Director and/or star of many of the greatest films ever made including The Great Dictator (2:05:16) [Globe scene and the eternally goosebump providing Final speech ], The Immigrant (20:01), The Gold Rush (1:11:49), City Lights(1:22:40), Modern Times (1:27:01), and Monsieur Verdoux (1:59:03), Charlie Chaplin’s movies have entered the public domain in most countries. Below the fold is an annotated list of all 82 of his official short and feature films in chronological order, as well as several more, with links to where you can watch them; it’s not like you had work to do right?
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series of one hour shows written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, that was aired at the tail end of 1980 and was – at the time – the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. It is best introduced by an audio excerpt of one of his books, The Pale Blue Dot,
Inside is a complete annotated collection of the series.
I was at sailing camp on the West River of the Chesapeake Bay almost a decade ago and he was the more experienced of the instructors. He was a short but large man with thick leathery skin and hard blue eyes with a way of asking for things in such a way as they’d get done and teaching skills in such a way as they were learned. The moment he walked onto a boat no one called him Jack any more, he was Skipper, and it was just so natural to call him that. So, one day towards the end of our trip around the bay at a campfire, he tells us this story of how he learned not to sail.
When English interpretations of the New Testament talk about ‘sexual immorality’ they are really translating the Greek word porneia (πορνεία), it’s used almost every time the topic of sex comes up and often when talking about the worst sins in general. If you can really grok what Paul was talking about as he uses the root for the word over and over again (it appears 32 times in the New Testament) then the rest falls into place. Now porneia has always been translated into Latin as fornication, while being understood by many conservatives to just be a 1:1 stand in for ‘any sexual expression not between husband and wife’. However, Porneia in post-classical Koine Greek did not mean generic sexual sin, or even sex outside of marriage, at all exactly and neither did fornication in actual Latin. The truth, like in many things, is a little bit more complicated and a lot more interesting
When English interpretations of the New Testament talk about ‘sexual immorality’ they are really translating the Greek word porneia (πορνεία), it’s used almost every time the topic of sex comes up and often when talking about the worst sins in general. If you can really grok what Paul was talking about as he uses the root for the word over and over again (it appears 32 times in the New Testament) then the rest falls into place. Now porneia has always been translated into Latin as fornication, while being understood by many conservatives to just be a 1:1 stand in for ‘any sexual expression not between husband and wife’. However, Porneia in post-classical Corinthian Greek did not mean generic sexual sin, or even sex outside of marriage, at all exactly and neither did fornication in actual Latin. The truth, like in many things, is a little bit more complicated and a lot more interesting
This is a trailer for The Master, an awesome movie about a WWII sailor who returns home to found a new religion inspired by the story of Scientology, but I wanted to mention something neat that you might not have noticed,
The torpedo that Freddie Quell was depicted drinking from looks an awful lot like a Mark 14 torpedo, which would have meant that the fuel he would have been drinking was methanol.
When I was in college, I had this very good friend who is generally pretty awkward, though in a wonderfully sincere and good natured way, and who occasionally did profoundly bizarre things. The craziest involved a can of beef stew and his misapplied education as a talented physics major.
If there is a God of creation that went around designing the genomes of all of the living things on Earth, they are the sloppiest, most frustrating, terrible programmer you could possibly imagine. The Intelligent Design proponents are particularly frustrating to me as a biologist having seen how fundamentally unintelligent the design of living critters actually is when you get down to the real moving parts. At least it is designed according to a sort of logic so fundamentally alien to our own that by any human standard we couldn’t help but call it stupid. Looking at life through the lens of Max Delbrück’s slowly fulfilled dream of a science of molecular genetics to replace the stamp collecting of Drosophila genetics1, the organization of information, regulation, and function in genomes makes precious little intuitive sense in terms of human logic. When you think about it; silly things like fundamentally unrelated systems being piled on top of each other such that one can’t be manipulated without messing up the other – necessitating otherwise functionless patches to the paired system whenever the other is modified, or Rube Goldberg-esque fragile systems of regulation that respond to all kinds of wrong stimuli, or systems of global regulation that are pretty analogous to reading the same giant program in either Python or C++ to produce one of two desired global results, or the kinds of systems that you can just tell are 99.9% amateur patch jobs are really what you would expect from systems designed exclusively by the entropic trial and error of evolution.
If you guys remember all of the big genome sequencing projects of the 90s and the early aughts, they’ve been continuing and the amount of raw data they have been giving back to us has exponentially accelerated. However, those of us trying to understand the biological realities of what all of those sequences actually mean were very quickly left behind and have been falling further and further behind as the advance of sequencing technology accelerates faster than we could ever hope to keep up with. The central problem is that while it turns out that we can get computers to do our pipetting for us if we pay engineers enough – we can’t get computers to do our thinking for us. Like mathematicians with some of the fanciest calculators imaginable, we can get the tools NCBI gives us to show us amazing things in amazing ways, but they can’t tell us what it all means. For the genomes we get to make any kind of sense a human being has to abstract meaning from it and communicate that meaning in understandable language – and there is no way around that limitation – there will only ever be ways to optimize it. This is really what synthetic biology is trying to do from its own weird and attractive but easily deceptively simplistic perspective.
(2:05:16) [Globe scene 
The Sinful Scientist 
