmer whipped up for her label.<\/li>\n<li>Way to go quantum mechanics: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/blog\/arxiv\/23292\/\">ruin the whole &#8216;warp bubble&#8217; idea<\/a>, why don&#8217;t you?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">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&#8230; you thought keeping track of your units and tech tree was a headache, wait for the fourth dimension. Maybe before you get too interested&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/06\/monday-night-miscellany\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[92,260,31,251,27,459,238,457,67,157,211],"class_list":["post-2478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkapalooza","tag-academic-papers","tag-beautiful-things","tag-comics","tag-games","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-philosophy","tag-reviews","tag-science","tag-smart-things","tag-web-crack","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-DY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2478"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2483,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478\/revisions\/2483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}