Rondam Ramblings

Congress voted against the bailout . Stocks plunge. I have personally lost the equivalent of many years salary (if I were still working fo...

An essay I wrote six years ago about some of my experiences working for NASA has gotten some recent attention on Reddit and Hacker News . ...

Every now and then the Republicans show their true face .

There are days when I feel like I'm losing the struggle to keep myself from slipping away into abject cynicism. Today was one of those ...

I still have not received any official word from the Santa Monica Film Festival but their web site now has a list of their official selecti...

Still no word from the Santa Monica Film Festival , but there has been an interesting development: this morning, their web site said that fi...

As some of you may know, for the last two years I have been working on a film about homeless people in Santa Monica, California. Last Spri...

Sam Harris seems to be trying to set the world record for choking on his own foot. In a screed in today's LA Times he writes: "Le...

This has to be the best political ad ever .

This is encouraging. The premier Creationist web site seems to be surrendering on nearly every front. The only argument that AIG doesn...

Being fully cognizant of the futility of the exercise, I think it is nonetheless instructive to occasionally deconstruct a creationist theor...

We had an earthquake in LA today. Five-four. No big deal, but it got my attention, and got me to thinking about what earthquakes have to ...

It's been taken one step closer to reality, ironically, by a toy company .

I just got back from being out of town and discovered that a one-line comment I posted on hacker news two weeks ago ignited a firestorm of ...

For anyone who has used iSightCapture and has been frustrated by the fact that it's released in object-code only format, here is qt-cap...

At least not according to Google Maps .

Larry Lessig calls the outrage at Obama's flip-flop over the FISA bill leftist hysteria . He's wrong. Whatever else one might think...

Tomorrow I plan to write a letter to the Obama campaign demanding a refund of my $2300 campaign contribution because Senator Obama did not f...

It's amazing how fast things change. Last year I was thinking how wonderful it was to be present at this historic moment when either a ...

If you thought that Muslims had cornered the market on hysterical overreactions to minor slights, Catholics worldwide are up in arms over t...

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions ...

I heard only a part of this story about San Quentin prison on NPR yesterday, but that was enough to turn my stomach. With overcrowding, it ...

A Texas high school student has been arrested for making a map of his school . (Caveat: I have not been able to verify this story. The purp...

This is so depressing I can barely bring myself to write about it. I thought we elected the Democrats to protect us from neocons running ro...

TPM is reporting that Obama is flip-flopping on telecom immunity . I hope this turns out not to be true. (The video isn't working so I...

The Supreme Court handed murderers and child rapists a pair of legal victories today. Never would have figured the Roberts court for bein...

Every now and then the religious right slips in its carefully crafted rhetoric to show its true and hateful face. The most recent example o...

The title of this post actually applies to two completely different matters. First, I saw a really great movie last night about life in Eas...

I wish it were a rhetorical question. Believe it or not, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush toda...

There is no other word for a society where something like this has to happen before someone starts to pay attention. The parents of a blind...

Hillary is ending her campaign . Halefuckingleujah. Can you say, "Too little, too late?"

In a display of truly breathtaking chutzpah even by her own standards, Hillary Clinton, who just two months ago was saying that Barak Obama ...

What else can you call it when the judge gets fired because he ruled that the prosecution has to disclose its evidence to the defense ?

If you've noticed an increase in the amount of spam you've been getting lately, it's probably because the captchas for both Gma...

One of the things that hard-core atheists like Dawkins get wrong IMO is they underestimate the importance of dramatic narrative in people...

sblinn over on reddit raises an interesting point (particularly since we have a Calvinist lurking out there somewhere): what does it mean ...

... is the title of an excellent and well-informed article by David Sloan Wilson . Some highlights: It is absurd, in retrospect, that evolu...

[NOTE: This essay is rough and incomplete, but it will be at least three days before I have another chance to work on it. Rather than keep ...