femtolicious

Michael Herr’s trippy fascinating recollection of his time as a journalist during the Vietnam War - first published in the 1970s - is not about Iraq:

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it a secret history.

Nope… doesn’t sound like today at all, does it?

Arrrghh… Seriously… Doesn’t anyone in the high councils of war read??!! How does FUBAR keep crashing down? This is not ancient Peloponnesian War stuff… surely someone in the Bush Gang remembers something from their draft dodging days of yore…

Demilitarized Zone / head for the Green Zone / head up in the Ozone… So much for the Golden Age of Journalism…

Thumbs and toes way up… Terrific terrific read…

Raw footage of an interview between Oxford professor Richard Dawkins and Oxford theologian Alister McGrath that - due to time constraints - never made it into the final cut of Dawkins’ Root of All Evil? documentary.

It certainly shows Dawkins in a different light than his usual, chopped down and edited video personae. He genuinely wrestles to grasp McGrath’s worldview, rather than simply dismiss him with some logic kung fu… Its more discussion, in other words, than argument.

As for McGrath, he presents more sophisticated reasoning than the evangelical “God is true because the bible says so… which says God is true…” merry-go-round, but the core principles don’t strike me as fundamentally different from those of his more fanatical, fire-breathing soul mates. Ultimately, what remains is a view of Life that is constrained by nothing, inscrutable in its ways and means, and thus is unable to really explain anything at all.

In science, an unquestioning and unyielding faith in one’s world view - impervious to all counterargument - will mark you off as a crank… In religion, it is the job description of a prophet.

Link

Hmm… What is this? Might be interesting… Let me just click the link and… oh wait:

Article title Cognition, emotion and the cerebellum
Author Schmahmann, J. D. Caplan, D.
Journal title BRAIN
Bibliographic details 2006, VOL 129; NUMBER 2, pages 290-292
Publisher Oxford University Press
Country of publication Great Britain
ISSN 0006-8950
Language English
Pricing To buy the full text of this article you pay:
£16.00 copyright fee + service charge (from £7.65) + VAT, if applicable

…so with a VAT of 17.5 per cent… and current exchange rates… that is just shy of $60 CDN for a 2 page article!

To view research that was (probably) funded by the public, hosted on a service (British Library) funded by the public, and which the public is expected to pony up yet again to take a look…

PLoS and pro-am biohacking are poised for world domination… Putting these info-vampires out of business will just be a pleasant side-effect…

Link (thanks honeyjr!)