what Dave thinks about movies, books and everything
{4.5/5} “Did I mention I also studied fencing?” The Book of Life, released in 2014 Manolo wants to be a musician but his father wants him to be a bullfighter in the family tradition. Joaquin is a soldier, like his father who died fighting a fearsome bandit. Manola and Joaquin both like Maria, who’s been away […]
{4.5/5} “Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept.” Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert, published in 1984 Fifteen hundred years after Leto II, the Tyrant, there are two […]
{5/5} “When I think of my wife, I always think of the back of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers. The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other? What will we do?” Gone […]
{4.5/5} “When the big bang happened, all the atoms in the universe, they were all smashed together into one little dot that exploded outward. So my atoms and your atoms were certainly together then, and, who knows, probably smashed together several times in the last 13.7 billion years. So my atoms have known your atoms […]
{4/5} “There is a saying in Korea. Saying something a hundred times is not as good as living it once.” Olympus Has Fallen, released in 2013 When a South Korean delegation arrives at the White House, North Korean infiltrators help their friends outside attack from the air and the ground. The President is kidnapped within […]
{4/5} “Because I never saw my mother again, she remains in absence to me. An empty space. An invisible, half remembered ghost. So even now I catch myself thinking that I’m gonna run into her some day. Like I’ll be at a stop light, and look over at the car next to me and there […]
Here’s an articulate article from National Geographic about why people doubt science. It talks about climate change, difficulties with the scientific method, and the science communication problem. Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?
Here’s a comic strip by Tom Gauld called “You’re all just jealous of my jetpack.” The comics often have a literary theme. Here are a few that I particularly enjoy: The Four Undramatic Plot Structures Dystopian Road Signs Complete Guide to Cricket, Chapter 8,435: Umpiring Signals Here’s the main page: You’re all just jealous of […]
Even though we can’t know what the future holds, we have some ideas about what’s to come. But at least some of those ideas might be wrong. Here’s a collection of counter-intuitive but plausible ideas about the future from the folks at io9, on such topis as authoritarian rule, privacy, and AI: 11 Ways The […]
{4.5/5} “Animal lovers, especially female ones, are often accused of being neurotic and unable to relate to other human beings. More often than not, those pointing the finger have never had a pet. It seems to me the universe gave us three things to make life bearable: hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of […]