Category Archives: Amateur Philosophy

(A rap song for my little girl, Kristin.) Hey, girl, you tell me you’re not special? I’ve got your number girl, and I’m talking to you right now. Imagine that, girl. I’ve got your number. Your number out of billions … Continue reading →

Ayn Rand shook the world with her prescription for what ails it. She offered a very simple prescription, one that goes against everything we have been taught so far, from Jesus Christ to Ghandi. She wrote that selfishness is a virtue, and … Continue reading →

One of my favorite movies is now a classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by the great Stanley Kubrick. Aside from a truly visual feast that it is, the movie treats the audience to a most fascinating examination of the ephemeral nature of life. Considering … Continue reading →

In a stampede, it is best not to fight the mad crowd. Go along with the flow because there’s nothing else you can do. Be patient and don’t push around. Let the crowd itself push you along, waiting for an opportunity … Continue reading →

The great Carl Sagan noted that if we compress the history of time (from the Big Bang to the present) to a year, then Earth came along at about the 255th day of that year, and we came down from … Continue reading →

Personal Computers, especially those for game playing, have become powerful enough to render the surface of reality. "Rendering" is the process of mathematically converting an abstract world model into images projected onto the computer screen. It requires supercomputer capabilities, which … Continue reading →

Working with map editors for first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Half-Life 2 latched me on to the idea of the "surface of reality". When playing a FPS game, one is immersed in a certain reality which mimics the real … Continue reading →