Author Archive

Nukes or Keys

Kateryna from Odessa builds art out of bits of polished sea glass: everything from beetles to jewelry cases to horned human skulls. I don’t know her, exactly. We’ve never met. But she’s a fan, and when I visited Ukraine a few years back she sent me one of her creations—a little stained-glass egg—via a friend […]

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A Plethora of Pictures

Yeah, I’ve been delinquent for a while now. It’s partly because things that pay generally get higher priority than things that don’t. It’s partly because writing my preferred sort of post (crunchy science or science-related politics) takes longer to research and write than the easier fiblets or tub-thumpery. It’s partly because the story I most […]

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Defective.

Ancient. Capricious. Vengeful. They lived among the stars and they hurled firebolts that would destroy any world they touched. We could see their tracks, once we knew how to look: faint wisps of ionized hydrogen out in the Oort, barely detectable after cooling for a dozen years; warmer footprints smoldering in the Kuiper and inside […]

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COP/out

“Governments should be afraid of their people”—Alan Moore It was our “last chance to act”, according to Sheldon Whitehouse of the Democratic Party. The “last best hope for the world”, according to John Kerry. Boris Johnson invoked James Bond doomsday machines, declared it “one minute to midnight”, and warned that “If we don’t act now […]

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The Guts of God (or, Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Lately)

Someone is waiting for me outside my building. He calls me by name; I have never seen him before. He begs me to share my wisdom, and does not believe me when I tell him I have none to offer. I am part of the overmind, he insists. I am connected to the Divine, I’ve […]

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Pimpage: Me and Neill on The Bridge.

Turns out I’ve made a fair number of podcast/interview appearances over the past year or so, across a bunch of jurisdictions all the way from Russia to the Free Republic of Guelph. Never really pimped them because A) I was raised by Baptists, B) I generally cringe when people thump their own tubs too loud, […]

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John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: or, The New Individualism

Sometimes you run into a concept that completely rewires your outlook. It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker: “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is, as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that […]

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Fucking Pirates: A Teeny, Tiny Call to Arms

You may have already seen this on Facebook, but if you’ve wisely sworn off that platform I’ll repeat it here: I have a favor to ask any US Amazon customers out there. Would you mind going over here and leaving a reader review pointing out that this is a pirated edition, unauthorized by the author, […]

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A Blade In Our Bed, a Knife in the Night.

It’s bright and sunny this morning. The BUG and I joke and feed the cats. I’m sitting on the front porch as I type this. BOG is curled up at my feet. It’s hard to believe that just a few hours ago, I was creeping around the back of our house in the darkness, trying-to-find/hoping-not-to-find […]

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Family Values: or, Lipsticking the Pig.

From an upcoming lecture on Architecture and Design: This guy I know wanted to get his kids vaccinated against Covid. Got a special deal: took them across the border to Scarborough, handed them special forms that said they worked for a company called—I kid you not—”Matrix”; and told them that if anyone asked about their […]

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