I know I don't blog much anymore

But I've been busy... honest. It's tough raising a kid these days. And I've been doing some reading that I would like to both document and share with anyone who happens upon these pages.

The things that have blown my mind recently are all scientific and/or metaphysical papers. I don't know. Seems like I've been on a science bender recently. Just thinking, I suppose. It's good to exercise the mind.

But in any case, the stuff I've come across is below. The time invested in reading the links is well worth it many times over. Oh-- sorry about all the .pdfs.

1. The first item of interest has to do with a certain astrophysicist of note: Max Tegmark. See, he had this article in Scientific American, which (I was very annoyed to find out) was not available on the freeweb. So I hit up his site and came across two papers that were extremely interesting. The first was Parallel Universes, which discusses the multiverse. This implicates the universe is composed of mathematics -which is eloquently put forth in Shut Up and Calculate - which coincidentally happens to be the "Director's Cut" of the above-mentioned SciAm article. (So there! Hah! Thank you arXiv.org) Additional material including thoughful criticism is found in the utterly fantastic On Math, Matter and Mind, which is a wonderful three-way discussion of the relationship between the titular subjects.
2. So as I'm exploring the material above, the Internet offers up the fact that there is a metaphysics called Modal Realism, championed by one David Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds (which I'm buying tonight). Funny thing is, it meshes perfectly with Tegmark's parallel universe theory. Then the Internet comes through yet again with Damon Woolsey's Modal Realism primer, and then the absolute kicker, his dissertation, A Fundamental Theory of Genuine Modal Realism, which corrects what Woolsey sees as some flaws with Lewis's version. And is terrifyingly enjoyable to boot.
   
3. Then, as if my mind wasn't blown enough by this point... along comes this great piece: The universe: a cryogenic habitat for microbial life, which points out that all the dust floating around in the universe is pretty much bacteria. Yep. Life everywhere. Going everywhere.
   
4. Oh, and then in all this rooting around, out popped Global Workspace Theory, brought to us by Bernard J. Baars' A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, which is both comprehensive and defensible. I've loved this kind of stuff ever since I studied cognitive science and cognitive psychology back in college.
   
5. Also interesting are the Brights, trying to do for atheism with "bright" what "gay" did for homosexuality, Daniel Dennett's powerful demand that science investigate religion: Breaking The Spell, and Marc Hauser's compelling case for evolved morals in Moral Minds.
   
6. And then be sure not to miss the highly recommended hulu.com's Space Rip channel and of course, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
7. Finally, I'd like to give mad props to the incredible open source frameworks jQuery and CodeIgniter. I'm using them to make some pretty incredible things.