While I thought that the PK Dick essay/lecture was great, Kelly's own post seems a bit rambling and vague. I understand that it's just a short blog entry, but would he care to give any examples to back up those sweeping proclamations of our great identity crisis?

I understand the basic PoMo Transhuman yadda yadda, and I think that there's some validity there. Clearly, technology is allowing us to extend our abilities into new and unexplored realms of experience. But is this going to lead to any kind of massive upheaval of human identity?

The human sense of self has already been "extended" by language, fire, agriculture, cities, commerce, astronomy, medicine, electricity, automobiles, mass communication, computers, biotechnology and the Internet, to say nothing of guns, drugs and religion. All of these things have redefined the way that individuals interact with the "outside" world, but we've always assimilated new technology into our bag of tricks with surprisingly little "crisis" compared to the magnitude of the change.

It seems like the claims of an identity crisis are built upon the notion that we will reach some point where our built-in sense of self-awareness just "breaks" and can no longer handle all the extensions that we've added on. I'm probably mis-characterizing Kelly's argument (such as it is), but I just don't buy that.

We're malleable critters, we are. New ideas and technologies will crop up, and these will challenge those who grew up under older ideas and technologies. But are we going to have a species-wide identity crisis? My intuition and my Magic 8-ball both say "doubtful."

-lessreal

Obviously homages to Banksy are completely unhip. But slagging on Banksy, now that's what all the cool kids are doing - get with the program, people!

I haven't actually watched the Simpsons in the last few years, though I did see the movie, which left me pretty unimpressed. If that's the direction that the series has taken, I guess I haven't missed much.

I'd be interested in knowing whether this shift in tone was an intentional response to the other animated shows that have entered the market, or if it was just a gradual loosening of the "rules," as highlighted in JoshD's comment.

There were some shifts early on in the show's development, too. It seems like the first couple seasons focused much more on developing Bart ("Everybody if you can, do the Bartman"), while later seasons started to focus more on Homer and the entire family. I guess you could consider this part of the initial "growing pains," but it also led to a show that was much funnier. The more recent shift, apparently, has made the show less funny. Is this a mid-life crisis, or the onset of senility?

Gawd, I guess that's an awful way to phrase the question to anyone actually involved in the show, but I can't think of any better way to put the recent changes in context.

And oh yes, by all means let's ask about Ralph Wiggum's dreams, because a joke can't be funny until it's been analyzed to death. In fact, I refuse to laugh at all until this issue has been resolved.

Teresa: He sure did, and to no apparent ill effect! It was an inspired evening all around...

Oh, I'm so confused. Why are all these people shopping at Ikea at 3 AM?

Also, I find the phrase "utmost shopping experience" personally offensive. Why is nobody complaining about that?

Congrats indeed!

I don't really know Saul, but I do know that he was responsible for the best damned view of a fireworks show that I've ever witnessed. You can get just about anywhere with ingenuity and a large supply of bicycle inner tubes.

I actually kind of like it, though it could probably be improved by making it less pie chart-like. Maybe hollow out the middle, make some faint notches around the perimeter to denote the hours of the clock, and it ought to work just fine.

Presented in clock form, it sticks in my mind much better than it would as a list of numbers or a timeline. Of course, given how little information there actually is to present, you could just as easily say "Weekends and evenings are busy. You could save a lot of time by buying your fake wood laminate in the off hours."

OK, so I think posting other people's phone numbers online is tacky (to say the least). But still, I couldn't resist googling the number that Boinger and Zidane posted, and uh, yikes... It brings up a whole pile of scary weirdness.

The most bizarre thing is that there is an equally racist blog dedicated entirely to hating Bill White. They call him "America's only Jewish Nazi," apparently with the implication that it's the "Jewish" part that makes him a bad person.

And of course, the reason that blog comes up in the search is that they posted White's phone number and home address in one of their entries back in June. Several of the other search results are from groups who apparently don't think that White is the "right kind" of racist, urging their readers to stalk him and his wife. They've apparently had some success in this, as there are several different addresses listed in the various posts, sometimes with indications that White has recently moved.

Perhaps this has become such a regular practice within the racist blogging community that White didn't think twice about posting all the personal data along with his hate-filled screed against the Jena 6. Naturally, "everybody else is doing it" is not a legal or moral defense, but this does seem to give some insight into the messed up minds of the people that do this kind of thing.

Shoot in the air. It makes you look like a badass, and it'll throw the others off their game. Of course, if you run the numbers, it's also your best chance at survival. But who wants to run the numbers? You don't go whipping out your TI-85 in the middle of a gun battle, dumbass...

@Dan

Bah... what are you thinking pointing us to an unreliable source like Wikipedia? Glugenwog was on the right track, and from this line of reasoning we can clearly see that the shape of the earth changes constantly throughout the month. It's round when the moon is crescent, flat when the moon is half-full, and bowl-shaped when the moon is gibbous.

This explains why Ms. Shepherd couldn't say whether the Earth was round or flat; she simply couldn't remember what phase the moon happened to be in at the time.

I have this memory lodged somewhere deep in the back of my brain (from when I used to watch TV) of the David Lynch mini-series "Wild Palms." There was this scene where it was explained that the villainous virtual reality media distributor was "diluting" the images on the discs delivered to one particular addict, so that he could only see his virtual love interest a few times before he had to go back and get another copy.

I remember thinking "but they couldn't do that - it's digital!" Yes, yes, very funny in retrospect, but apparently Lynch (or whoever penned this dark vision of 2007) had the future pegged a lot better than we thought.

But on the bright side, at least Windows DRM doesn't lead to dementia, hallucinations and death.

-lessreal

Meh.

I guess I've never really understood the whole toys-for-adults vinyl figurine thing, but this doll seems destined for the same historical dustbin as Suicide Bomber Barbie and Jihadi Kitty. They're all slightly clever ideas, but unlikely to make anyone reconsider their relationship to violence in any meaningful way.

The doll, and the comic it came from, are pretty superficial critiques of violence. There's a huge mess of conflicting ideals at play behind the various Middle-eastern conflicts, and many of these are ripe for satire, but I'm not sure how exactly one would "ironize" the act of murder itself.

Yeah, health risks, that's why I'm never going to get a chip implanted in my ass.

So this is just adding injury to insult, I guess?

Robert, I think you may be mis-interpreting the articles that you linked to. Nowhere do they claim that going vegetarian is "the single most effective way" of reducing your carbon footprint, though from the way that they frame the issue, one might very well come away with that impression. The New Scientist article makes a comparison between the carbon reductions from switching to a hybrid car and going vegetarian. These are only two of many ways to reduce your personal carbon emissions. Many people can accomplish larger reductions more easily just by improving the energy efficiency of their home, or reducing their air travel.

I agree with you on the issue of personal responsibility, but unfortunately no amount of evangelizing is going to get most people to change their habits. As long as people are able to cause environmental damage without personally feeling any repercussions, the tragedy of the commons is here to stay.

The only way that change is going to happen on a societal level is to introduce policies that modify people's incentives, so that the environmental costs are built into the costs they incur for everyday activities. So if the cost of beef or airplane fuel is increased to include the cost of the damage that they'll produce by contributing to climate change, people will reduce their consumption.

Some people think it should be a tax, and others say cap-and-trade, but I think that the best policy option here is pretty clear. We should feed all of the top carbon emitters to the polar bears.

-lessreal