Ryan Somma's Blog, page 3
September 15, 2013
20 Years of Magic the Gathering
Friday Night Magic at Earth 383
20 years ago this month, I introduced my college friends to a new concept, the collectible card game (CCG). Magic the Gathering was instantly addictive for all of us, a game one part role-playing, one part exploration and discovery, and ten parts ingenuity. I’ll never forget when my friends confronted me after a few weeks of play, demanding, “Why did you keep this from us for so long?”
Truth is, I had just discovered Magic a few months earlier when I found a coup...
June 9, 2013
Bird Feeders, Pornography, and Other Evolutionary Traps
“Examples of animals exhibiting maladaptive responses to evolutionary novel objects and becoming trapped. (A) A Cuban tree frog (Osteopilus septentrionalis) ingesting a decorative light that mimics the bioluminescent qualities of its insect prey. (B) A black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) killed by the ingestion of small, often colorful, floating garbage that mimics food items. (C) A giant jewel beetle (Julodimorpha bakewelli) attempting to mate with a beer bottle that produces super...
June 3, 2013
Put Your Commas On the Left, Dink-Butt
How Programmers See Each Other
I watch a lot of holy wars with a bemused air of superiority. Programming languages and operating systems are like musical instruments, put them in the right hands and beautiful music will come out no matter the tool or environment. So I don’t care if you’re a Mac/Windows/Linux fanboy or a Ruby/PHP/C++/Python zealot. But there is one thing that really really bugs me and it seriously irritates me that it’s not a holy war (yet):
PUT YOUR COMMAS ON THE LEFT!!!
Serious...
Put Your Commas On the Left Dink-Butt
How Programmers See Each Other
I watch a lot of holy wars with a bemused air of superiority. Programming languages and operating systems are like musical instruments, put them in the right hands and beautiful music will come out no matter the tool or environment. So I don’t care if you’re a Mac/Windows/Linux fanboy or a Ruby/PHP/C++/Python zealot. But there is one thing that really really bugs me and it seriously irritates me that it’s not a holy war (yet):
PUT YOUR COMMAS ON THE LEFT!!!
Serious...
May 27, 2013
Mass Effect as Great Science Fiction
Cerberus
For 106 hours (24 ME1, 33 ME2, 59 ME3) over the last six months, I have been exploring the epic science fiction worlds of Mass Effect (ME). I could have easily only spent 60 hours there, since that’s enough time to get through the game, but I was genuinely engaged with the universe and eager to explore every little detail. I’m not a hardcore video game player, but occasionally, I come across one that I simply cannot pass up.
Tali
First there was the production values. A game featuring a...
May 5, 2013
Is Web Design All About Hacking or Kludging?
So I decided to spend the weekend redesigning/modernizing my lifetime project, a citation-management tool memexplex, because the site is old and ugly looking and I wanted to play with some of the shiny new toys in CSS:
The 00s Called, They Want Their Website Design Back
So hundreds googlings and SOings and two sugar-driven all-nighter’s later, I’ve got the new “placeholder” tags in my inputs, nifty-gradient backgrounds in my divs, my inputs are modern-ish looking, and my checkboxes, buttons, an...
February 25, 2013
Article on Gun Control Published in The Humanist
March/April Humanist
My article Never a Magic Bullet: The Personal and Public Dimensions of Gun Ownership and Gun Violence is appearing in the March/April edition of the Humanist. Much of the article is an appeal for rational, civil discourse on the subject, but I did have one dimension where I have a strong opinion. Not surprisingly, it has to do with scientific integrity:
In 1996, Congress stripped the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of funding for research that “may b...
February 3, 2013
In Defense of “The Big Bang Theory”
Sheldon Fashion
I love love love The Big Bang Theory (BBT). I love the intelligent science references, the highly-debatable geek-culture references, and the cameos only a nerd would enjoy. Most of all, the portrayal of idiosyncratic individuals who bare an incredible resemblance to people I’ve had to deal with for decades working in IT and hanging out at Cons and Comic shops.
So it comes as a shock to me that there is a lot of hate for BBT in geek culture. Many geeks seem to loathe the way the...
December 1, 2012
Carnival of Evolution #54: A Walkabout Mount Improbable
border:2px solid;
border-radius:25px;
padding:15px;
font-family: Verdana;
font-size: 16px;
line-height: 25px;}
Mount Ranier Panorama
Credit: Tyler Foote
I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday dinosaur this Thanksgiving, and thank you joining me in this delightful excursion out into the wide wonderful world of ideas and expressions in evolution.
Chronicle Canyon
History in the layers and controversies in the stories they tell.
How did we eradicate Malaria in the United States? A thought-...
August 26, 2012
The Science of Mindfulness Meditation and Practice for the Rational Skeptic
Jump to:
The Science Fiction of Meditation
Mindfulness Meditation
Science of Mindfulness Meditation
Experimentally-Observed Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation
How to Meditate
References
The Science Fiction of Meditation
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was a deeply flawed movie on many levels, but there was one moment in the film that I thought was brilliant. The Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn is in the heat of a duel with the Sith lord Darth Maul, when a force field comes in between them, momentarily pausing...
