Religious fundamentalism is a force which has absolutely possessed the imagination of both America and the world lately. You have your terrorists on the one hand, who are always characterized as Islamic fundamentalists. And then you have your Christian fundamentalists, on the other hand, who actively promote the return of traditional Christian values to American […]

Note: This post is part of an on-going series about how people use stories. For additional background, you may find it useful to reference the items previous to this (most recent are listed first).

Canon, Apocrypha & Centralized Distribution

Version Control

How Stories Are Modified by Transmission

In my previous post, I talked about canonical and apocryphal versions of […]

Every once in a while, I find something that tickles my nerdly fancy, and today, it is this clever use of XML tags to make a political statement, which I saw on fusion anomalog:
Of course, you could also further modify this if you were so inclined:
Anyway, like I said, this is really nerd-a-licious, but hey […]

I recently came across a book I am interested in picking up, entitled, “The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System“. It’s by Siva Vaidhyanathan who is an assistant professor at NYU in their Culture & Communication department. It seems to be […]

Just came across mention of something called the Goblin Edit in Russia. It seems there is a fellow doing pirate movie edits there with an interesting twist. His name is Dmitri Puchkov (nicknamed “the Goblin”) and he started out by taking Hollywood films, and dubbing them into colloquial Russian, because their subtitle translations were usually […]

With the elections two days off, I’d like to bring up something cool about the idea of “holding office” that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. And no, this isn’t just a clever rhetorical trick to fool you down some byzantine path at the end of which is a political surprise. Actually, I want […]

I knew from reading Jung and other stuff that “psyche” comes from the Greek word for soul. He seems to have favored that term over “mind” I think because it’s more inclusive, and because of its connotative links to the idea of a person’s soul. Anyway, right, so psychology is the study of this field. […]

I like this list of universal human traits which I found via furl. There are a ton of them, some more interesting than others. Here’s some of the ones which strike my fancy…

magic to increase life

magic to sustain life

magic to win love

males engage in more coalitional violence

childhood fear of loud noises

classification of inner states

overestimating objectivity […]

On the radio airwaves, I’ve noticed a tremendous number of ads for a company called Invention Submission Corporation. This is one of those companies that like they claim to help you develop and sell your invention ideas, but there are broad allegations online that they instead steal your money and then your invention. Anyway, […]