Culture
voltagegate | December 21, 2007
I had to visit an elementary school for a story the other day and had to wait a bit for my interview, so I started walking around the halls, looking at what the kids had been up to in class.
There were the requisite scaled models of Native American abodes, teepees and wigwams, complete with little plastic figures and livestock. Behind that, hanging on a giant corkboard, were self portraits of the children, all smiles and scribbly shirts.
In a smaller corner of the corkboard there was a cluster of little watercolor paintings surrounding a hand written construction paper sign that read "Mrs.…
razib | December 19, 2007Ed, Greg & PZ have commented on the strange reaction of the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary toward Richard Dawkins' enthusiasm for Christmas traditions. So "why would an atheist want to sing Christmas carols?"
The same reason that the study and reading of literature has not been reduced to physics. We humans appreciate great stories, and we can conceive in our mind's eye ideas which may not be true, but we enjoy the play of those ideas nonetheless. One does not have to be a Greek pagan to appreciate the beauty and power of the Iliad, and in fact for centuries…
sheril | December 18, 2007
I need a new computer.
So readers, Mac or PC?
The thing is Mac users sometimes scare me just a little... Really. It's as if they've been converted to the Church of Macintosh. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? Now admittedly, my dad is a Mac user and mom's set on her PC, so it's possible that's why I'm now at this crossroads questioning my faith over at Correlations...
Mac users generally strike me akin to missionaries. I've recently dubbed them the 'Cult of Apple'. Why? Well, it's not enough that they love the camera, the screen, the bubbly icons at the bottom of their desktop…
voltagegate | December 12, 2007This week I did a little search for Lycaon, one of the many suggestions given to me in the comments of the introductory post. This one came from Brian from Laelaps, who had a brief affair with World of Warcraft that his computer did not particularly like.
Lycaon is a popular name. There are 77 toons named Lycaon on the North American servers, and another 51 in Europe. From the European server Doomhammer, we have a troll hunter named Lycaon who seems to have recently hit level 70 (grats!).
IRL, Lycaon is the genus name of Lycaon pictus, the African wild dog, the beautifully mottled pack…
sheril | November 30, 2007I often write about the power of music to move and motivate people. The arts have a monumental role in culture which is, of course, at the intersection of politics, science... life. As a musician and former radio jock, I recognize talent, and a couple weeks ago I heard something special from outside The Broad Street Cafe in Durham... I wandered in to see a young guy on stage with an acoustic guitar, but it's his voice that gave me pause - influences of Eddie Vedder and Dave Matthews are immediately evident--Just take a listen to 'The Rabbit' and see what you think...
The simple message is…
sheril | November 29, 2007It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
- Douglas Adams
sheril | November 27, 2007
Next November 4, make an informed decision.
There's no denying this is the kind of stuff the voting public remembers...
razib | November 25, 2007Ali Eteraz has an article titled Mistaken identity in The Guardian which is a long rambling reflection on Islamic identity, and specifically his Islamic identity. He is somewhat confused by the conflation of Islam with a quasi-ethnic identity.
There are a few distinct issues here; though in the modern era we deemphasize terms such as "Christendom" or the "Dar-al-Islam," it would be disingenuous to deny that religious affinity is a powerful cross-cultural current. After all, one reason that American evangelicals are focused on the oppression of black Christians in Sudan and Chinese…
razib | November 23, 2007The Future of Reading:
All these ideas are anathema to traditionalists. In May 2006, novelist John Updike, appalled at reading Kelly's article ("a pretty grisly scenario"), decided to speak for them. Addressing a convention of booksellers, he cited "the printed, bound and paid-for book" as an ideal, and worried that book readers and writers were "approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electric sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." (Actually, studies show that heavy Internet users read many more books than do those not on the Net.) He…
razib | November 18, 2007Just talked to my mother today and she phoned relatives in Dhaka. Everything is OK, electricity is coming back online. She seemed dismissive of the idea when I asked if it was all well in the rural areas where some of my distant relatives live; it wasn't that big of a deal. On the other hand a cousin married a man whose family is from Barisal. Her husband went to check out the situation (family has estates and properties around the Sundbarbans) which was in the path of the storm, and it wasn't as pretty there as everything had been blasted away and tossed around. The main aim of my call…
razib | November 17, 2007Update: OK, not to be morbid, but the confirmed death tolls is now greater than 3,000, and there is a tentative projected death toll on the order of 10,000. That's in line with my comments below. End Update
The death toll is pushing 2,000. I think I might be safe in saying that the fatalities are going to be one order of magnitude lower than the 1991 and 1970 typhoons. Chris Mooney considers whether Sidr was as bad as hurricane Mitch in 1998. Mitch caused 11,000 fatalities. Sidr might cause as many. But the combined population for Nicaragua and Honduras is about 13 million today (one…
razib | November 15, 2007It's almost Friday here in the United States. The latest update I can find is that 200 people have died due to typhoon Sidr. These are almost certainly "early returns," and the numbers will keep going up. Like pre-modern battles most of the fatalities won't be directly due to the cyclone. Social disturbances, and likely outbreaks of disease (cholera) are going to take their their toll. That being said, at this point I think it is important to have a sense of perspective. A cyclone in 1991 killed 138,000 people and left 10 million homeless (I heard from relatives who told of how they had…
sheril | November 14, 2007It had to happen sooner or later for a site at the nexus of science, politics, and pop culture... Look to our sidebar at the newest feature - The InterSeCtion SoundTrack link
We're kicking things off with Van Halen's 'Right Now':
Reader's sometimes question why we care so much about the environment, engage in policy, and believe a better future is possible...
It's what's happening
Right here and now
Tell me, what are ya waitin' for?
Turn this thing around
At any given moment, we may change our selection to whatever we feel reflects the present tone and topic.
voltagegate | November 9, 2007I had to do it. With the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) at the top of my favorite animals list, I had to know exactly how many folks share enough interest in the firefox to name their toon after its genus name.
So how many Ailuruses are there out there? Seven on the North American servers and three on the European; appropriately, six of them are druids (cat/bear forms). The highest level (and she's leveled in the past few days, so is active) is a 68 feral druid who must have just recently snagged her Staff of Beasts from the Ring of Blood quest series in Nagrand.
If you've kept up with TVG,…
cmooney | November 6, 2007[This post is for sci-fi fantasy geeks only. If you're not a sci-fi fantasy geek, read no further.]
So anyways, there's something of a paradox in my life right now. Even as I'm supposed to be supporting the Writers' Guild strike, I'm also anxiously awaiting the November 16 release of Paramount Pictures' blockbuster version of Beowulf. I mean, sure, I may boycott some entertainment industry products as the Hollywood labor conflict rages on. But this just ain't one of them. I've been in Lord of the Rings withdrawal since...well, since 2003 or so. And now, we get the motherlode that inspired…
voltagegate | November 1, 2007Today we'll start this little experiment with one of the toons that gave me the idea (the other is a secret as of yet!), Empidonax from Ravencrest. Emp is spec'd holy with almost two dozen points discipline as well, presumably for mana sustainability in raids like Karazhan.
There are only two Empidonax's on all 200 of WoW's North American servers, none on the European servers. The other Empidonax is a level 10 Druid on Arathor.
IRL (in real life) the genus Empidonax, meaning "mosquito king" in Latin, collects a group of "tyrant flycatchers" from the family Tyrannidae. Our representative of…
voltagegate | October 31, 2007In March of this year, to the amusement of my friends, my brother convinced me to start playing World of Warcraft (WoW) with him. Since I left the Baltimore/Washington DC area four years ago, I've only had a few chances to see him per year, mostly on holidays or on vacation, and he pitched it to me as a way for us to interact weekly without having to travel. The two of us grew up casually playing video games together, starting with Combat on the Atari 2600, so naturally the idea was immediately appealing. I bought the software, registered and hopped on his server. We've been playing ever…
razib | October 26, 2007Interesting piece which chronicles the decline in the DVD driven profits of porn companies due to "user generated porn." Porn is in some ways sui generis, so this is an interesting trend. Check out the traffic of YouPorn vs. Facebook.
sheril | October 23, 2007Emmy Rossum's first album Inside Out drops today. You may remember her from Phantom of the Opera. And what, you may be wondering, does this possibly have to do with The Intersection? We live in a world where girls are hugely influenced everyday by media images of who and what we are expected to be. We're bombarded so many poor examples of pop icons to emulate making front page news. Therefore, it's worth pointing out a role model of substance. As a young woman trying to keep up while the world seems to be spinning so quickly around me, I relate to this particular song and video more…
sheril | October 12, 2007'Go read Doris Lessing,' said my favorite Classics professor at Tufts. You see, we both love Vonnegut, Heinlein and all sorts of science fiction, so I visited his office one day asking why there weren't more women writers of the genre catching my fancy.
I took his advice and wandered into the used bookstore in Harvard Square. There among the maze of shelves downstairs, I came upon an old copy of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. The book deals with struggles between men and women and dimensions of love and sex. Here's the…