A review of I am Legend, a tale of apocalypse, societal rebirth, and vampirism.
What with the lack of real diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran, a significant portion of what I have read in the past couple of months about Iran has focused on the hostage crisis. Back in January, I stumbled across Mark Bowden's article in the May 2006 issue of The Atlantic about Operation [...]
A year ago, I was reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha:
And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him.
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Gnome developer Miguel de Icaza pointed to Howard Zinn's editorial on war in next month's issue of The Progressive. In it, Zinn posits that the conflict in Iraq might be the last war that the United States takes part in. He claims that war is not the natural state of humanity, and armed conflict only [...]
Although I spent most of yesterday asleep, I have spent most of my waking hours reading and thinking about Hiroshima, which was attacked by a nuclear bomb 60 years ago. Over the past two weeks, the British newspaper The Guardian has released a number of articles about the blast, including edited versions of the interviews [...]
Instead of reading the latest Harry Potter book, I spent last night reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I have intended to read the book since junior year of high school, when one of my friends noted similarities between an English essay I had written entitled "Under the Tire" with Hesse's novel Beneath the Wheel.
Siddhartha was far [...]
Olle Wastberg's New York Times editorial lays out why he thinks former New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani would make an excellent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. It begins thus:
Today I will send a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominating the former mayor of New York City, Rudolph W. Giuliani, for the [...]
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Jason Lurie writes in yesterday's Crimson about an increase in the number of cases of student plagiarism coming before the Ad Board. While he rightly suggests that faculty members found guilty of having plagiarized should be punished, he attempts to blame them for the increase:
In each case, Harvard took no public (or as best as [...]
Michael Behe's editorial in today's New York Times uses rather unscientific methods to justify intelligent design:
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply [...]
Phil Ringnalda, disturbed by a dream he had about RSS, asks how people who remember their dreams can live normal, productive lives. As a member of that exclusive group which regularly remembers their dreams, I felt compelled to respond, especially as Ringnalda's question brought to mind part of one of the dreams I had last [...]
In many ways, it would be wrong if the District Attorney for Los Angeles decides to seek the death penalty in the case of Juan Alvarez, the man who killed 11 people by trying to commit suicide by train. Unfortunately for him (and of course, the passengers on the train), he decided at the last [...]
Friday, September 3, 2004
George from Pathetic Earthlings suggests that George W. Bush is the intellectual heir to Wilsonian foreign policy.
Wilsonians, or those who claimed to be so, include FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan and George W. Bush. Even Nixon (according to this writer the President closest to the TR worldview) kept a portrait of Wilson in his cabinet room. [...]
Wednesday, August 4, 2004
I was randomly looking at Wikipedia articles when I noted that August 4 is the date that the Gestapo arrested Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam. Even though it occurred only sixty years ago, Occupied Europe seems like another planet.
After discussing Neutral Milk Hotel in the July statistics post, I decided to do a [...]
In the interest of full disclosure, Amazon follows Anarchy, State, & Utopia with three more government books, followed by a lot of random music interspersed with some science fiction and a number of works of French existentialism.
Although there is nothing in Kermit Lipez's biography to suggest a high level of computer proficiency, his dissenting opinion in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals case U.S. v. Councilman suggests that he knows what he is talking about. While the majority opinion (which also contains a discussions of MTAs) claims that e-mail intercepted by [...]
I would like to think that Secretary of State Powell's trip to Darfur (NYT, BBC, etc.) will cause the situation there to be thrust into the national limelight, spurring action to prevent what can already be considered a humanitarian crisis, but I think that I know better by now. Consider these three factors:
The Bush Administration [...]
This is in slightly bad taste, considering his violent death, but when I read this previous BBC News article, I thought that the comments made by Kim Sun-il, the South Korean hostage kidnapped in Iraq, were a bit strange.
In the video released by the militants, Kim Sun-il, a 33-year-old translator working for a company that [...]
From Slashdot today comes the news that the newest version of the popular Shareaza peer-to-peer program has been released under the GPL. Why is this important?
Suppose the main developer of Shareaza develops a terminal illness. Or suppose the RIAA realizes that its strategy of suing the people who use peer-to-peer networks will not work. Instead, [...]
Also from BoingBoing comes an interview with a graphic designer who worked on a project that most would find cryptic - Meta Haven: Sealand Identity Project.
However, as soon as I saw the words "Haven" and "Sealand" in the same sentence, I knew exactly what was meant (HavenCo and the Principality of Sealand, for the ignorant). [...]
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This blog started in December of last year, well after the war in Iraq began and ended, mission accomplished!, leading what seems to be a new era in American foreign policy.
There are those that would have you, dear reader, believe that Iraq also represents the growing divide in American politics. On one side, this [...]
After I went down to the laundry room and manually checked the status of my laundry (if any MacGrey representatives read this, Harvard could really do with some LaundryView), I went to the mailroom to while away three minutes. I felt somewhat apprensive to see that April's Atlantic had arrived (alas, I have not [...]
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From the Guardian comes this article about Disney's production of C. S. Lewis' Narnia series. Apparently, the success of the secular Lord of the Rings series has made such the potential profit of such a venture extremely high.
Saturday, February 28, 2004
From the Scobleizer comes a link to Plaxo, which makes a plugin for Outlook and Outlook Express that allows for automatic updating of contact information. Seems nice, but no extensions for Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird yet. Still, any company that has a blog (and it's a real blog, with Movable Type! No Trackback, [...]
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
This article from Chechenpress.info (which claims to be the "State News Agency" of Chechnya) sums up to me all that is wrong with reling on faith in legal matters.
Saturday, January 31, 2004
When I first saw this article, I assumed it was written by some PETA shill, based on its blurb in the RSS feed:
Most of the mammals in the north change into a denser and deeper winter coat by late fall. Man survives by taking his coat from them.
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Thursday, January 22, 2004
Stumbled upon this website from BoingBoing. In looking through the forum, it struck me how many people assumed that this was simply an American phenomenom (i.e. someone from Belgium) or as something that was only a (regrettable) part of the past. Few posters extrapolated about the consequences of the images in the [...]
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I was in the bathroom in the Science Center today when I had a thought. The urinals use infrared technology so you do not have to touch them. The sinks use infrared technology so you do not have to touch them. The soap dispensers, however, have to be pushed.
Admittedly, this would not [...]
Saturday, January 3, 2004
I found this New York Times article especially compelling. It is about the Manthey brothers, Polish Germans expelled at the end of the Second World War. The writer, Richard Bernstein, noted that the brothers are much richer than the the Polish couple that now own their ancestral farm and most of the other [...]