Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) - ProfilesArchive

About Me

Below you'll find some websites that fail to suck:
Informatiom:
Eric Weisstein's Badass World of Science : Mathworld's the most complete, but all are good.
John Baez's kick-ass home page : One of the most worthwhile sites online.
Bad Astronomy : Phil Plait has news on astronomy.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Skepticism:
Snopes : Wait, don't forward that shocking rumor just yet. Better check it out on Snopes first.
Talk.Origins archive : Good reference to explain lots of creationist claims and exactly what's wrong with them.
The James Randi Educational Foundation : Foundation for examining paranormal claims founded by world-famous Skeptic, cranky codger and stage musician, James Randi.
Operation Clambake : Site that levels some deeply deserved criticism about the Church of Scientology and provides resources to help people caught up in it.
Some of the best humor sites to waste time:
Insolitology : Is it wrong to laugh at insane people? I sure hope not. Insolitology is a site full of links to (and reviews of) some of the stranger things on the internet.
Edible Dirt : Stylistically resembles The Far Side, but much more offensive.
XKCD : Both the nerdiest and best comic I've found online.
The Best Page in the Universe : Self explanatory
Got an offer for a profitable business deal from Nigera? : Hilarious site made by people who try to fight back against scammers and have fun in the meantime.
The Editing Room : Much funnier (and shorter) versions of the scripts for popular movies.

My Interests

Science, math, philosophy, linguistics, politics, debate, discussion, religious beliefs, skepticism, debunking pseudoscience, eating disobedient children, walking, running, listing my interests, including self-referential items in lists.

Music:

Nirvana, The Toadies, The Doors, Pink Floyd, System of a Down, They Might Be Giants, Beethoven, Green Day, The Beatles, REM, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Simon and Garfunkel, Sublime, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots

Movies:

2001: A Space Odyssey, The Big Lebowski, Cidade de Deus, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Fight Club, Full Metal Jacket, The Game, Minority Report, Office Space, Pulp Fiction, Raising Arizona, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, The Shining, Trainspotting, Twelve Monkeys, The Usual Suspects, Lucky Number Slevin

Television:

King of the Hill, Futurama, Seinfeld, Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park

Books:

Fiction: The Gods Themselves (Asimov); Dune series (Herbert); Lord of the Rings (Tolkien); The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams); Rendezvous With Rama (Clarke); 2001 Series (Clarke); Foundation Series (Asimov); Contact (Sagan); Ender's Game (Card); Nightfall (Asimov); Schild's Ladder (Egan); Permutation City (Egan)
Non-fiction: The Selfish Gene (Dawkins); The Demon Haunted World (Sagan); Relativity: The Special and General Theories (Einstein); Zero: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Seife); The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Pinker)
Textbooks (Author and Title positions inverted): Apostol (Calculus vol. I and II); Liboff (Quantum); Purcell (E&M), Carrol & Ostlie (Astro); Arfken (Mathematical methods); Schroeder (Thermo), Crawford (Waves); Nestler (Neuropharmacology); Alberts (Molecular bio, big version)
Intend to read (i.e. suspected of being good): The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper); GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter); An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)

Heroes:

Richard Feynman, Alan Turing, Archimedes, Leonhard Euler, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Imre Lakatos, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper

My Blog

Trust me, your music is terrible.

One of the principal thing that annoys me about MySpace is that one can't look at peoples' pages without either turning the sound off or being bombarded with everyone's favorite song embedded and set ...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:06:00 PST

Movies from a Fundy perspective

..tr>One of the best unintentionally humorous sites on the internet is the "Childcare Action Project" webpage run by Thomas A. Carder of Granbury, Texas (a Texas town of about 5,000 where I once spent...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Sat, 20 Jan 2007 03:21:00 PST

Wikipedia is awesome.

Lots of people hate Wikipedia. True, there are plenty of uses it's not good for and many people who use it for such purposes, but that's no more to the point than the fact that those silica dessicant...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Sun, 09 Sep 2007 04:04:00 PST

Michael Bay is a bag of douche

..>If you haven't heard of Michael Bay, he's a director and producer whose responsible for such travesties as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. Ok, I've never seen Pearl Harbor, but based on the quality o...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Tue, 03 Jul 2007 04:13:00 PST

Thanks a lot, Einstein!

Everyone knows who Albert Einstein was. . . sort of.From what I've seen, it seems that what most people know is basically along the lines:He was German, moved to the U.S. and did, well, some kind of s...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Thu, 24 May 2007 09:29:00 PST

Words stupid people shouldn't use but do anyway

..>Some words and phrases are like magnets for stupid. They might have some uses that wouldn't justify nasally raping their user, but for some reason these painless uses have become the exception rat...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Sat, 12 May 2007 09:29:00 PST

Vidiocy

I like video. I really do. It has great artistic potential (movies and television, obviously), and the potential to show something almost as it would be seen from a firs...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Tue, 06 Mar 2007 03:40:00 PST

What else should we have expected?

This blog vaguely relates to my last one in that its subject is a major conspiracy theorist (and something of a posterboy for them as he's one of the few with academic credentials)....
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Thu, 01 Mar 2007 03:30:00 PST

Conspiracy theories

A popular form of idiocy has taken the internet by storm in the last couple of years, thanks in large part to a single video called "Loose Change". The film suggests implicitly tha...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Sun, 25 Feb 2007 03:11:00 PST

Grammar Nazi-ism

For those who don't know, I'm a card-carrying member of the Grammar National Socialist party. We're often confused with a now-defunct, highly authoritarian, anti-semitic German political party of a s...
Posted by Shlomo (Mr. Roboto) on Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:38:00 PST