i've spent the last year and a half writing a procedural thriller. most of the feedback i've received focuses on the fact that we never get invested enough in the characters. the message came in different forms. some said i hadn't developed my characters enough, some said they weren't sympathetic en...

Here is a good article that sums up my perspective on Christianity, especially the bolded paragraph. There is no question n my mind that evolution has provided a sort of boobytrap in that it causes us to impute intentionality to all sorts of things that don’t necessarily have it, but that̵...

“LaFleur” rebooted the Season 5, kicking off a major new story arc for the show which finds our beloved castaways living among the Dharma Initiative in the 1970s. Reviews were largely very positive for the ep, though a few critics had trouble with the back-and-forth-through-time nature o...

by Latoya Peterson “Though you do add some much needed cultural diversity to an otherwise homogeneous group, your responses to [The Friendship Survey] were deeply disturbing.” —Sheldon to Rajesh, The Friendship Algorithm A few weeks ago, I discovered a new favorite show to watch. M...

Say you wanted to get up to scratch as a thinker in Theology and Film - where would you start? It’s a question I’ve been asked a few times. Back in mid 2001 I proposed a Masters level module for theology and film and what follows below is adapted from the paper I wrote in support of that...

From David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology-- Academics love Michel Foucault's argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to th...

I've been working in just intonation since my freshman year in high school, in 1975 or 76, when the music of Lou Harrison and Harry Partch first registered.  The beauty of the pure intervals was the first attraction, but soon, the whole business of organizing tones into scales and systems became an...

* Much like everything else so far, the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts are stumbling out of the gates. The administration presented Russia with a reset button, which is cute because a) they mistranslated the word “reset” for “overcharge,” (and do they really ...

Daniel Siegel: A System's View of Disintegration & Integration (He's still cute, he's still brilliant, he speaks in easy-to-remember aphorisms and he's still heartful. What's not to like?) "Integration is the linking of differentiated parts. The concept is useful for ass...

Introduction One kind of legal theory attempts to relate the mass of legal materials (cases, clauses, statutes, etc.) to a systematic set of principles.  Such theories may be normative: that is, some legal theories are frameworks for the prescriptive evaluation of legal rules.  Or the th...