John L. Taylor

177 posts

Friday Random Ten

1. B.B. King, “When Love Comes To Town”: Gotta love the King. 2. Iron & Wine, “Teeth In The Grass”: Iron and Wine is an excellent alt-folk group and this is one their most likable and vaguely menacing. 3. Smashing Pumpkins , “We Only Come Out At Night”: Simple, but incredibly catchy tune for alienated youth. 4. Neko Case, “In California”: Glorious melancholia from one of my favorite alternative country singers. 5. Jurassic 5, “Red Hot”: Jurassic 5 is a great hip-hop group, though this is not one of their best. It took me far too long (late last year) […]

My Space vs Atheism?

Today is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day and I plan to I am damned tired of My Space’s crappy design, banner ads, despicable parent company and spam, not to mention burgeoning privacy problems. If that is not enough to get you to delete your profile and salt the virtual earth, here is infuriating news from the Secular Student Alliance: Cleveland, OH.— Social networking site, MySpace.com, panders to religious intolerants by deleting atheist users, groups and content. Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find […]

Philosophy and Science Fiction

It is too long to post here, but I had an interesting disagreement over the value of science fiction as a literature of ideas over at Library Thing. In short, I think SF is a great genre for limbering ones mind, which is requisite for philosophy. Further, philosophy has some interesting overlap with SF, particularly when it come to much used and abused thought experiments. This overlap is pedagogically useful, as well as, occasionally, philosophically fruitful. A few relevant links: The SciPhi Show: A blog devoted to science fiction and philosophy. SciPhi Journal Sci Phi is the journal of Science […]

“A Study in Emerald” Online

Gaiman’s 2004 Hugo winning short story “A Study in Emerald” is free online in both pdf and mp3 formats (the latter is a reading from Gaimon himself). ASiE is a clever pastiche of Holmes and Cthulhu mythos, with extra intertextual goodness– highly recommended to anyone at this price!