For those of you who have been living under a rock, a quick explanation. A gateway drug is a drug which is known to lead to the use of “harder”, more damaging and addictive drugs. Gateway drugs are often seen as innocuous in and of themselves and it’s government flacks we need to tell us that they’re actually dangerous gateways to worse substances. When it’s convenient, of course, for those governments. They don’t get antsy about all gateway drugs, of course. Some are openly tolerated. Like coffee, for instance. No kidding. The stats are kind of surprising, really: Girls and …

So it seems that since the release of the film The Day After Tomorrow, everything in the literati media (such as what you find on Arts & Letters Daily) is saying the film is alarmist… and yet, other environment-related pieces are also showing up in somewhat higher proportions. I’m not sure what I think about “alarmism” as a political strategy. As with everything, there are pros and cons that are difficult to weigh. I guess the thing we need to do is think about what’s at stake, and what are the probable (and possible) consequences of our strategies.

Here’s a piece on the obesity epidemic in America: its causes, and possible solutions.

There’s a weird but interesting expedition being documented over at a page calledTravel Afghanistan. A small proportion of Afghan children have a distinctively European appearance, sometimes blonde or red-haired, quite different from the dark Asian looks of most Afghans. Western explorers have always wondered whether they might be descended from the Greek soldiers in Alexander’s army whom we know settled in Asia. The Afghans themselves are proud of this tradition: Marco Polo records that in the thirteenth century the Kings of Badakshan (the remote eastern part of Afghanistan that abuts China) claimed descent from the Greek conqueror. These people may …

A review of Brian Green’s latest physics popularization by Freeman J. Dyson. I have a book in my bookshelf waiting for me to read, by this Green guy. Hm. I wish I had more books by Dyson, actually. He’s fascinating. Especially The Sun, The Genome, and the Internet, which I think is the title of one of his monographs. Ah, yes, it is. My old online acquaintance Stefan sent me a tape of the title lecture of this book and I loved it dearly. Wow, Stefan’s written a lot of reviews over at Amazon.

Right now I’m reading a great book on consciousness that was sent to me by my Texan friends, I think it was specifically Julia though I can’t be sure, the list of who sent what is buried deep in my bookcase. The book is not exactly recent, but good: Merlin Donald‘s A Mind So Rare (see a review here, and another here, and one last, slightly more critical, one here). In it Donald sets out to debunk some of the kinds of consciousnessn theorizing that’ve been advanced by people like Dennet (see a recent interview with old Dennet here) and …

A certain self-named Hot Abercrombie Chick has been constructing arguments about the existence of God. While she may be hot and may be a philosophy major, her essay has generated far too many comments relative to the content. Not to be nasty… it’s a nice attempt but even a theist ought to be embarrassed at such a simplistic conception of “it all”. One note from the world of physics that might help clear up things: the anthropic cosmological principle forwarded by, among others, Frank J. Tipler (before he went crazy—here’s a review of that insanity) claims that the structure of …

Here’s a cool gizmo that Budaechigae posted about recently: a Newsmap app online that builds maps of the most-focused-on news items that have passed through the Google aggregator. This, it seems to me, is how we will be looking at the news everyday in twenty years, though by then I’m sure we’ll be able to weigh it by keyword references, topics, poltical slant, journos we like, and so on. That’s gonna be a fascinating time.

Everyone should go look at the images and news at this site every once in a while. I don’t much care about strange sounds being heard on the space station but I do think that seeing images of space is about the closest thing we can have to that old story of the Romantic Era when poets looked at waterfalls and clouds and had intimations of the eternal, and felt holy terror at the immensity of nature and the tininess of themselves. This image, by the way, is of Venus in Pleiades. I remember seeing Pleiades, also known as the …