If Beef Is So Bad For Us, Why Are Aliens Always Stealing Our Cows?

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 28, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Some say you can’t beat the meat for nutrition. I disagree. To quote Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner: It’s not only irrational, it’s unsportsmanlike!

I haven’t been much of a meat eater for a long time, but I think I’m going to finally commit to a rule that will make me more or less vegetarian: I won’t eat it unless I kill it myself. When you take an objective look at eating meat, there’s virtually no rational reason to do it. Even if you don’t care about the brutality of “harvesting” it, it doesn’t offer nutrients that can’t be found elsewhere, it’s arguably unhealthy, it has multiple negative impacts on the environment including deforestation and habitat destruction, excessive water consumption, pollution and greenhouse gas production, and on top of all that, it contributes to starvation worldwide. Not a very good scorecard. I’m even finding it hard to justify eating fish; as I joked with a friend the other day: Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll be starving in 50 years. So why have I suddenly decided on the change in diet? It’s not really so sudden. I’ve avoided corn-centric food and gone light on meat proteins since the 80′s, because of Diet for a New America, but recently I watched three films in a one-week period that drove it all home: Read the rest of this entry »

Just Who The Heck Do You Think You Are?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Whatever your answer is, I hope you’re happy with yourself. Find out who you are with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. And then get happy!

I am absolutely fascinated with people’s fascination with personality quizzes, which is why I’ve written about the topic before. I don’t need a multimillion dollar study to tell me that clearly, people take them because they either truly want to understand themselves better, or they simply want to reaffirm whatever they already believe about themselves (or in the case of Facebook quizzes like “Which Old-School Obscure Seasame Street character are you?“, do neither, while entertaining their friends). If you answer a well-designed test honestly and with self-awareness, they can be very helpful, but obviously a poorly-designed test leaves a lot of room for “Self-Report Bias”. So. If you really do want to to get to know yourself better, there are only a few credible methods on line to do so. And you can trust me, because according to this simple Jungian word pair test, I’m an ENFJ. Which means I’m a “Persuader. An outstanding leader of groups. Aggressive at helping others to be the best that they can be, and represent only 2.5% of the total population“. Hmm. I always suspected I was an outsider somehow. But my low self-intelligence result on this Multiple Intelligence Quiz prevented me from figuring it out. But now that I know, and since I do want to help you be the best you can be, here’s a whole page of these tests. After you’ve spent most of the day coming to a better understanding of yourself, ask yourself: are Read the rest of this entry »

Is The Internet Becoming A Giant Flesh-Eating Robot?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 26, 2009 by admin in Technology

The human race. It’s what’s for dinner.

Great. Not only does the Internet eat all our time, now it’s going to start eating us. We treat the idea of a self-aware Internet as science fiction that only exists in the form of the Terminator franchise’s Skynet or old 70′s movies like Colossus – The Forbin Project. Personally though, I’ve been saying to friends for a while that the Internet already is self-aware. It’s controlling our time and modifying our behaviour slowly and subtly, by forcing us into social networking, mobile devices, and pornography. Sure. Go ahead and convince yourself that it was your personal volition that turned you into an ADD-afflicted, Facebook-obsessed, Tivo-ing, CrackBerry textaholic, but I’m convinced the Internet is slowly training us to communicate in its preferred mode – text and images. And apparently I’m not too crazy for pondering this line of thought. Two respected scientists in this NewScientist article say that a self-aware Internet may already exist, and there was recently a serious scientific summit addressing the concern that machines may soon outsmart man. Combine this with the fact that military researchers are developing corpse-eating robots (which of course the company involved immediately denied, claiming they’re vegetarians) and you have some pretty scary scenarios brewing, even if they seem a little silly at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Green Hornet Generates More Buzz

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 25, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Unfortunately not much of it is positive. Will they really be recasting Kato as a non-Asian?

I’ve never been a big fan of comic books or the films based on them, but I’ll be really disappointed if they mishandle the film version of The Green Hornet. As a kid in the sixties, I of course watched shows like Batman, but was much more drawn to things like The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and especially the short-lived Green Hornet. I was in fact convinced that I had some mysterious connection with the show, a belief that was probably fueled by a few things: the fact that my dad drove a 1966 Imperial (the car the show’s Black Beauty was based on), that we had a mysterious Asian student boarding with us (unusual in the sixties) and that I’ve always had a strange connection with the idea that good things come from darkness. Although the show had some of the camp that many other 60′s spy or superhero shows had, it also had a little dark edginess that set it apart. And maybe doomed it to its one-season run. It also had some kick-ass music (yeah, Rimsky-Korsakov can be kick-ass) and was – as you may know – a huge break for Asian talent in the states. Although the central character of the show was supposedly the Britt Reid/Green Hornet figure, we all know the real star was his sidekick Kato, played by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. This is a story element which sadly may be changed in the film. Although the film version is slated for release on July 9, 2010 (my birthday, by the way), the production has had a bumpy ride. Originally Stephen Chow was directing and starring as Kato, now he’s doing neither. It also appears they’re broadening the type as they cast the new Kato. I’m hoping for the best; I really don’t get the casting of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet, but Michael Gondry is directing, and so far the car looks pretty cool.

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Did You Take The Red Pill Or The Blue Pill?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 24, 2009 by admin in Politics

Shirts or skins? Red or blue? Republican or Democrat? Liberal Or conservative? Is life really that simple? Maybe an online quiz can help.

I’m confused. I wish the words liberal and conservative would rediscover their meaning and stop consorting with scoundrels like the Democratic and Republican parties. And I wish we could de-politicize colors. Although it was pretty easy to choose a color in the great red and blue contest of 2008, I think I’m really something more like purple, given what red and blue have come to mean. And purple just seems a little indecisive somehow. But who – if they’re paying attention -  wouldn’t be a little undecided, in a time when both near-socialists like myself and a rabid neo-con like Free Republic’s Jim Robinson joke about the need for revolution, rather than voting. I think I’d fall into the liberal category simply because I don’t want some demented, rapture-driven Ayn Rand capitalist deciding who we can have sex with, or racist nutjobs like the GOP base deciding anything for us. But I can’t say I’m ecstatic with the current administration either. I know that campaigns are poll-driven marketing machines designed to appeal to nebulous but emotional voter values (like mine), but I have to admit I still feel a little suckered by the “Hope & Change” pitch. I see the former fading in a lot of people, and very little of the latter. So rather than continue thinking for myself, which has never done me any good, I decided to submit my indecision to science, and took the Pew Research Typology Test. Give it a try, the results were surprising. So surprising in fact (it pegged me as a Conservative Democrat) that now I’ve given up on science as well. I found this Democratic Loyalty Test much more informative, with questions and choices like: Read the rest of this entry »

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