In regard to the recent press coverage of Food Not Bombs’ public food sharing at Lake Eola, and the city of Orlando’s arrests of those who participate in them, I would like to make a couple of points – some as a matter of fact, some as a matter of theory. First, there seems to [...]

This is an arcane paper I ran across doing a piece for my content-mill employer on Gestalt psychology’s property of invariance in perception. It intrigued me somehow, because I’ve always been fonder of the notion of tropes (a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words) than memes (an idea, behavior or [...]

In the 2008 General Election in the United States, I cast my vote for Barack Obama to become the President of the United States. I stated publicly that it was important to me to vote for Obama for three reasons. First, I wanted to rebuke the race-baiting of the campaign, beginning in the Primaries with [...]

I’ve been engaging in a little debate over at the Oil Drum, on the relative merits and risks of nuclear plants (for generating electric power, that is). My primary pro-nuke “learned friend” has come right out and said openly that in his (I am pretty sure he is male) opinion, Chernobyl and Fukushima are no [...]

a couple of my Durham friends do some cultural crit… Dystopian novels—stories of the future going badly wrong—have apparently now surpassed the vampire and fantasy genres in the young adult fiction market. The books, and the phenomenon of their popularity, have provoked numerous discussions online, in schools, and in the sort of serious, adult magazines [...]

Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed [...]

The question was asked at the Barbastro Peak Oil Conference. If we are justified in poisoning people in order to produce combustible liquids and gas, why don’t we jump to the ultimate consequence and turn human corpses into oil? Swift’s Modest Proposal returns, with increased poignancy.

I felt a little frisson of interest and anticipation when I saw an article at Energy Bulletin entitled “Gender Issues”. I thought it might be a long-overdue discussion of gender and technocracy, gender and industrial technology, gender and power and recklessness, risk discounting, and other interesting issues. I thought it might address the dysfunctionality of [...]

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park. Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan “Keith” McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry [...]