PicoBlog

Good morning! Today is Monday, June 19, 2023. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C. Need to subscribe — or upgrade your Ledger e-newsletter subscription? Details here. Today's Charlotte Ledger is sponsored by Fox Rothschild, a national law firm whose Charlotte-based attorneys provide litigation, real estate, labor and employment, corporate and a wide range of other services to clients in the Carolinas and across the country.

MaryAnn’s quick take: The king of all monsters gets a period-piece reboot, and it’s the closest the series has gotten since to the sincere, unironic horrors of the 1954 original. No comfy escape from terrible reality here.[This review is also available at FlickFilosopher.com. Godzilla Minus One opens in US cinemas tomorrow, and UK cinemas on December 15th.] ncG1vNJzZmienJ6wrLLIpaasp6CdsrN60q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnl6Sxu7XLpZhmpZmjwrR5zqecZqWfq7amedGeraKdp2LBqbE%3D

"Not me. I’ve got no choice. I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in jinxes, but that stone’s jinxed me and it won’t let go. I’ve been damn near bitten, shot at, peed on and robbed. And worse is gonna happen before it’s done, so I’m taking my stand. I’m going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me!" That's a line of dialogue from "The Hot Rock"

The language for computers is not simply code, it's machine code that gives instructions to the CPU, which in the binary computers we use is represented in binary. We have already bridged the "gap between human intent and precise instructions for a computer", because we long ago translated the language of computers, which is machine code that gives instructions to the CPU, into a form we can work with. How many programmers do you know who program in binary, which is the only language our binary computers understand without translation?

Nolan Ryan was used to being the ace on a pitching staff. But, on the 1986 Houston Astros, who won the National League Western Division that year, he not only wasn’t the ace, he was happy to be a member of a starting rotation that arguably boasted four. Mike Scott was the stopper, and rounding out that remarkable staff were southpaws Jim Deshaies and Bob Knepper. Like most memorable team moments in baseball (the ’27 Yankees and the ’17 World Champion Astros, for example), this 1986 Houston rotation, who led the Astros to the NL Championship Series, didn’t just appear out of nowhere.

Last week, in The Case for Pagan Monotheism, I discussed recently scholarly literature that has made a case for the existence of monotheistic religion within the pagans of Late Antiquity (and perhaps earlier). This week I am going to begin my presentation of a reconstruction of this religion. Before I start, though, let me clarify where I am coming from and what I hope to achieve. Why reconstruct pagan monotheism? I have two reasons for doing so.

If there’s one bit of trivia constantly on the edge of my brain, just waiting for an excuse to be let loose, it’s the history of Batman’s sidekick, Robin, and the various characters who have taken on that mantle over the last 80 years — get a couple drinks in me at a party and it’ll all come spilling out soon enough. There’s one particular “Robin” on my mind today, though, a character I’ve watched struggle to find a place within the comics over the past few years, but in order to properly explain his story I do need to give a bit of backstory on the Robins who came before him.

After last night’s vice-presidential debate, political analyst Frank Lutz met with a focus group of 13 undecided voters on Zoom. Nine of those voters were men. They described Pence’s performance as “presidential” and “calm, cool, and collected.” And they described Harris as “evasive,” “nervous,” “snarky,” “rehearsed,” “abrasive,” “unsteady,” “rigid,” and “unpresidential.” Twelve of the thirteen participants declared Pence to be the winner. The vast majority of these participants were white — and the dissenting voice, as Vox’s Nicole Narea points out, came from the one black woman in the group: “I think we have to understand the difference of how we equate male and female,” she said.

I published the following essay a few years ago, but it didn’t get much traction at the time. I offer it again to the readers of Archedelia (with some changes) on the hunch that the problem I describe might be recognizable to more people now. The sexual paranoia promoted by the campus sex bureaucracy educates the sexual imagination of young men and women, in ways that make intimacy much harder. The effects include a rigorous practice of self-suspicion that is incumbent on men, and dissatisfaction on the part of women with the morally worm-eaten mates that they have been taught to approve of.