Are you sure you want to be "free"? Freedom is such a strange concept. I've never understood it in the context of personal decision-making. Americans claim to love "freedom," but how much freedom can you stand? Freedom implies occurrences that are unhinged from naturalistic laws. Freedom implies a mechanism that…
"What an odd question?" was my first thought when I read this column. Blogging, as a profession, has grown from geeky obscurity into a direct challenge to the journalism industry, even with bloggers' reputation for being unruly, unvetted, grammatically and syntactically insufficient, and above all, a disorganized mess. He discusses…
Here's a cute video by "AngryLittleGirl" called "Gullible is not in the Dictionary" [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OruQy-X32O0[/youtube] It makes the simple point that one should check the source when someone presents a "fact" such as "95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate" or "Jesus rose from the dead". That reminds me of "Passion of…
A Hindu chaplain was invited to say the opening prayer in the Senate and some christians slipped in to protest, disrupting the prayer, and generally making fools of themselves and presenting the face of their faith which causes those who feel religious belief is something everyone ought to get over…
There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.TANSTAAFL.
Anybody recognize that? Where it comes from? What it refers to?
This past weekend was the 100th birthday of Robert A. Heinlein. I was not there, though I’d wanted to be. You see, Robert A. Heinlein was one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world, and when I was a child, his books informed my apprehension of just about everything. It might be questioned whether one man deserves the kind of press Heinlein gets. Even when he was alive (he passed away in 1988) he was controversial but there were still many places you could walk into where not a soul would know who he was. I think he’s important because, in a way, he made modern America.
What? A science fiction writer? Made America?
Such a statement demands clarification.
A biography is soon to be out by a gentleman named Bill Patterson. You can read it, read about the man who once wore the title “The Dean of Space Age Fiction”, and judge for yourself. I won’t go into huge detail about his life or work here. I want to make a smaller, more pointed observation.
In 33 novels and a significant number of short stories, Robert A. Heinlein established a didactic approach to science fiction that has been copied, improved, debated, revered, and hated since he began his career in 1938. Heinlein was born in Missouri. He graduated from Annapolis. He received a medical discharge from …
