Eugene Son is one of the coolest people I know, regardless of the high praise seismologists have for the size of his head. He's blogging currently from his World Tour in Europe (which puzzles me as I would expect it to be his European Tour unless his itinerary really does extend beyond that region...)
Read excellent writing from a cool dude. I'd buy _that_ for a dollar.
http://www.eugeneson.com/
Here's more from a draft I never posted until now:
I met Eugene when working at Qualcomm. He was quite a tech support godling but what turned me on about him was his unabashed love for comics.
At that point in my life, I was waay repressed. Loving comics was one of those wonderfully fun things that I had kissed off years before in an attempt to be cool. Other items that I had blown off were old friends, parents, drugs & alcohol, and building models. I was really good at all of those things, but I kept choosing to let those go from my life because I had "better, more important" priorities.
Eugene, on the other hand, was steeped in his passions. I knew him to love comics and animation. I came to respect his high geek quotient, his gaming abilities, and his encyclopedic recall of tv and movie facts. I also knew he wrote scripts and was pitching them to Hollywood at one point.
I left before he got the gig and moved to L.A. I heard about it through mutual friends at the QC, but it was one of the best pieces of news I had heard for a long time.
(Note: any news of someone taking the plunge to pursue their creative side ranks very high up on my Good News scale.)
I <3 Eson (UPDATED)
How to Play Fair (or Rules for Debate)
So I've been luxuriating in the wonders of iTunes U, listening to various recorded seminars on a variety of subjects. One of them from Stanford University's Philosophy Talk entitled "Intelligent Design" inspired this latest blurb along with my rant about the conceit of humanity regarding Intelligent Design.
What impresses me as an observer of debate isn't necessarily the "right" answer, but the effect of the debate, the stimulation that comes as a result of the actual participants such that my own mind is stimulated with clear reasoning, accurate information, and passionate discourse.
Here's the gist of what I'm wanting to say: When having any debate, what I look for amongst participants is for a participant to maintain respect, tolerance, and kindness of their opponent. I hope to maintain such ideals in my own debates and arguments. What I think is essential above all that, though, is humility, especially when the topic has to do with complicated issues such as politics, morality, and religion.
I'm considering a moderated forum that would enable this type of discussion for the sake of public consumption. This would be Pet Project #732 (or so...).
Intelligent design -- such conceit!!!
This is one of those subjects that I'd love to write a dissertation on (if I _ever_ got that motivated), but it basically goes like this:
How pompous must we, as human beings, be to imagine that we could fathom the ideals and motivations of a creator capable of creating a universe such as ours! It seems such a haughty claim to think that we can discern, let alone debate, how and why a Supreme Being would be like.
Yes, I can respect that the Holy Bible and other books like it have been written through divine inspiration and yet I would venture to say that it is analogous to my writing a book for the sake of my infant child, hoping to give her guidelines for living such that she might, in time, come to a deeper understanding of the ways of the world or, to the point, the virtues of a spiritual life.
Obviously this isn't the fully fleshed out diatribe that it deserves to be, but I did feel compelled to blurt this out as its been sitting in my drafts for quite some time.
