If you haven’t had it, and want to know the bitterness-free, rich, gorgeous taste of actually fresh-roasted coffee, there are probably a few places in Seoul to pick up some beans roasted recently. The place I know is called Momo, and it’s a coffee shop (not a Himalayan dumpling shop, much as I may long for one of those) near Shindorim station. The beans aren’t cheap, but they’re also good, so I’d say it’s worth it. To get to Momo (or it might be called Momo’s, I can’t quite recall) go out the front of the Technomart building. Turn right …
Category: GENERAL
The Microme Century
I’ve been thinking for years that SF’s love affair with nanotech was really just a symptom of a disease afflicting both physicists and technocrats in general: microorganism envy, or rather, the envy of those who work with the fascinating microworlds of biology. Well, this article has some interesting suggestions about how the growing realization of just how much of a role bacteria play in human life, and the biosphere generally. Bacteria-mediated and bacteria-friendly surgery. The human Microme project. The mental health effects of bacteria in yogurt. This is definitely an article to check out for anyone who wants some idea …
Jane Goodall Retrospective
It’s a funny coincidence that this should be up now, since I’m currently reading Jane Goodall’s book Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating–a book I received as a present some time ago, and only got to now–but I noticed on Boing-Boing’s Twitter feed regarding a link to a retrospective on her career and discoveries–titled “Being Jane Goodall”–at National Geographic, as well as a lovely cache of the photos contributed by her to the magazine. Both the article and the photos are worth your time, so go and check them out. The thing that’s fascinating to me about the …
More Books on Belgian Beer (and More)
I mentioned reading Jeff Sparrow’s Wild Brews a while back, and noted that I wanted to read about the other Belgian styles of beer, covered in other books in the same series. Well, I wish I’d gotten to them sooner, but I have finally gotten to Stan Hieronymous’ famous Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them, and Phil Markowski’s Farmhouse Ales: Culture and Craftsmanship in the Belgian Tradition. Both books are really good, though the latter is slimmer than the former. I don’t have a great deal to say about them, in part …
Phoneless Till Friday (Probably)
The thing I’m going to complain about isn’t that the KT shop gave me a note with the address for the service center, but didn’t write the name of the service center (so it was impossible to find and I went to the wrong place, because guess what? All Apple products except iPhones are serviced at one place, and iPhones are serviced at the other). It’s not that my employer, when offering an iPhone 4 to each professor on tenure track, failed to ask (though when I asked, I was told it had been cleared, of course) whether non-Koreans could …
Whew!
Well, I’ve been home for about 48 hours now, but it was a busy couple of days. Tuesday I had a full day of classes, well, from noon to 7pm; and today, I had an empty day but had some things to do, especially getting my ankle looked at. Oh, yes, sprinting across the Sydney airport on Monday morning, as well as the cold weather in Melbourne, resulted in a recurrence of the tendinitis in my left ankle. Which sucks. But it’s getting better, with hot packs and pills and so on. I’ve written a few posts that I’ll be …
Immortality?
The Maverick Philosopher discusses the fact that Christopher Hitchens, who is not doing so well, also has not recanted his atheism. Valicella writes: The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. “Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” But this of course …
Net Connected Ganked…
So if you’re trying to get hold of me, today’s a bad day. Sorry!
The Trickiness of Explaining Pregnancy Denial and Infanticide
UPDATE (5 Aug 2010): Hat tip to David Garnier, whose comment got gobbled up by the ether monsters, but who pointed me to the admission of the woman in the case described, who says it actually isn’t pregnancy denial. Nope, she just doesn’t like doctors. (And that’s why she committed infanticide a bunch of times? Crikey!) ORIGINAL POST: Robert Koehler twittered this article: The question is as horrifying as it is important to ask: Why are a rising number of French women killing their newborn babies? Finding the answer has become a matter of urgency following the discovery on Wednesday …
Woo! Woo! I am the Woo-rus!
The one thing that will always, always make someone less intimidating is when you realize they’ve been seduced by woo. I don’t mean, like, “The Woo of Lost” as a recent essay by Adam Roberts is titled. I mean full-on Deepak Chopra, Derrick Jensen, Shakti Gawain, Shambhala publications woo. The obvious stuff, when you realize someone is woo-sceptible. (Disclosure: I do, myself, own a couple of Shambhala books: both are related to Buddhism, one of them a present from a friend in high school — which is in some box in Canada, I think — and the other primarily about Buddhism …