Site Update 2014

After running this site for 7 years, I have done a comprehensive update of the systems that run it, namely migrating it to a brand new database. This has increased the site speed, noticeable in page loading times especially on the calendar. The calendar is going strong, with many talks and events for the Fall of 2014. Please check it out if you are in the New York City metropolitan area.

Site Update

After running this blog for over 6 years, I’m thinking it is time for a site update. I’d like to give a thanks to the WordPress.org community for making great blogging software freely available, and NearlyFreeSpeech.net for providing site hosting at a reasonable price. That said, there is a good chance I am going to mess something up. The site has been running on the same underlying (MySql) process, perhaps from the start, without any […]

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism

Something fun to read: “…What Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs. Just as magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui (speaking of aspirational names) have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ultimate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is […]

Philosophy Carnival #141

Welcome to the one hundred forty first philosophy carnival. In my internet travels I found some really cool philosophy inspired posters by Genis Carreras, which I have paired with the links to pretty up the carnival. Zombies, because philosophers like zombies. An introduction to the philosophical discussion of zombies and dualism by Tom B. over at Philosophy of… which looks like a promising new blog contributing “in some humble way to this movement of the […]

bah humbug

I haven’t done a link roundup in a while, so be assured that all these links are awesome. [via information aesthetics] . Animal of the Month: Immortal Jellyfish ‘Immortal’ jellyfish swarming across the world – Telegraph . In second place is: Giant meat-eating plants prefer to eat tree shrew poo – BBC – Earth News . A Softer World: 395 . [via Don’t Panic > Magazine > Desire > THE BLACK HEART GANG] . Beautiful […]

Climate Change

This is a post for Blog Action Day 09! If the climate changes rapidly enough, the human race is finished.  If the climate does not change quite that rapidly, we’ve got other problems. For the sake of argument, let us assume that we are not beings in some religious pantheon, but are merely biological organisms of this Earth.  If the climate changes, i.e. if nature as we know it no longer exists, then how are […]