Intellectually, I recognize that Steampunk for the most part has no more of a ridiculous premise than most other sf and certainly not more so than fantasy, and yet I can’t stand steampunk novels.

It does not make sense, like most preferences, and yet I’ve never been able to do more than tolerate any steampunk tale.

Something about the typical forced whimsy and my general distaste for historical revisionism I think.

History made: Army Ranger School to graduate its first female students ever.

Hoo-fucking-ah!

I know, I know, it’s déclassé to support even peripherally the military-industrial killing machine.

But I lived that life for five years — a large chunk of my adult life. I’m no longer that person, but that person helped make me.

I tried to get into Ranger school after becoming a paratrooper, but it was a no-go. I didn’t have the right MOS so they would not let me in no matter how I pleaded.

Still ended up road-marching a buncha Rangers into the dust more than a few times.

Such is life.

But good job. That is a hard, hard school and anyone graduating from it is impressive.

The denial of biological imperatives and genetic causes in and of human nature by both sides of the political aisle precludes much understanding of why humans are the way they are.

Extreme biological determinism is obviously ridiculous. But there is a reason humans don’t roost in trees compulsively, and why they tend to find certain other types of humans attractive — and, guess what, it has very little to do with acculturation.

That people have and might get the wrong idea about certain areas is not reason enough to avoid entire fields, in my view.

If the human species is to survive we will likely have to modify ourselves in significant ways.

Understanding exactly what to modify and why will be of extreme importance. Might as well get started on that, as scary as it might seem.

What do you do when Ann Coulter is 95% correct?

“[Feminism is] totally a class thing. Feminism is about upper-middle class women who went to Smith or Wellesley and are supported by their husbands… they [don’t care] about people who work at Walmart,” Coulter says.

That’s a valid critique. There is no lie there, at least about mainstream, Amanda  Marcotte-style feminism, which is almost all visible feminism.

I rant about this frequently. I can’t seem to help it.

Every time I see science books mentioned, I see praise for Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Why? I just can’t understand it.

The book is littered with second-rate ideas told in third-rate prose. And it’s like a billion pages and it could’ve been 200 or less. But Barbara from Goodreads said it best.

This book told me something about intelligence – the smartest thing to do is to avoid this book’s overly lengthy babblings of a self-important graduate student who is way too impressed with himself. It took this guy over 700 pages to illustrate by analogy his not-particularly novel theory….

Good on you, Barbara. You summed up Hofstadter’s picayune claptrap very well.

If you like, I can recommend a lot better books than GEB that don’t condescend to the reader, are based in more solid science, and aren’t so goddamn annoying.

Only read GEB if you have a whole lot of time to waste or it’s the only book within 500 miles.

Otherwise, tear the pages out and do something useful with them. They can make good kindling or can line a bird cage, or even soak up minor spills.

Any list like this that doesn’t have Deb Talan on it is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Hey, I remember Socket 7!

Used to love that because you could pop just about any CPU in there depending on your budget. It’d take $40 CPUs or $800 CPUs. Though the $40 CPUs were as so slow it was quicker to use a pen and paper.

Built a lot of machines with good ol’ Socket 7.

Oh my fucking god, what the hell is this?

Kirk writes, “This weekend we upgraded my 14-year-old son’s laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Today I got a creepy-ass email from Microsoft titled ‘Weekly activity report for [my kid]’, including which websites he’s visited, how many hours per day he’s used it, and how many minutes he used each of his favorite apps.”

Seriously, is Windows 10 some sort of practical joke? Is this a real OS, or did Microsoft spend a few billion to troll us all for fun?

And by the way, you can disable the “feature,” but I betcha the data will all still get sent to Microsoft.

All I have to say is that if you use Windows 10, there is something wrong with your brain.

It simply is not possible to make the OS secure. It cannot be done. It is a huge risk to you and to any company who runs it.

Can it even legally be run in a HIPAA or PCI DSS regulated environment? I don’t think so.