Kind of the opposite of a wish-book.

The Worst Things For Sale

A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox

Site Recommendation

From The Cloud Appreciation Society manifesto:

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.

I'm down with--and maybe up for--that. Give me gray skies any day! And blue nebulae are nice, too.

The Cloud Appreciation Society

Want to give some aliens a piece of your mind? Here's a site that can help you get that job done.

Lone Signal

Europa Repor

Also, potentially off-putting for some may be the chronologically-jumbled found-footage style of presentation that obliges the viewer to work a bit harder to make sense of the sequence of events than is warranted by the elementary story line. I mention it as a caveat, but trust me, you've see far worse.

The movie tells the story of a crew dispatched on a commercially-funded space venture to seek life, implied by the presence of water, on a moon of Jupiter. This is a long, tedious, bleak voyage with only the chance of a scientifically-profound payoff. Each member of the crew is committed to the cause in his/her own way, but the cost of the mission's success proves to be very high.

I particularly liked the lean, stoic tone of the narrative. The visuals, including the ship's austere interior, the exterior vistas, and the moonscapes, were well-crafted and convincing. The interface graphics of the crew's technology added subtle notes of credibility.

This movie is about the risks and rewards of exploring other worlds. It suggests, but does not exaggerate, the reasons why humans will choose to take those risks. And it illustrates the inevitable losses those gambles will entail.

I do not recommend Europa Report to you if you're looking for deep plotting, high action, rich fantasy, or space opera. Europa Report has more in common with Moon than with Star Wars. But if you have a taste for Science Fiction with a strong sense of near-future plausibility, I do recommend it to you.

(Spoilers follow)

* For example:

For a damaged communications array, a solar event seems much less plausible than any of a number of other signal-munging accidents.

Did you find yourself periodically wondering "Which of the ship's cameras is taking that shot, 'cause I'm pretty sure there is no reason to for them to have a camera aimed there?"

And since the real Europa's gravity is weaker even than the Moon's, much of the action depicted on the surface of their fictional version of the icy world just does not look right. Indeed, many of the perils facing the crew would not be so perilous but for the Earth-like gravity they mysteriously endure there. The captain's fatal fall is particularly troublesome in that regard

Europa Report

". . .Snyder’s beat sheet has taken over Hollywood screenwriting. Movies big and small stick closely to his beats and page counts. Intentionally or not, it’s become a formula—a formula that threatens the world of original screenwriting as we know it."

Save the Movie!

Site Recommendation

A limited but charming gallery of examples of aesthetic inferiority.

Museum of Bad Art

How about Lunch? Consequences of the Meal Context on Cognition and Emotion

"Things fall apart;
The centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" 

Doing It Wrong

"It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors."

Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

In this view, what we should be uniting ourselves against, whether as a community, society, nation, race, or whatever, is not drugs, crime, Godlessness, poverty or whatever, but rather stupidity.  However, to combat something that is truly a natural and endogenous characteristic of some individuals would entail social measures that should radically challenge our current political and ethical structures. Perhaps the political system that will supplant ours is the one that clears the egalitarian hurdle to better mitigate the inimical effects of human stupidity.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

This site's owner claims to be interested in calling attention to failures of critical thinking. It seems to me that it would be a failure of critical thinking to take all of the various unfortunate outcomes listed here as irrefragable failures of critical thinking 

I think a more pertinent question may be "What's the point?"

What's The Harm? 

So, Boston, NYC, and Miami are doomed. Bad news for sure! But "'tis an ill wind that blows nobody good," and according to NOAA's hokey visualization (zoom in to see the visualization icons), the Toledo Oregon Skateboard Park is destined (at 6 ft. above mean higher high water) to become a rather inviting-looking water recreation area.

The Egyptian Theater at Coos Bay is apparently a lost cause, however.

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts

So, instead of giving one lady a Taj Mahal, putting up one guy's Great Pyramid, or interring one big shot's massive terra cotta army, we give more or less everybody a shot at an SUV, a smart phone, and a venti non-fat caffe caramel macchiato -- Did I say that right? -- (and we have pretty much determined that it's not a good idea to try to "consume" all of them at the same time).

Mass-produced consumer goods instead of unique Wonders of the World. Paradigm shift. Different measures of value.

What if Shah Jehan had said to his twenty-thousand artisans, "Hey guys, instead of building a monument for the eons, why don't you take all these materials we have assembled, the finest gems and stone gathered from all over the continent, and each of you just do something to amuse or impress your friends?" What if Khufu had commanded his 7000-strong labor force to render the giant limestone blocks into small representations of whatever was on their mind at the time? What if the master builders of Chartres had said, "Hey, you village peasant-types, here are some pieces of stained glass. See how many cute pictures of kittens you can make out of them."

Yeah, the historians of the future are going to have to adapt their discipline's techniques to include a robust capacity for intellectual waste management.

Hey, there may be some things of relative value in there, though. Who (except the historians of the future) can tell? Perhaps it's like that infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters theorem..Except that we are now dealing with around two billion . . . umm "monkey surrogates?" . .  and maybe about the same number of social media content input interface instances.

So yeah, it could take a quite a while before anything really valuable shows up.

Oh yeah, and what if the Ming Emperors, weary of many decades of costly maintenance, had opted for an ad-based funding model for the Great Wall of China? Just asking you to think about it.

Historians of the Future, Sorry About All My Photos Called DSC987234534.jpg or Whatever

To me, the interesting part is that, while broad appeal was often a critical success factor in pre-Internet publishing, recently social media have enabled content providers to realize a measure of popularity within very narrowly-scoped audience demographics. Such popularity does not emerge from intrinsic content value, but rather from specialized audience-specific references and relevance to a group identity.

40 Signs You Can Publish Any Old Crap Nowadays as Long as It's Well-Targeted 

Some to read online, some downloads, even some audio book links.

Open Culture Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web

At dawn I hasten toward the Purple Hall,
At dusk I await edicts from the Golden Gate.
I read book after book, scattering rare manuscripts all around.
I study antiquity to search for the ultimate essence.
Whenever I feel I understand a word,
I close my book and suddenly smile.
Black flies too easily defile the pure,
A lofty tune like "White Snow" finds few echoes.
By nature carefree and unrestrained,
I've often been rebuked for eccentricity.
When the cloudy sky becomes clear and bright,
I long for visits to woods and hills.
Sometimes when the cool breezes rise,
I'll lean on railings and whistle aloud.
Yen Kuang angled in his T'ung-lu Creek,
And Hsieh K'e climbed his Ling-hai Peak.
When I finish my task in this world,
I shall follow them and try my fishhook.

--Li Po (trans. Joseph J. Lee)

From Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry

First, it looks to me as though the overall percentages did not change much between 2006 and 2013. That is--the number of Americans opposed to government agencies snooping on them (regardless of their party) remained roughly the same. Similarly, the number of folks accepting the surveillance stayed about the same.

The article's characterization of the data as indicating a "virtually unyielding preference for partisanship over principle" seems purely a matter interpretation. Framed in another way, the data might be used to provoke interest in why the snooping-opposed faction tended to identify more as Democrat back in 2006 and more as Republican in 2013 (and vice versa). In that light, we should be grousing about our population's fixation on single-issue politics over party loyalty, or some such thing.

Second, a lot of variables underwent change between 2006 and 2013--not just the party of the US President. For one thing, the iPhone hit the market in 2007. Could it be that some folks just started becoming real introspective about government eavesdropping after realizing how much of their daily lives they were pumping through the aether with the mobile playthings they find so addictive?

I don't think the data this article cites means what they say it means.

NSA Confidential: We Love Big Brother If He's Got the Right Party Affiliation

Along the route to making this point, the author manages to stand up some straw man arguments against such ideas as "we're the only intelligent life in the universe" and "we'd make good subjects for scientific study."

For me, Hawking's scenario delivers a Pascal's Wager-like persuasive payload against which this blogger's dismissiveness is ineffective. Consider Pascal's thought with the concept of intelligent extraterrestrial life in place of divinity:

If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny Him, and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a god sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity  Pensees

Would it not be a better wager for us in our "pitiful state" to accept a belief in the potential danger of advanced alien explorers than to assume that we can adequately calculate the economic disincentives to their putting Earth on their list of hostile takeover targets?

Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

Cruise offers up a workmanlike performance, which is appropriate considering he plays a futuristic drone-repairman-cum-soldier, Andrea Riseborough is seductive yet eerily unnatural as his nubile companion who, having "taken the red pill," prefers her Reality just as it appears, thank you very much. 

You have likely seen elements of this story in numerous other movies, but not as neatly and appealingly prepared, packaged, and presented. The appreciative viewer just needs to be a little more like Victoria ("I don't want to know . . .") than Jack, troubled by intrusive recollections of a history he does not understand. Who really cares if the recipes have been done elsewhere if  the meal is delicious nevertheless?

Oblivion (2013)

I have been following with interest the controversy surrounding Graham Hancock's TED talk video and the TED officials' decision to remove it from their Youtube channel.

I have long appreciated Hancock's speculative non-fiction. His ideas may well turn out to be incorrect but they do not deserve to be "sequestered" simply because they are incompatible with the TED organization's apparently prevailing preference for a materialist agenda.

Of course, where TED is paying the bills they can do what they will with their properties. But in the much larger public space where they do not exert control they seem to be fomenting a massive Streisand Effect that weakens their reputation and diminishes their credibility.

Graham Hancock's post on Google+ contains numerous links that provide background and commentary on this matter for those interested.

Graham Hancock's G+ post on the TED controversy