Now I know who wrote God Rest Ye, Unitarians, it was the Rev. Christopher Gist Raible of the First Unitarian Church of Worcester. Since my copy of the lyric is (as of this writing) the top result in Google for “god rest ye unitarians,” I’m glad I now have the correct attribution.
Cynthia and I saw The Golden Compass last night. And I was disappointed. And no, it wasn’t about the religion. With all that brocade and those Roman collars, it was obvious that the heavies were clerics. The Catholic League will feast for weeks on that. There were bigger holes and problems.
I’ve noticed an increase in traffic from searches for Pullman and the upcoming The Golden Compass movie adaptation, so as a service, here’s an index to my posts on the topic: Pullman opens a can of whup ass on Harry Potter: A friend introduces to me to the book. Pullman wins Whitbread Prize Interview with [...]
In a couple of hours’ play, I’ve reached stage 13 of Portal, and it’s that sing-song computer voice, goading you along, that makes it work. Tim Bray’s assessment is dead-on: Dear Marketing Professionals; when you think ‘message control’ several generational cohorts of geeky target demographics are thinking about the Portal voice. Portal may be a [...]
So, my friends have been having fun imagining what Falwell’s reception in the afterlife might be like. But I don’t think we have souls, so I have to come up with a technological teleology for the late Reverend.
Falwell’s machine-instantiated conscious…
There’s a Mormon Transhumanist movement.
Katha Pollitt on opposition to the HPV vaccine: Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time.
Carl Zimmer, describing a documentary on the latest round of science wars: They’ve [biologists] got the science right, but they can be inarticulate and high-handed, torpedoeing their own cause. Their efforts at communication to the public are stiff and a bit arrogant. Meanwhile, intelligent design advocates have hired the PR firm that brought us Swift [...]
At 3 Quarks Daily, an introduction to recent work on religion and cognition: [It] does not see religious belief as a corruption of rationality, but rather as an over-extension of some of the very mental mechanisms that underlie and make rationality possible. In other words, rather than religion having emerged to serve a social or [...]
Brad Templeton puts paid to the so-called War on Christmas. Christopher Davis in the comments: Retcon it all you want, but a solstice celebration is still a solstice celebration.
Alex Epstein uses the current skirmish in the Culture Wars as a teaching moment on writing villains: But trying giving your villain such a convincing argument that the audience, for one brief moment at least, almost starts to take his side. Good villains have motives, even if they aren’t reasonable or justified, but they must [...]
John Rogers: But it is universally agreed that ‘The War on Christmas’ movement marked the moment that America had become just … too stupid to survive.
A couple of podcasts of note: Coverville had a special, hour-long show for Elvis Costello’s birthday back at the end of August. I like Blur’s version of Oliver’s Army, and the Bangles’ poppy cover of Tear Off Your Own Head. Jennifer Pelland has a story on Escape Pod, The Burning Bush: funny, and sacrilegious, but [...]
Many friends mistook the Robertson Blames Hurricane on Choice of Ellen Degeneres to Host Emmys article from the satire site Dateline Hollywood for fact. Can you blame them? After all, Robertson linked Katrina to abortion rights.
So there’s a common complaint among some of the pious that we liberals pick and choose our morality rather than ordering the prix fixe meal they offer. The editors at Worldchanging found an admonishment to that sentiment in a series of responses that Spiked got when they asked scientists what would be the one thing [...]