The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Author Archive
“You see, Earth, it’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we just don’t care.”
In his writings on contemporary culture, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to invoke a concept borrowed from psychoanalysis, “the subject presumed to know.” Basically, we often project onto specific other people and institutions a sense that they hold the answers about us. It is derived from a patient’s inner conviction that his therapist really holds […]
“They” Are Not “Them”: A Hybrid View of the UFO Presence
For many years I was skeptical of the UFO phenomenon. I was persuaded by SETI pioneers like Carl Sagan: It’s pretty certain that the universe is full of intelligent civilizations, but the vast interstellar distances and the vast timescales involved in traversing them made the notion of an alien presence in our skies seem (to […]
Hirshhorn floor
So E and I went to the Hirshhorn this weekend. It’s my favorite DC gallery, but I hadn’t been in a few years. For some reason, I totally fell in love with the way the pinkish green floor looked in my iPhone camera. Then I got mesmerized by the marble floor on the upper level. […]
Secrecy and Truth
Call me crazy, but I think that the age of open, free publication has done something to debase or weaken the domain of thought in the West. Where are the really powerful and amazing ideas? I want to Prague in 1990 because I was in love with the idea of samizdat, of an underground culture […]
In Denmark, No One Can Hear You Scream (or, Is Beowulf a Forgery?)
M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural […]
Muzeum Alchymie v Kutne Hore
E. and I made a day trip to Kutna Hora to visit an Alchemy Museum run by an acquaintance from my Prague days, Michal Pober. A mutual friend, Dan Kenney, had introduced us back in ’97 in a quiet teahouse on a secluded street in Old Town. It had been one of those Prague conversations: […]
Cosmic WTF
A new article in Sky & Telescope magazine reports on a recent discovery of a highly anomalous “optical transient” detected by the Hubble telescope in the constellation Bootes. The object, in the location of no known star or galaxy, appeared and brightened to the 21st magnitude over a span of about 100 days, and then […]
Politely ignoring linguistic primitivity
M.J. Harper (The Secret History of the English Language–see previous post) has been taken to task for an apparent misunderstanding of how evolution works: A form can’t evolve from another living form, goes the dogma; rather, two related forms are said to share a common ancestor. So, for example, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees; […]
The Secret History of the English Language
Reckoning the origins of words is a politically significant exercise, and etymologies, wherever and whenever they are from, are notoriously full of shit. They always reflect someone’s political vested interests or fantasies of “who was here first.” Yet somehow the old dons who gave us our etymological bible, the OED, have always remained above suspicion. […]
Evolution of the Eye
Wikipedia has a terrific, thorough and readable explanation of the evolution of the eye from earlier structures (directional photodetectors found in simple, even single-celled organisms). It has nice diagrams and pictures of the intermediate forms leading to this astonishing structure. Next time you have lunch with a Creationist or “intelligent design” proponent–who love to flog […]
