Wow … Gappa (retitled as Monster from a Prehistoric Planet) is in the public domain and available at Archive.Org. One of the funniest movie watching experiences I’ve ever had was watching this with my wife. The movie is hilarious — both intentionally and unintentionally. Gappa is what might have happened if the Monty Python folks had been Japanese and decided to make a giant monster movie instead of Life of Brian.
In what frankly comes across as a publicity stunt, Stephenie Meyer has been complaining on her blog that somebody ended up with a draft copy of one of her forthcoming novels and posted it to the Internets. Oh noes. Right up there with those bands that issue press releases denouncing the leaking of one of their songs from a forthcoming album through BitTorrent. Especially since in Meyer’s case she’s subsequently gone and posted the draft herself for everyone to read. Talk about torn up about the leak!
Anyway, what struck me about Meyer’s case was this,
I’d rather my fans not read this version of Midnight Sun. It was only an incomplete draft; the writing is messy and flawed and full of mistakes.
The writing is flawed and messy and full of errors? You mean like every other Stephenie Meyer novel? Hell, go to print on it tomorrow, it’s finished.
It’s a shame she’s dead, because I’d really like to see the monstrosity that a VC Andrews/Stephenie Meyer team-up could have produced.
Zabazoo manufactures a building toy called Stonees — colorful rocks made from crushed stone. The rocks have flat surfaces so they can be easily stacked. A tub of 50 goes for about $20.
And they’re great for any sort of diorama scene (involving, say, action figures) that also requires rocks.
Was weeding out my collection of magazines the other day, and ran across an ad in an early 1980s issue of Dragon for the Zoccihedron — a 100-side die that’s really just a ball that randomly (or not) displays a number between 1 and 100. And, of course they’re still making the things.
This is a picture of the presumaby much-improved Zocchihedron II. Nice.
Science News has a fascinating — if brain splitting — look at research by Princeton mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen who are trying to defend free will in what looks like a completely deterministic universe,
Conway and Kochen say this search [for variables that would determine the outcome of quantum-level events] is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.
. . .
Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”
Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft retorts to this that Kochen and Conway are correct, but that they’ve simply come down on the wrong side of the argument — there simply isn’t even a tiny bit of free will in the universe.
“As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter’s choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” ’t Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”
It is telling that Kochen ultimately has to appeal to the phenomenology of consciousness and talk about “natural feelings” to attempt to convince us — and perhaps himself — that we really do have free will in deciding whether or not to push that button. That’s not exactly a convincing theoretical framework to base free will on.
One of these days I’m going to write a longer review, but I’d recommend Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves which makes a fairly lucid (though still brain straining) case for a compatibilist approach between determinism and free will and does an especially good job of highlighting how much of the debate over free will vs. determinism is predicated on hidden assumptions in the way we talk about freedom and deciding.
Privateer Press has uploaded a copy of the Monsterpocalypse Rulebook (17.4 mb PDF). Looks like this game is going to rock.
Hilariously weird video of two World of Warcraft players who hook treadmills up to the game and then literally run their toons in a race from Shadowglenn to Darnassus.
In general, I tend to think of Great Britain and Europe as significantly more secular than the United States, which is why I always get a bit weirded out reading op-eds like George Pitcher’s defense of compulsory religious education in the United Kingdom.
The thing is that compulsory education is already the norm — although from what I can tell just from news accounts, many public schools give only a perfunctory nod to their legal obligation to provide religious instruction to their pupils.
A joint committee of Parliament recommended giving some children the right to abstain from religious “education.”
We recommend that the Government reconsiders its objection to permitting a child of sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding to withdraw from religous education. As for religious worship, we recommend that children who are not in the sixth form but who have sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding to be permitted to withdraw.
Pitcher finds even this recommendation as part of a secular attack on religious faith in the UK,
The NSS’s [National Secular Society] agenda is simple: it wants to force the next generation to stop thinking about the spiritual, the transcendental and the mysterious, in favour of a negative utilitarianism. That can be the only reason for picking on this particular bit of the syllabus.
Which is odd because, in general, the widely accepted explanation for the much greater religious fervor in the United States is precisely the strict separation of church and state. And, of course, nothing even close to the existing regime of religious instruction in school nor this rather mild modification of the same would have a chance in hell of passing muster in U.S. courts — they’d be rejected out of hand as impingements on fundamental freedoms.
So from a strictly utilitarian perspective, perhaps atheists and secularists in the United States are engaged in self-defeating behavior when they run around trying to extinguish mention of religion from the public sphere. Receiving religion from the state — at least a liberal democratic state — seems to have the same effect on religion that perhaps a teenager receiving a pornographic magazine from his parents might have on the libido. It takes all the fun and interest out of it.
Teenormous.Com is a search engine focused on helping users find cool t-shirts. Seriously awesome.
The Catholic Church is apparently a bit unhappy over this sculpture currently being displayed in an Italian museum that depicts a green frog being crucified while it holds a beer mug in one hand and an egg in the other.
The sculpture, Zuerst die Fuess is by the late German sculptor Martin Kippenberger. The Vatican wrote a letter in Pope Benedict’s name supporting efforts by Italian politician Franz Pahl to have the sculpture removed from the state-supported museum where it is being displayed. In portions of the letter released by Pahl, the Vatican complains that the sculpture “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God’s love.”
According to the Associated Press, Kippenberger apparently considered the sculpture “a self-portrait illustrating human angst.” Um, yeah, why else would the frog be holding an egg in one hand?
On the one hand, it is always a bit strange to see people who allegedly have the Supreme Creator of all things brought low by something as ridiculous as a frog on a stick (or whatever the allegedly blasephemous item of the day is).
On the other hand, in Western societies generally the Vatican’s letter writing is about the limit of its power to actually remove the offending item. This was not always the case, and, of course, in many parts of the world a similar item — say portraying Mohammed as a green frog — would likely end up with museum officials in prison or worse.
