Neuropath
by Scott Bakker
2008.
306 pages (with afterword).
Orion TPB.
“Only a small fraction of your brain is involved in conscious experience, which is why so much of what we do is unconscious. The bulk of your brain’s processing falls outside what you can experience; it simply doesn’t exist for your consciousness, not even as an absence. That’s why [...]
Posts filed in Speculations
Unfounded or poorly founded musings, without much hope of ever being neither verified nor falsified. I almost envy them.
Neuropath by Scott Bakker
WALL-E
As I went to see WALL-E (from now on Wall-E, as Nature abhors a shout, even though it’s supposed to be an acronym) last a couple of days ago, I was feeling highly ambiguous and thus also a bit scared. You see, my hopes for this movie were nothing short of astronomic, as just about [...]
A Plague! A Plague on Our Houses!
In my Last.fm shoutbox, I was recently asked by one of my readers to post more frequently in my blog, and seeing as your whim is my law, I bring you this: an essay of sorts about the last topic you’d expected me to write about!
One of the things you might not know [...]
Some things I suspect I believe to be true
About eighteen months ago now, I realised I’m a materialist; I believe that everything in this world is matter, that there is no such thing as spirit, that what others might perceive as “spirit” can be explained materially. And for some thirteen, fourteen months, my Christian flatmate Håvard has challenged me on this.
To him there [...]
An elitist yet fascinating hypothesis
“Medan [mannspanelet] drøftar feminiseringa av samfunnet over kaffikoppen, er ein type ung mann, som mannspanelet er kjemisk reinsa for, på full fart inn i sammfunnet. Han du ser med flagrande svart dress i Dagens Næringsliv, som raider på tysdagen, hedger på torsdagen, shorter på fredagen, snorter på laurdagen og speler poker på søndagen. Resten av [...]
This does not bode well…
I was in Molde yesterday, to have dinner with a buddy of mine from high school, and somehow at least two thirds of the four hours we spent together were spent talking about World of Warcraft, which said buddy, like so many others, had been pretty much addicted by the last couple of years. Personally, [...]
Our hope
“But we will not be around in 500 years to see how our predictions have fared; we can only hope that historians of that future time will be understanding of our inability to guess how things would turn out and why.”
— Laurie Bauer in the conclusion of the discussion of the chances of a [...]
I’m concerned for my university
I had my fifth and final exam for the term today, and unfortunately, I thought it was just like the four previous ones.
You see, based on the curriculi and the lectures in the courses I’ve been taking this fall, I’ve been expecting to be satisfied with a straight Cs. Global English had a lot of [...]
How to interpret a peculiar request
“‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his [...]
Concerning Documentaries
I just watched an Australian documentary about Mullah Krekar (whose real name is Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad), one of the founders of the militant, Kurdish, Islamist organization Ansar al Islam, and an asylum seeker in Norway. The guy whom the Americans tried to use to link Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden a couple of years [...]
Movies Galore: A Summary
It’s nearly two months since my last movie review — a review, I might add, where I was unreasonably hard on the reviewed movie, as the fact that I’m in a foul mood shouldn’t really count against it. Anyway, since then I’ve watched a lot of movies: excellent movies, great movies, good movies, mediocre movies, [...]
Red Seas Under Red Skies
Red Seas under Red Skies
by Scott Lynch.
Gollancz Fantasy 2007, 587 pages (tpb).
I think this is my first review of a sequel, but RSURS is relatively independent of The Lies of Locke Lamora, so I’ll take my chances.
The plot of RSURS is quite elegantly summed up by Locke himself, on page 554:
Why did some stupid motherfucker [...]
Hume
I was reading Oxford University Press’ ”A very short introduction to Philosophy” just the other day, and in that book I came across something that has bothered me for a day or two now.
This is a book in which the English (I presume) professor of philosophy Edward Craig attempts to present examples of philosophy and [...]
Easter Holiday
Happy Easter! Crucify! Crucify! Crucify!
Or, if you’re not into that religious stuff: Bunnies and Chickens and Eggs!
Anyway, it’s Easter Holiday again, and I’ve travelled home to my parents’ place to relax. Or, “relax” might not be the right word. Yesterday I acted as stand-in for a mule in my dad’s gardening [...]
Seriously…
… does people really believe in stuff like this?
Dear Friend,
I know that this mail will come to you as a surprise as we have never met before.
My name is Mr.Ahmed Hassan. I am the bill and exchange manager in African Development Bank.
I hope that you will not expose or betray this trust and confidence [...]
2007-03-15 — Quote of the Day
“We stood with our noses in the air and our eyes turned to the stars. ‘Imagine if there’s life out there,’ we said to each other. Because we felt so lonesome in the universe. But if we’d only lowered our eyes… if only we’d been less self-obsessed and arrogant… then maybe we’d have discovered that [...]
I am worried…
Because the rate at which my sister watches Buffy? Frighteningly fast. And unlike me, she actually has a conscience to get her out of bed in the mornings, so where my staying up extremely late during my worst Angel and Buffy addictions last spring only messed up my day rythm, her doing the same messes [...]
Religion? No, thank you. Marx? Yes, please.
I was just reading “The Right Nation“, a book about the rise of the American Right, and I came to a passage which said that American conservatives such as Ronald Reagan see the United States as a nation favored by God because of its democratic virtue, and those kinds of things, and that this is [...]
Concerning categories…
It just struck me, that the intended function of categories is to facilitate the manouverability of the blog; that if readers want to find a specific post, they only have to click the most fitting category, and search.
It also struck me that my overrzealous use of the categories might be undermining this function. Of course, [...]
Wee!
Logging on to my favourite fantasy forum today, I found two great news in one post. The news were so great that I at first had some problems accepting them as true, so I set out so dig up som news about these supposed future events — the making of two television shows, based on [...]
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