It’s been ages since I posted any Brain Bubbles! That’s not for lack of my brain bubbling so much as various other “real world” (ha!) sharp pin bubble-popping things intruding. I thought it was high time I returned to effervescence!
There are some older bubbles queued up — they’ll surface eventually — but I was recently struck by a couple of brain bubbles recently (to the point of serious bemusement in one case and serious amusement in other).
Not feeling like a long post, so instead you get a pair of tiny bubbles!
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26 Comments | tags: Categorical Imperative, Immanuel Kant, movie violence, TV violence, violence, violence in movies | posted in Brain Bubble
Hot off the press! Check out Pluto’s first close up:
Those mountains are up to 11,000 feet high! And the surface looks to be roughly 100 million years old — extremely young compared to the four-and-a-half billion-year age of the solar system (and not a crater in sight!).
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17 Comments | tags: Charon, Clyde Tombaugh, Emily Lakdawalla, Mordor, NASA, New Horizons, Planetary Society, Pluto, Pluto is a planet, Pluto is amazing!, space, space exploration | posted in Science
Recent careful analysis of the early images from Pluto have turned up results that are astonishing and yet, perhaps, not surprising:

This explains a great deal…
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6 Comments | tags: dogs, humor, New Horizons, Pluto | posted in From My Collection
Oh, my! I mentioned last time that the Minnesota Twins, after a surprisingly good month of May, cooled down big time in June. Fans held their breath wondering how far the team would fall from the height reached in May. Now, with June behind us and July well under way, we can start breathing normally again.
The Twins lost ground in June but remained above the .500 mark (by five games!) by month’s end. But July seems to have brought an end to the ice-cold bats. The Twins are 8-4 in July as we begin the All-Star break.
But more importantly: It’s Pluto Day!
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4 Comments | tags: Brian Dozier, Ceres, Charon, Clyde Tombaugh, Dawn mission, Glen Perkins, Minnesota Twins, MLB All-Star Game, NASA, New Horizons, Pluto, Pluto is a planet, Pluto is amazing!, space, space exploration, Twins 2015, Venetia Burney, Vesta, Win Twins | posted in Baseball, Science
“Four score and seven…” (Ahem.) Excuse me, I meant… “Four years and seven (or more — it’s gotten hard to keep track) lifetimes ago, I brought forth upon this WordPress (dot com) a new blog, conceived in lunacy, and dedicated to the proposition that all blog readers would subscribe eventually.”
“Now I am engaged in a great deal of introspection, questioning whether that blog, or any blog so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The truth is, the world will little note, nor long remember what I write here. It is for us the bloggers, rather, to be dedicated here to adding a few more drops to the ocean. Tiny cries of small critters in a very large wilderness.”
And at this point, I’m way off script¹…
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54 Comments | tags: Anniversary, blog, blogger, blogging, humor, July 4, wry | posted in Life, Writing
It was never the plan for this blog, but I’ve found myself several times writing about morals (for example: here, here, and very recently here). In those posts I touched on what morality means and how we might define it. I make no claim to breaking new ground or having anything particularly insightful to say — just my 1/50th of a buck based on my own observations, thoughts, and experiences.
The last week or so a set of three thought threads wound through the loom of my mind and seemed to form an interesting fabric. They have to do with the nature of morals, the usefulness of reason, and our modern sense of otherness.
Today I’m going to try to make something out of that fabric.
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53 Comments | tags: alien contact, David Brin, Dogma of Otherness, dolphins, Ernest Hemingway, Immanuel Kant, intelligence, is and ought, mathematics, morality, morals, Otherness, rational thought, reason, Rebecca Goldstein, Rodin, Steven Pinker, The Thinker | posted in Philosophy, Sunday Sermons
Today the merry, merry month of May has its final appearance in locations worldwide. If you managed to miss all 31 shows you’re out of luck for the remainder of the season and will have to wait until it hits the road for the 2016 tour. (Hint: order your tickets now; they go fast.)
It’s been a slightly strange month in Minnesota. Temperatures have shown strong indicators towards summer, but winter’s chill has been persistent. Last night’s low was 44 degrees (Fahrenheit), and it’s only 66 degrees here late in the afternoon.
Even the deer are acting strange!
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17 Comments | tags: Angie Harmon, Battle Creek, deer, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, Lina Leandersson, Lisa Edelstein, Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, Minnesota Twins, Rise: Blood Hunter, Sebastian Gutierrez, Tomas Alfredson, Toronto Blue Jays, Twins 2015, vampires, Win Twins | posted in Baseball, Life, Movies

This blog is nearly four years old (I started on July 4th, 2011). This post makes it exactly 500 posts here on Logos Con Carne. To commemorate it, I’m giving myself the 500 Odometer Award (which I built myself from various electrons I had laying around).
As part of the party, this post consists of miscellaneous odds and ends that have intrigued me lately. I’ll leave it to you to decide which are the odds and which are the ends.
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22 Comments | tags: All of Me, Comic Sans, George Winston, Jon Schmidt, light, light speed, Linus and Lucy, Minnesota Twins, Monty Python, NASA, SDO, skydiving, The Piano Guys, Tom Scott | posted in From My Collection, Life, Music, Science, The Interweb, Writing
I don’t reblog very often (in fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever reblogged a post by someone else). But this is so much more important than movies or science fiction or baseball. Please take a moment to read charmarie221’s humbling post. Life… is a hell of a thing.
Rambling Is Therapeutic
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This month there is a big focus on Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) with the culmination being Global Awareness Day today, May 15th, and a campaign to hear all of the stories at #IAMTSC.
I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously thought of the disease as a Global Issue, although obviously it is as the numbers reveal that it affects people everywhere. I’ve thought of it in the National sense because we’ve lived in different states and have had different experiences with doctors and clinics and support groups and schools, all of which have had varying experiences with the condition. I receive publications and information from the National Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance. And I’ve thought of it locally when we’ve taken part in the Step Forward To Cure TSC which is a fundraiser in the form of a Walk in Frisco (as well as many other cities nationwide) each year…
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2 Comments | tags: #IAMTSC, TSC, Tuberous Sclerosis Complex | posted in Life