In a word: Moof

My hatred of shopping is becoming pathological. That, and my selection of clothes is becoming smaller. Someday, these two developments are going to collide. I’m hoping that amazon starts selling pants before this becomes a crisis. Although it’s not like I have any problem with wearing old jeans.

In other news, Whole Foods is now open at Cedar and Warrrensville Center. Amazing and expensive food.

Let’s test some stuff:

So yeah, I can now do in posts, and it automatically generates images for me. Pretty nice. And I’m writing this from Emacs, which is pretty absurd too. Took a bunch of hacking on weblogger.el to get it to work nicely with movable type, but Lisp is fun.

I started watching the movie Primer, and I realized one thing that explains my complete boredom with all science fiction.

Science fiction is just not as cool as real science.

Most astronomers have the same basic response when presented with the question of “how did you become an astronomer.” They almost universally answer with some childhood memory of seeing Saturn, Jupiter, or just looking up at the sky. It always as a child, with a telescope, and it’s always heartwarming. And that’s a great thing; astronomy is a very accessible science, in the sense that everyone has some acquaintance with the subject. A clear night is all that’s required. But beyond that it’s very opaque, and oddly enough this is probably what drew me into the field.

We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

An amazing quote I found from Bertrand Russel's lecture "Why I am not a Christian". A very good work, though slightly dated (It was presented in 1927). At the beginning he concentrates on debunking arguments for god's existence, which is nothing particularly difficult or novel. But towards the end he becomes more persuasive, making an argument for why we, as a society, must not be impeded by outdated and pernicious ideas. He makes the same points that many of the "new atheists" make, which really makes me doubt that there's anything "new" about them. But new or old, it's definitely worth a read.