Archive for Books
Posted in Atheism, Books, Media
January 6, 2010 at 9:36 am
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’ Terry Pratchett at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Media
August 10, 2009 at 10:10 am
The pirates reluctantly slunk out from behind various barrels and piles of old fish. Several of them held their hands over their faces in the mistaken belief that if they couldn’t see Cutlass Liz then she couldn’t see them.
‘You know I once ate twenty babies?’ said Cutlass Liz, looking them up and down. The crew all nodded fearfully.
‘I’m sure babies taste a lot better than pirates,’ said the albino pirate. ‘Because they’d be fresher. And not as salty.’
Gideon Defoe at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
August 10, 2009 at 9:58 am
“After punching god in the brain, I smuggled the vicious little bastard back to E.M.P.I.R.E. I have no idea what they’ll do with a hostage god, but the mind reels. And I hope it hurts.” Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba at Powells.com
Posted in Books, Democracy, Digital Culture, Media, Technology, literature
July 22, 2009 at 10:56 am
“You can’t get anything done by doing nothing. It’s our country. They’ve taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free–but we’re not. I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.” – Cory Doctorow at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Media, Philosophy, literature
July 7, 2009 at 11:44 am
“Ok, look,” Wilson said. “You noted it yourself – without the brain, the pattern of consciousness usually collapses. That’s because the consciousness is wholly dependent on the physical structure of the brain. And not just any brain; it’s dependent on the brain in which it arose. Every pattern of consciousness is like a fingerprint. It’s specific to that person and it’s specific right down to the genes.” John Scalzi on Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Media
May 18, 2009 at 3:49 pm
And while we were standing on this spot, the spot where Mao stood when he proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the music we were having played at us by the public address system was first “Viva Espana” and then the “Theme from Hawaii Five-O.” It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point I couldn’ve even be sure that it wasn’t me… Douglas Adams at Powells.com
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Books, Media, Philosophy, literature
April 9, 2009 at 3:05 pm
“Man did not feel inches or meters, pounds or gallons. He felt heat, He felt cold; He felt heaviness and lightness. He knew hatred and love, pride and despair. You cannot measure these things. You cannot know them. You can only know the things that He did not need to know: dimensions, weights temperatures, gravities. There is no formula for a feeling. There is no conversion factor for an emotion.”
“There must be,” said Frost. “If a thing exists, it is knowable.”
“You are speaking again of measurement. I am talking about a quality of experience. A machine is a Man turned inside-out, because it can describe all the details of a process which a Man cannot, but it cannot experience that process itself as a Man can.”
-Roger Zelazny at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Evolution, Media, Science
February 16, 2009 at 12:21 pm
“Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; pit vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01degree Centigrade at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have microseismometers on their legs so they can detect in pitch darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away…” Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
February 9, 2009 at 3:34 pm
“What’s it like in space?”
“It sings.”
“The vibrations from the spin of the drive arms, sir, and the motion of the heat through the casements to space, which is very cold. The whole ship sings quietly, like a gently struck tuning fork.”
Warren Ellis at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Comics, Media
January 8, 2009 at 2:57 pm
“You’re not here. You’re not even the real Kathy. The Doctor explained it to me, once he’d examined the computer.” – Corner of the Eye, by Steven Moffat. (Early version of the story that became the Doctor Who episode “Blink.”)