Author: Dennis

Bob Novella at the Rogues Gallery has more sensible information on metamaterials and invisibility than is found in the news reports, and has some disappointing words for all the nerds out there: So many stories focus on the invisibility angle and there is some beef in that hamburger. This could potentially scale up and offer…

As a long-time fan of the inimitable and controversial Kitchener, Ontario comics creator Dave Sim, I was intrigued when my girlfriend pointed out Judenhass on the rack at my favorite comic shop. Judenhass is a German term which means “hatred of Jews”. Sim chose the terms because he found antisemitism to be inaccurate in that…

I can’t help but think that Eric would have posted something on this story if he weren’t still hip deep in the big move to Michigan, so I’ll take a small crack at it myself, though I see that it’s created some buzz throughout the blogosphere. There’s no better place to start than the lead…

Who do you want in the White House when an urgent e-mail arrives at 3AM? “It’s just amazing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s very hard to even think about someone who doesn’t know how to use the internet. It’s like, ‘Really?’ My five-year-old niece can use the internet. She knows how to go to…

My favorite writer on everything has some words on “how you can do your bit to build democracy”: In the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniya, the American University of Iraq has just opened its doors. And it is appealing for people to donate books. … As anyone who has read the Arab Human Development Reports…

This is just to say that despite calls by others in years and decades past, now really is the time to privatize the postal service. My girlfriend and I returned home tonight after a lovely evening with friends to find everything as we had left it. We’d already received our daily ration of junk mail…

From a silly AP story (that also attributes Hillary’s lie about Bosnia to a lack of sleep): For her part, Clinton is a veteran of her husband’s back-to-back White House races and is keenly aware of the toll it takes on body and spirit. She, too, takes short naps on her plane and eats a…

Anyone who knows me from this blog (it’s been awhile) or just about anywhere else would probably be surprised to recognize an Ani DiFranco reference in the title, but they’d be even more surprised to learn that I belong to *gasp* a union. I am in fact a public school teacher working in a closed…

Dr. Megalommatis is at it again, writing in his usual cryptic style, which is another way of saying that he has posted a confusing and ill-edited op-ed piece. The piece in question is an apparent repudiation of an old book that I’m not familiar with, Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. The book, published…

This from the Times Online: SAIMA KHAN wants to die a martyr. Life is transient, she told her father in a telephone call last week, and the real glory is to sacrifice it for Allah. Her statement would be alarming at any age, but Saima is only 10. As she spoke, rifle shots rang out,…

Recently links to a dubious interview on an even more doubtful internet news site found their way into my inbox. Under the guise of informed scholarship the interviewee claimed that all languages descended ultimately from Aramaic, and I see now that the interviewer, a certain Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, is advocating the imposition of Aramaic…

Excuse me while I co-opt Classical Values to solve a little frustrating problem, assuming there are some science fiction readers who may be able to help. I guess I’ve been feeling nostalgic, having recently recovered a very fond memory of a local Philadelphia show called StarStuff. It was like tracking down an old friend. And…

There is supposed to be a battle raging now on the cultural front between Darwinists and the faithful, and I guess for some people that battle seems real. But it’s foolishly shortsighted to treat a theory as a tenet of faith, equally to treat faith as an argument, and doubly so to pit theory against…

While shopping for essentials at the local Target I noticed something which our very own proprietor Eric alerted me to once before on this blog, namely the false bargain of larger quantities. He was talking about retailers playing upon consumers’ assumption that buying in bulk saves money, but this is more nefarious: Now, I’m a…

I awoke this morning to find that a number of search engines/web portals were down: Google, Yahoo, and MSN were the big ones. Live‘s front page loads, but searches time out. Ask.com seems to be fully functional. In addition, of the smaller search sites some are up, some down, some incredibly sluggish. What does it…

I’m glad to see that Eric has enlisted a guest blogger considering I haven’t written about anything in a long time, and I really have no awareness of the outside world. for me it’s been nothing but teaching, lesson plans, and the politics of the public school system. And since M. Simon has been giving…

This is really fun. I’m blogging to you now from the new browser channel for the Nintendo Wii (powered by Opera). The typing interface isn’t as bad as you might think, but it definitely isn’t something I’m likely to do again. You point and click with the wiimote on a visual keyboard, and the software…

Caught this via Drudge: “He’s a Republican, I’m a Democrat, we work together on issues that are important to the state of Nevada. And I wish other people had the same nonaggression pact we have,” Reid told reporters. “It’s not a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ situation,” he added, referring to last year’s film about two gay cowboy…

I happened upon the parade in Media today (‘Everybody’s hometown‘), and it was a fortuitous event. We stopped to do a little shopping and ran into some friends and their new baby. Before we knew it, there was a parade on. Yesterday my father celebrated the Marine Corps birthday at Cookie’s Tavern in Philadelphia with…