As in Post Script, Climate Shift, and Bull Shit. I really wasn’t expecting so many responses (getting boinged obviously ramped up the amplitude a bit). There have been hosannas and trolls and yes, some well-taken objections to my last post, both here and around teh tubes. Once again, some of my responses are too long […]
Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World.
Category: climate, sciliticsI’m going to make a bit of an exception today. There were other newsworthy items after my heart (Jason Stackhouse — yes, you read that right — sent me an intriguing link on insect intelligence, and who could resist the creation of the first cat-based AI?). But I’ve decided instead to weigh in on this UCR […]
He Speaks French. In English.
Category: ink on art, public interfaceI was holding off on this but people have been twitting it for a few days — hell, someone even rated it, if I’m reading this right — so here you go. ActuSF has posted their interview with me, in French and in the original English. There’s not a whole lot of new stuff there […]
The End of War Crimes
Category: neuro, sentience/cognitionWe’ve talked about free will on these screens before. We’ve referred to consciousness as the pointy-haired boss who takes credit for decisions made endless milliseconds before it was even aware of them; tumors that turn people into pedophiles, and do violence to the very concept of “culpability’; military hardware that bypasses conscious thought entirely and […]
In Which I Passionately Lament the Absence of Bestiality in First Person Shooters.
Category: interviews, public interface, writing newsBrief follow-up to my last, strangely-popular post. Someone going by the name of W. Flynn has started a list on Amazon.com: “Authors Who Have Maced a Restaurant“. And while I am honored to be in such esteemed company, I can’t help noticing that the list itself is awfully small. I wonder if I could prevail […]
Adventures in Dining, Part 1: The Case of the Scurrilous Scrotum.
Category: misc, public interfaceThe relationship between chili peppers and my scrotum has always been a difficult one. It got off to a rocky start back during grad school, when I was making vegetarian tacos in the nude. Having crumbled a bunch of hot dry chili peppers into a bowl, I absently reached down with the same hand to […]
Post Human
Category: miscThere’s this guy I almost knew, Mac Tonnies. A fan of my books, a writer of his own (I never read After the Martian Apocalypse, his book about the “Face on Mars”, but I read some of his short fiction), and a paradoxical amalgam of UFO buff and skeptic: someone who embraced the phenomenon while […]
The Exception That Doesn’t Exactly Contradict the Rule
Category: misc, public interfacePosition statement here. While replying to a batch of comments on a recent thread, I encountered the following sentiment from Seruko: I am somewhat troubles by the lack of self-pimping. I really wanted to read ‘The Island’ but didn’t know it had been published until a month or so ago. If you can’t shill for […]
Flowers for Hobbie-J
Category: Dumbspeech, neuro, sentience/cognitionA single gene. A single tweak. Synapse speed boosted by perhaps a hundred milliseconds, tops. Transgenic Genius rats. (PopSci story here.) Who’da thunk it would be so easy? And how long before I can get these NR2B boosters in a nasal spray?
Islands, Eclipses, and Sundry Other Things
Category: ink on art, writing newsI’m going to sneak in a few bits of self-aggrandizing tub-thumpery here, in the hopes that the last few postings have mitigated the ‘crawl’s tendency to list to all-about-me. First, however, a bit of housekeeping: I’ve just learned that anyone posting comments on this blog is forced to enter their name and e-mail up front. […]