Posts from ‘April, 2008’

I’ve finished the entire Frank Herbert original Dune series back-to-back, pacing myself out towards the end (since I realised I completed Pullman’s His Dark Materials a tad too quickly, by which time it was too late). Nothing beats the thrill of a virgin read.
After that, I picked up a couple of others and put [...]

What an imperceptive lot we are. Surrounded by so much, so fascinating and so real, that we do not see (hear, smell touch, taste) in nature, yet so gullible and so seduced by claims for novel power that we mistake the tricks of mediocre magicians for glimpses of a psychic world beyond our ken. The [...]

Oriental Whip

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~ H. P. Lovecraft

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
The experience of overcoming fear [...]

Know those arcade shooter games where you’re supposed to rescue hostages and you have your crosshairs hovering over innocent victims?
Us camera-trotting types may have to echo their cry.
I’m a bit late on this one - trust the budak to have spotted this article in BBC when I missed it. I’m not in London right [...]

*hollow echos*
*stirring within*
Yes… I’m uhh… alive.

Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the veridical status of their attempts to understand the world - ranging from conjectures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systematically confirmed through many interrogations of how the world works. But even laws of Nature are [...]

Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought educational.
~ Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune, book IV of the Dune Chronicles