Pope Francis understands that the root cause of terrorism are the inequalities caused by the history of imperialism and colonialism and perpetuated by global capitalism.

Aside from the overhyped and clickbaity headlines, one of the basic problems of popular medical journalism is that they generally elevate meta-analyses over randomized controlled trials.¹

Thinking about the last three months, it's kind of crazy how much has happened to me.

The Sci-Fi Channel had like six back-to-back episodes of the show “Andromeda”, whose concept was originally conceived by Gene Roddenberry (the creator of the original “Star Trek.”) What made me stop was that Nia Peeples[wikipedia][myspace] was a guest character on a particular episode. It turns out that Lexa Doig[wikipedia][IMDb] is a main character (in fact, the title character.) Why am I not aware of these things?

So the experiment here is to see if I can just hack Blosxom and make it read XML files instead of the standard text files it reads.

Making that familiar drive back down to San Diego, I found myself in a very sullen, sulky, and brooding mood. Maybe it’s just the fact that I have to go to work tomorrow. Back to reality, I guess. No use crying over impossibilities.

(I was thinking of the city of Lhasa this morning as I contemplated my dog, who is a Lhasa Apso-something else. I also thought of the cheery thought my sister shared with me a while ago: you know how we’re fighting wars for oil these days? She predicts that the next natural resource we’ll be fighting wars for will be water. Specifically, as the Himalayan snowpack starts to melt because of global warming, India and China will be forced into a standoff over water rights. I also think that contention over water rights will be the single most important factor driving the politics of California in the next few years. But that is neither here nor there.)

Might as well write this down while it's in my head. I'm currently just listening to a bunch of mp3s sitting on my hard drive as I prune my library after a psync mishap, but that scarcely matters.

To infinity and beyond!

The universe may not be random, but we'll never know. Our sense need noise. That's how they work—discerning between noise that is interesting and important and that which is not. The human mind can probably only handle a certain range of signal to noise, too low, and it can't discern anything, too high, and you get overwhelmed (or distortion, like pumping the input too high on an amp.)