Recent Blog Posts

  • I would recommend….

    …buying stand-up comedian Tig Notaro’s set off fellow comedian Louis CK’s web site. But before you listen to it, I would really recommend listening to listening to the Professor Blastoff podcast. In general, but especially since episode 63. Here’s the iTunes link. Hat tip to Kara, who pointed me in the right direction after I…

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  • Tripping a little more

    A few more thoughts on Eben Alexander’s near-death experience: PZ Myers describes the story in a post called Newsweek panders to the deluded again, which isn’t an inaccurate label (it is indeed a delusion to say that the experience of one questionably conscious neurosurgeon “proves” anything, much less the existence of an afterlife) but I think…

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  • I’m tripping over you, God

    In a Newsweek article grandiosely (to put it lightly) titled Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife published yesterday, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts a story of what it was like to visit Heaven (apparently) and speak with God (apparently) which supposedly took place while he was in a coma due to bacterial meningitis. His sole basis for…

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  • Internet antipathy

    So much of what happens on the internet is petty squabbles between strangers. Arguments which flare up and then fade away, which will have no effects outside of making some people temporarily inflamed/enthused/bewildered. But if you dismissed every internet disagreement on that basis, you’d be highly naive. Reputations are built and ruined on the internet.…

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  • The only football player I care about

    He’s also nearly the only football player I could name, but only nearly. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe writes again in response to another banal, thoughtless anti-gay marriage diatribe, and his essay is just superb. The diatribe in this case was written by his former team member Ravens center Matt Birk, who trots out the…

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  • A simple ethics of expectations

    On the news this morning I listened to a report about a new virus discovered in Saudi Arabia. But after talking about how scary and disturbing that is, it was mentioned that it has infected a total of two people and is believed to be only transmissable from non-human animals to humans, so it probably…

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