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Using a cellular telephone is like standing naked in an open field with a megaphone, screaming Please kill me and take all my stuff.
Michael’s Recent Updates
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Michael Burnam-Fink
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| Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs. She wanted to remembered as an entrepreneur who changed the world, with a glowing biography of her insight and toughness by someone like Walter Isaacson. But her company was an immense fraud that is ...more | |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
rated a book it was amazing
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| I'm always a little skeptical when a literary prodigy does genre fiction. Science fiction is bad enough enough, without the literary ball of neuroses that is the Iowa Writer's Workshop sliding in. So let me say that How to Live Safely In a Science Fi ...more | |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
and
73 other people
liked
Kemper's review
of
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe:
"If anyone is ever crazy enough to make a movie version of this, they better hire Charlie Kaufman to do the adapted screenplay. Even he would probably be left scratching his head and saying, “What the hell??”
Trying to summarize this is going to be..." Read more of this review » |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
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| As Americans, we invaded and wrecked Iraq, so the least we can do is read some Iraqi literature. As editor Hassan Blasim, the Arab world has a dearth of genre literature. There is no Arab Tolkien or Asimov, no living or historical author who links th ...more | |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
rated a book liked it
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| As Americans, we invaded and wrecked Iraq, so the least we can do is read some Iraqi literature. As editor Hassan Blasim, the Arab world has a dearth of genre literature. There is no Arab Tolkien or Asimov, no living or historical author who links th ...more | |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
and
39 other people
liked
Taryn's review
of
Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq:
"3.5 Stars. Ten short stories by Iraqi writers envisioning Iraq 100 years after the US-led invasion. I love short speculative fiction, but I was mostly interested in this book because I have a huge blind spot in my knowledge about Iraq. Everything..."
Read more of this review »
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Michael Burnam-Fink
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| Tahir Shah likes to play the fool, but behind the jokes is a sharp observer of people. Trail of Feathers is actually a fascinating adventure and serious work of ethnopharmacology masquerading as yet another dumb European travelogue (as a Pakistan Bri ...more | |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
rated a book it was amazing
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Everyone says Ted Chiang is really good. Everyone is right. This collection of his earliest work, including his Nebula winning first story "Babylon", a sci-fi retelling of the tower of Babylon, and basis for the film Arrival, demonstrate fluency with b ...more |
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Michael Burnam-Fink
made a comment on
his review
of
Smokejumper: A Memoir by One of America's Most Select Airborne Firefighters
"
Less educational than reading a 200 page forestry manual on fuel models, but a lot more fun
"
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Michael Burnam-Fink
rated a book really liked it
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| Across The Fence is a top-notch memoir and history detailing one of the most hazardous jobs in the Vietnam War. In order to gain intelligence on and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, small teams of Americans and Vietnamese were secretly inserted into La ...more | |
“This is not to say that science itself is politics. Scientific knowledge is profoundly different from political ideology. Science is an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involves falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible results, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge isn't a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table is a political construct.
But the things people do with science are every bit as political as the things people do with gold.”
― Distraction
But the things people do with science are every bit as political as the things people do with gold.”
― Distraction
“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul”
―
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“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
― The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
― The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
Goons and their Military History
— 44 members
— last activity Jan 06, 2015 04:20AM
there is a thread.
Michael’s 2018 Year in Books
Take a look at Michael’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
130 books
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2,616 friends
744 books
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239 friends
1,382 books
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166 friends
947 books
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86 friends
1,488 books
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4,932 friends
1,718 books
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1,222 friends
1,668 books
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73 friends
2,365 books
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58 friends
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