Christopher Columbus fills the New World natives with fear and awe by predicting a lunar eclipse in 1504. Over at Thomas Ligotti Online, someone has created a discussion thread that asks whether people believe in the paranormal. This has spawned an interesting conversation. It has also prodded me to reflect on the very terms of…
Tag: Science
Teeming Links – June 20, 2014
Pandemic plague? Nuclear holocaust? Lethal asteroid strike? No worries: in case of planetary disaster, plans are afoot to use the moon as off-planet storage for the religious, cultural, and even genetic trappings of humanity. Meanwhile, back here on earth, philosopher Mary Midgely (currently 94 years old) warns of impending catastrophe in a culture of scientism…
‘Mummies around the World’ now available for preorder
I’m pleased to announce that my mummy encyclopedia is now available for preorder from the publisher, and also from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere. The scheduled publication date is November 30. From the official publisher’s description: Perfect for school and public libraries, this is the only reference book to combine pop culture with science…
Life guidance from Edward O. Wilson: ‘Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression’
Edward O. Wilson, 2003 Edward O. Wilson is of course most famous as the seminal thinker, author, scientist, and figure in the field of sociobiology, which he defined in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis as the “systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.” Although there are many valid criticisms to…
Teeming Links – April 18, 2014
Washington, DC as a corrupt inferno of reality distortion (WARNING: Reading this may make you profoundly ill): “The resulting offspring of this confluence of industry, politics, and pop-culture has produced a wide range of hybrid permutations of all three partners: the celebrity operative (Carville-Matalin, Stephanopoulos), the cable news partisanship industry (Fox, MSNBC), the Hollywood revisionist/fictional…
To Cleanse the Doors of Conception: Psychic Dreams, Scientific Monsters, and Transcendent Realities
Dream researcher, Teeming Brain friend, and future Teeming Brain contributor Ryan Hurd — who has spoken about dreams, consciousness, sleep paralysis, and related matters at Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley, the Rhine Center, and elsewhere — recently shared an account of an apparently precognitive dream that he personally experienced. As I was reading through it, in…
Anomalies, Materialism, and the Liberating Death of Ufology
Would the death of ufology as a materialist scientific endeavor actually constitute the liberation of an ancient and persistent anomalous human experience from an exceptionally restrictive cultural straitjacket?
Humility and Silence: Where True Science and True Spirituality Meet
It is said that we live in an age of light, but it would be truer to say that we are living in an age of twilight; here and there a luminous ray pierces through the mists of darkness, but does not light to full clearness either our reason or our hearts. Men are not…
Recommended Reading 28
This week: posthumously offered words of warning and encouragement to an America in decline from Ernest Callenbach, author of the 1975 classic Ecotopia; insightful meditations on the intrinsic value of the humanities and their inherent resistance to being explained (as in, explained away) by quantitative scientific methodologies and approaches; a 1908 essay by a French…
Recommended Reading 27
This week’s recommended reading covers Morris Berman’s diagnosis of, and prognosis for, the waning of our modern age of capitalism; the end of economic growth due to peak oil; a call from Jaron Lanier to recognize the wizard’s trick of delusion that we’re all pulling on ourselves with technology; a reflection on the soul tragedy…