« Previous No. 217 Next »
Zach: "So I should buy this obviously inferior product just because everyone else uses a better one?" 2006-05-24T08:18:57Z
LameZone: "Companies need to get their heads around the idea that viral marketing campains like iDon't really do nothing more than engender bad feelings in the marketplace. You want to buy an iRiver, or a Sansa? Have a good time. Personally, I think it¹s a bad choice since you're lining yourself up with Windows Media for online music purchases, but if that's your bag, enjoy your more restrictive DRM." 2006-05-24T08:01:30Z
You can call them laupes, but I, schooled uncermoniously in Kierkegaard, call them aesthetes. 2006-05-23T23:23:46Z
Citizens to the rescue 2006-05-24T15:37:54Z
A nice little bit of citizen digging, albeit over something rather trivial, by the folks over at the Digital Spy: Big Brother forum, who've managed to dig up the the CV of the rather shady Sezer Yurtseven, one of the contestants on the show.
He claims, for instance, to have been trading on the London Stock Exchange at eighteen years old. He's currently 26 year old. The Stock Exchange trading floor closed in '86, meaning he was six years old when he purportedly traded on the Stock Exchange.
Debunk Star Wars! 2006-05-24T09:03:19Z
It is my duty to inform you all that Jar-Jar Binks does not exist. He is a figment of the imagination of George Lucas.
Scholars of galactic history are angry and dismayed that people believe in the existence of Jar-Jar Binks based on a movie called "Star Wars". There is no biological evidence for the existence of Wookies or Gungans. There are no Ewoks or Kaminoans or Hutts either.
There is no historical evidence for the existence of starships or light sabres. These are fictions masquerading as, well, fiction. We should get extremely angry about this because people might believe these fictional ideas having seen them in a format usually associated with fiction.
It is time the government put a stop to this nonsense. We need historians guarding every cinema and airport bookshop, lest anyone start believing in the existence of Gandalf or Harry Potter.
Seriously, though, what the fuck is up with these people who are spending page after page in newspapers and magazines "debunking" the novel and (apparently, rather terrible) movie, The Da Vinci Code. I haven't read it or watched it, nor do I intend to do either. I know numerous people who've read it, and their opinions are mixed about it's quality. The general consensus is simple though: "it's a potboiler".
Why aren't we seeing debunkings of other movies too? I'm sure there'd be a fantastic opportunity to debunk Mission: Impossible III or the new X-Men movie. If you think that a movie with Tom Hanks as the lead is anything but fiction, you are seriously beyond hope. If you need to point out the factual errors in a movie, you're nothing but a damn idiot.
I am a vegetarian, an atheist, like to code in Ruby and Scala (and Java, but let’s not talk about that), and noodle about with microformats and the Semantic Web.
I have an MA in philosophy from Heythrop College, University of London. My philosophical interests are in analytic metaphysics, ontology, modality, the work of Armstrong, Lewis, Kripke, Russell and Plato. I have a strange, unfulfilled interest in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I’ve been influenced by Gadamer, by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rawls and Nozick.
Musically, I like jazz fusion, soul and P-Funk. My musical nirvana would be a mixture of Beethoven, Miles Davis and George Clinton topped with a side-serving of Erykah, Jill and Angie.
I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.
