Monday, December 20, 2010

My top 14 albums for 2010 featuring women singers!





1. Janelle MonĂ¡e - The ArchAndroid



2. Carolina Chocolate Drops - Genuine Negro Jig



3. Robyn - Body Talk



4. Sade - Soldier of Love



5. Best Coast - Crazy for You



6. St. Lola in the Fields - High Atop the Houses and the Towns



7. Angus & Julia Stone - Down the Way



8. Shakira - Sale El Sol



9. KT Tungstall - Tiger Suit



10. Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster (An EP but still cool)


11. Kylie Minogue - Aphrodite


12. Azure Ray - Drawing Down the Moon



13. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - I Learned the Hard Way



14. Ke$ha - Cannibal

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Incredible Hulk, Biology, Intelligent Design, and the Total Lie that is Adaptation Via Natural Selection

This is what I awoke with, cogitating through closed eyes, groggy from some medicine I took last night, a grogginess which will not leave me, and so I share my points as point-by-point. I confess I'm feeling very clever right now, my head-full-of-cotton notwithstanding.

1. Preface: I'm not doing any additional research, so any one of these points could be proven wrong, with a simple reference to the Incredible Hulk's long history, biology, or intelligent design argumentation. I still boldly go, intuitively raining my brilliance upon the Nation of Facebook.

2. Let us proceed, for a bit, to reason from a scientific mindset.

3. When Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk, he gets a lot bigger, stronger, and less intelligent, more simple in choosing the factors upon which he chooses to act. He converts from brilliant scientist to freakish huge green cave-thingie.

4. When this happens, do certain neural pathways gently unplug themselves from each other? As the body grows, do the synapses fail to grow along with the skeleton, the muscles, the skin? I propose something like this must happen. Just as his clothing remains on his body, even though in the comics he sometimes grows ten times his size, this so he doesn't show his big green penis to the millions of ten-year-olds who used to read his comic book, so must his synapses remain undamaged. So it must be a gentle process he undergoes, which allows him to return to the status of Scientific Smart Person at some point with all of his cognitive abilities reinstated as if nothing had happened.

5. Furthermore, "Hulk smash" is not similar to how any two-year-old I've met speaks. Nobody talks like that. So this is not a cognitive reversion to childhood. Maybe it is literary (more on that in a moment) device to show that he is becoming more like a beast than a man, but scientifically speaking, that is not allowed. Hulk's linguistic change is not deterioriation - he loses weird things, like prepositions, and verb tenses, and commas. And when he shrinks back down in size and becomes Banner again, he's able to speak normally again.

6. We should note that, while there appears to be a connection with whatever keeps his close from ripping completely off his body and whatever the heck happens to his neural network, the difference is obvious: he does lose his shirt and the lower-leg portion of his purple pants do end up shredded. The only parallel I can see is that Banner's Hulkifying does damage to his conscience and his social life, so maybe I'm onto something there. That appears, however, to be literary rather than biochemical.

7. (Speaking of literary, and films are considered part of literary study these days, while Banner might feel fortunate that he doesn't always emerge from Hulkdom completely naked, werewolves in movies and TV do not share that luck. Of course, that makes this viewer happy, as there are so many hot actors playing werewolves and it's always nice to see them completely naked. The exception I must note is the second Twilight film - I haven't seen the third, as the second was terrible but I can't help it, I have a Robert Pattinson attraction as big as the Hulk himself - in which the actors are underaged, and the world is paranoid about underaged nudity these days, in spite of the irony of the focus on a gang of muscled teenage boys running around shirtless certainly having some element of sexual intent behind it.)

8. Most of what I've observed, excluding #7, which is True and not False, would certainly not match what scientists have observed thusfar in the natural world. Unless, like with the extra-terrestrial crash-landing at Roswell, they are keeping it a secret from us, scientists have most likely not observed a human turn into a very large creature with strange verbal skills return to his normal state with his former intelligence and verbal acuity regenerated.

9. Either:

10. Bruce Banner has regenerative powers, and the gamma-ray blast gave those to him along with everything else, or

11. God exists as an intelligent designer, and Darwin worshipped Satan.

Note: is the Bruce Banner/Hulk dichotomy the two sides of Jesus, both God and Man? Or something more complicated, like Jesus and Herod?

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The smallness of spirituality, sometimes

I share this because in all the debate that continues about God vs science (as if there needs to be any opposition between the two), all the wondering about our individual problems, concerns about gay marriage, concerns about the U.S. becoming a theocracy, and so much else, is the God in question the God of all the earthlings, all the earth-like-planetlings, or is all of this explained in some bigger way? As I make my own way along the path of life, the spiritual life, whatever phase I feel like I'm in, whatever label I slap on myself to tell people what I believe, is insufficient, or too specific, or too small.

When I see stories like this, my spiritual view just seems to small to hold it all.

----

More than 100 'Earth-like' planets discovered in past few weeks

By Niall Firth
Last updated at 11:43 AM on 23rd July 2010

(Excerpt):
The breakthrough raises the tantalising prospect that we may not be alone in the Universe.

Scientists now believe that there are likely to be around 100 million planets in the Milky Way that harbour exactly the right conditions for life.

And they expect to be able to identify around 60 of these habitable Earth-like planets within the next two years.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296841/More-100-Earth-like-planets-just-past-weeks.html#ixzz0uvYCCHw5

Friday, July 16, 2010

Best birthday card ever? Maybe.



from

http://shop.moderntoss.com/cards

So now we just wait

Just don't read this one if you fear getting depressed. Or worried.

I saw this article over at the excellent blog Alterdestiny (http://alterdestiny.blogspot.com/) and just noticed that they took the post down. Not sure why.

But according to some scientists we have about six months to find out if we are on the brink of the next mass extinction. Warning to you all, the information in this article is not pretty.

I don't have any background in the field of geology and even less in mass extinction research, so all I can do is share this frightening link and ask, so what, do we sit and wait?

http://www.helium.com/items/1882339-doomsday-how-bp-gulf-disaster-may-have-triggered-a-world-killing-event

"Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event"

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Theism and atheism: I can't see beyond the river, so maybe it doesn't matter right now

As someone who has struggled along the spiritual path most of my life...wait, got distracted by a hottie standing next to me...anyway, as such a person, I find myself not only dipping my toe in spiritual waters, but converting only to be disillusioned. Pretty much every time. I think this is because so many Western religions strive to define *too much*...or at least my own habit of scrupulosity "goes there" into the "too much" world of theology and practice and...dang, the hot guy just left...and morality, and find it difficult to be just as I am within a context of practice which I know would be very good for me.

My point is that theologically I will probably always be mostly agnostic, in terms of the full identity of deity or beyond-deity is concerned. Philosophically - and this is much more complex than it seems, and possibly more vague at the same time - I'm Muslim and Taoist. At that level, I don't see much difference. I run into trouble when I get into that which was generated by culture rather than wisdom. And recognizing wisdom is such an individual, subjective thing. There is oneness, and life is a river. There is not much else I can be certain of. Even the oneness betrays me, or perhaps I betray it, very often. So life is a river. Worthy of (and for centuries already the subject of) much thought and writing.

Theist vs. atheist, well, I never got much into that, because with life being a river, and that being all I know, or believe, or something, God and Spirit and whatever else we want to call it is either necessarily real or not (or something else!).

Okay, enough of my Andrewocity for now. I seek serenity, and thus go to a lecture on the pre-Socratics. I wonder if that will bring serenity or dischord. I'll let y'all know.