tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30494952025-12-17T18:43:45.362-08:00Making people think ... one idea at a time.azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.comBlogger144125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-64524484124924628822025-04-21T09:06:00.000-07:002025-04-21T09:06:47.802-07:00

The 2023 & 2024 Book ListThe Night Circus by Erin MorgensternHelgoland by Carlo RovelliReality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David ChalmersIs Math Real?: How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics' Deepest Truths by Eugenia Chang1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones & othersDemocracy Awakening: Notes on the State of the Nation by

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-78540078941624529322023-08-07T20:47:00.005-07:002023-08-07T21:00:00.841-07:00

I've just recently acquired the new Star Trek Adventures solo RPG Captain's Log from Modiphius Entertainment. This is a roleplaying game that contains a streamlined set of rules from the full Star Trek Adventures RPG (which I blogged about during the playtest and when it came out here, here, and here) and directions on how to run yourself through solo adventures.How does a solo roleplaying game

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-72630786513210754152021-12-31T12:30:00.004-08:002021-12-31T12:30:48.761-08:00

The 2021 Book ListBeen a crazy year, marked with some health problems. Oddly enough, spending so much of the year bedridden and immobile has seemed to have a negative impact on my ability to focus on reading. My intake of audiobooks has drastically dropped off, as I've been listening a lot more to podcasts over the last couple of years. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-71893139438461704702021-01-01T05:12:00.002-08:002021-01-01T05:12:55.551-08:00

The 2020 Book List Well, that's a crazy year in the record books ... and, speaking of books, here's the list of books I read this year. Ironically, everyone being locked at home meant that generally I did less reading than normal. Fewer audiobooks because there was no commuting, for example, but also even just in terms of having free time to read, I found I had less, because so many activities

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-82565300254630993832019-12-31T16:41:00.003-08:002019-12-31T16:43:00.442-08:00

The 2019 Book List In 2018, I initiated a plan to not read any of my "default" authors (white heterosexual males, which were by far the bulk of my reading library). I called this "Don't read white (males) after Labor Day." So up through Labor Day this year, I was specifically focusing on reading minority or female authors. During that period, I'm listing what I can tell of the identity of the

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-38329182823750088902019-01-01T15:57:00.000-08:002019-01-30T04:58:11.603-08:00

The 2018 Book List Ones and Zeroes by Dan Wells Children of the Divide by Patrick S. Tomlinson The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday The Higgs Boson and Beyond by Sean Carroll (The Great Courses) The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World by Bart Ehrman Republic, Lost: Version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig The

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-57463121430484168982018-09-03T12:06:00.002-07:002018-09-03T12:06:36.806-07:00

Regardless of political affiliation or inclination, I sincerely wish that we could have a national book club where everyone was encouraged to read Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. It took me the better part of the summer to get through it. This is not because of any flaw in the book

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-27571059793433236832018-01-01T11:38:00.001-08:002018-01-01T11:38:16.545-08:00

End of the year, so time for my annual accounting of books consumed for 2017! The 2017 Book List The Speech by Bernie Sanders Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal Over Your Dead Body by Dan Wells The Dictator's Handbook by Alastair Smith & Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Witch: A Tale of Terror by Charles McKay (read by Sam Harris) Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin Capital in the

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-75024505884006186212017-01-17T05:58:00.001-08:002017-01-17T09:26:35.959-08:00

This morning I called Indiana Senator Todd Young. I was kicked to voicemail, presumably with the staff overburdened with calls related to things that came up over the weekend. Young is on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions, so I wanted to speak with him regarding the confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Not able to get through, I left

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-25124063401974753512016-12-31T10:00:00.000-08:002016-12-31T10:00:05.852-08:00

End of the year, so time for my annual accounting of books consumed for 2016! The 2016 Book List Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall This Will Make You Smarter by John Brockman The Koran A Night of Blacker Darkness by Dan Wells Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-13646616814630553902016-11-09T08:24:00.000-08:002016-11-09T08:49:02.298-08:00

There has possibly been no political contest in my living history that I have felt more strongly about than this one, so the result that Donald Trump has been elected as President is really devastating. These aren't quite my first thoughts on this, because I had to get up, see my kids off to school, take my youngest to a doctor's appointment ... you know, the stuff of living that actually

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-63952093044578686982016-02-19T06:32:00.003-08:002016-02-19T06:32:52.793-08:00

In this February 16 interview, Indiana Senator Dan Coats said that he didn't believe President Barack Obama should nominate a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia. Here is the point he made, in particular: “I think that ought to be put to the American people and let them decide who they want to be their president and who they want to nominate,” Coats said. “But at that point, that person

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-66038434644286494402015-12-31T08:00:00.000-08:002016-01-04T07:32:13.787-08:00

End of the year, so time for my annual accounting of books consumed for 2015! The 2015 Book List Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines (reread) The Martian by Andy Weir Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell Codex Born by Jim C. Hines (reread) How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-49456951462203218092015-10-15T20:49:00.002-07:002015-10-15T20:52:21.406-07:00

The Feynman family with the family van. From its first joke, CBS' The Big Bang Theory has proven adept at mixing humor and science. Many of the science jokes hinge on comprehending the subtleties of quantum physics in the Shrodinger's cat thought experiment (or making a self-aware lack of comprehension), but some are not about scientific concepts themselves, but jokes that focus on the

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-59695535747813852772015-04-02T08:36:00.000-07:002015-04-02T08:58:28.182-07:00

I still think the Catholics should go with this more-inspiring sigil for the modern age. Back in 2012, well before it occurred to me that a corporation could be said to have religious beliefs, I commented on the idea of "corporate personhood."  I focused on this idea at length in that post, but recent events have made it worth looking at again. Indiana RFRA and Corporations In

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-2921929314121879252014-12-31T05:44:00.000-08:002015-01-01T13:53:14.550-08:00

End of the year, so time for my annual accounting of books consumed. (Out of deference to my lovely wife, I will not say "books read," because nearly half were in audiobook format.) Here are the books I consumed in 2014. The 2014 Book List The Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles de Lint The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided Over Religion and Politics by Jonathan Haidt The Republican

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-12769283253718616702014-09-11T08:25:00.002-07:002014-09-11T08:25:38.340-07:00

"Symbols of Religions". Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Several recent atheist commentators have rightly condemned ISIS, citing it as an example of religion gone horribly wrong. But then they go further, using the example of ISIS to condemn religion as a whole. Is this a valid move? If not, then why not? And what clues, if any, does the

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-90967173835788062302014-09-07T19:18:00.001-07:002014-09-08T10:37:06.822-07:00

First, let me say that I've done this before, back in 2008, so here's a link to that list (although please ignore all of the begging to join BookWise ... it was a clever book-oriented multi-level marketing system which, sadly, did not survive the digital age). As you can see, the lists are a bit different. In some cases, I've found other books by the same authors which resonate on those

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-69975549056563064842014-08-25T19:26:00.000-07:002014-08-26T08:27:04.684-07:00

Buy at Amazon So, I was reading some philosophy tonight. I finished David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which - at the end of a book with no abstract reasoning of quantity or number or really any experimental reasoning - has the following as the final lines: If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-70572817679067388282014-08-13T10:35:00.000-07:002014-08-13T11:20:16.807-07:00

So this may become a thing. I really enjoyed the mental exercise of pulling together my pitch for Ghostbusters III, and the buzz on the internet recently about the possibility of an Aquaman movie (see here, here, and here) has gotten my creative juices flowing. They have two different writers developing scripts, though, and it's very easy to see how an Aquaman movie could go wrong. I have a

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-92002707862818026772014-08-06T07:22:00.000-07:002014-08-06T07:42:11.152-07:00

Okay, I am really sick and tired of reboots. I've reached my limit, and the idea that there might be a reboot of the classic Ghostbusters is enough to push me over the edge. For a while, there have been rumors of another sequel that introduced a new team. This, however, is different. It's a reboot. And, in fact, the rumors are of a reboot with an all-female team, which seems a bit gratuitous.

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-50256724004126830312014-07-03T14:13:00.001-07:002014-07-03T14:20:09.548-07:00

A couple of years ago, I posted a list of 5 patriotic shows for Independence Day. Here's another 5 to add onto that list: Johnny Tremain (Amazon) This film is based on a classic children's novel, about a young boy who gets swept up in the American revolution. One thing I really enjoyed about this film as a boy was that it did an excellent job of depicting the day-to-day life of the

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-9468392856787331242014-06-03T12:26:00.000-07:002014-06-03T13:40:50.647-07:00

Buy at Amazon Several months ago, I submitted a piece to an essay competition put forth by neuroscientist, author, and atheist moral philosopher Sam Harris. Motivated by the anniversary of his publication of The Moral Landscape, Harris called out a challenge to readers to refute his argument. The winner would receive $200 and, if successful in convincing Harris he was wrong, would receive $

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-40766240822192912992014-04-30T07:24:00.003-07:002014-04-30T07:24:42.990-07:00

I've been told that this quote isn't authentic, but I like it anyway. There is another movement afoot to end "net neutrality." What this means is that internet service providers (ISPs) would be able to charge money not only to the person who is getting the internet access, but also to the people who are providing the content. The argument for this seems, on the surface, perfectly reasonable.

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3049495.post-88110933244225858682014-02-20T03:33:00.004-08:002014-02-20T04:06:38.351-08:00

In a recent The New York Times interview, philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga goes through an involved discussion about how evolution doesn't guarantee that our beliefs are true. This is absolutely a valid concern ... and, in fact, I know of no atheist who doesn't recognize the fallibility of our inherent beliefs and thought processes. In fact, some of the strongest arguments in favor of a

azjauthorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07258812893943159574noreply@blogger.com0