Author: Fred Rothganger
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Age of Adaline — What’s so bad about immortality?
The movie “Age of Adaline” has gotten some tepid marks from sites like Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was a very well-constructed drama, with no wasted footage. For example, it shows Adaline’s dog growing old and dying. Then she goes and puts his picture in her photo album, and we discover he was like the…
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I can’t believe in Panem
I read “Hunger Games” and also watched the movie. Given the lock-step similarity between the book and the first movie, I decided movies were sufficient to get the rest of the story. I also watched “Divergent”, but haven’t read that book. I thoroughly enjoyed both stories, but there is something irritatingly out of kilter about…
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Data transfer between body parts
Yesterday I went to the podiatrist to have my sprained toe checked. The lady at the desk asked me, “Did they give you a tablet up front so you could fill in the new patient form?” “No, but I’m an established patient. I spent over half an hour filling in stuff on your computer last…
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Age of the Earth … according to Hoyle
There was once a time when I was skeptical about radioactive dating. You can measure the level of a substance, but you can’t say anything about the age of an object unless you know how much was there to begin with! Then I read Hoyle’s cosomology book, and it all made sense. In at least…
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What to expect from SuSAn
Today I got my first negative book review on Amazon. In a way it’s kind of exciting, because it means someone beside a friend read the book! It is bad form to respond directly to a review, but I feel it is important to say something here, because I want to help set people’s expectations.…
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Most of what we call “science” is really religion
For the sake of discussion, let me propose some highly oversimplified definitions: science – Knowledge you test for yourself. religion – Knowledge you get from someone else and take on faith. What does this imply? The practical everyday business of science requires us to take things on faith. We can’t possibly reproduce every experiment ourselves,…
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The Imitation Game
The movie “Imitation Game” amazed me! It was exceptionally well-written. It had war, spy intrigue, friendship, romance, computer science, and addressed Alan Turing’s homosexuality. It is an enormous achievement for a script to pull together so many diverse threads in a way that makes sense, with just the right amount of each one. So why…
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Science versus Magic: The Secret of NIMH
My family recently watched The Secret of NIMH, an animated movie based on the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I was surprised and annoyed at how the movie turned science fiction into fantasy. In the book, everything was the result of disciplined neuroscience research. The rats achieved success via intelligence and hard…
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“Atlas Shrugged” belongs to all of us
The title of this post is a deliberately inflammatory reference to my previous post 1984 belongs to all of us. That post offended a few of my readers, in one case specifically because it flew in the face of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Because of that, I was compelled to read Atlas Shrugged. At the end of…
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Internet tracking
In another disturbing episode of Facebook data connectivity, ads are now showing up on my news feed for the exact item I looked at on Home Depot’s site a few days ago. The good news is that ads for beautiful young (or middle-aged) women are disappearing from my FB news page. The bad news is…