Jesus the Vampire's Landing Spot

  We've all known talking potatoes--at least that's my favorite name for the those who seem so unthinking and unreasoning that we might as well be talking to a vegetable. It turns out that it's not really such an an inexact parallel. If we really examine the potato closely, it turns out to have many of the traits of humans that we've likely failed to notice. Samuel Butler, in his famous volume "Erewhon," elaborates the traits we have come to think of as human, and how these traits are also to be found in the potato. Butler's explorations were in the context of consciousness and machine learning, which would one day become what we know call Artificial Intelligence. So, next time YOU call someone a Talking Potato, just remember, it might be a bit generous of a comparison. From The Book of the Machines: Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get...

Gene Roddenberry had quite a ride before creating and producing a certain science fiction series in the mid-1960's that allowed the TV-viewing public to embark on a certain five-year mission aboard a certain starship that went where no man had gone before. Born in El Paso, Texas on August 19, 1921, Roddenberry grew up in Los Angeles, California where his father was an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was in Los Angeles that Roddenberry began what eventually became a global phenomenon and a multi-billion dollar industry, but before that, he worked in jobs that relatively few people are willing or able to do. Initially wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps, Roddenberry began attending Los Angeles City College in 1939 and pursued an AA degree in police science, graduating in June of 1941. During this time, he also was trained as a pilot through a special Army program and attempted to join the U.S. Army Air Corps immediately after his graduation, but w...

From the Original Series, First Season. LINK TO VIDEO: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5v2nwm

LINK TO VIDEO: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6fmjc3

Figured I'd put this up for the hell of it... LINK TO VIDEO: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6lsg37

What is reality? That is a question that has been asked at least from the time of the ancient Greeks. I have thought about this problem for decades, and have come to the conclusion that an objective reality is impossible to define or determine. That conclusion is, of course, subjective, as are all of our perceptions. At the quantum level it is even worse - it seems that several realities coexist at the same time. Another way to look at the problem is to assume for a moment that there is another party to this existence, that is a maker or creator. Although I do not think there is one, I have no way of definitively knowing that, any more than a believer has definitive knowledge that a maker or creator exists. So for the sake of argument, we can assume for a moment that a maker or creator does exist.  That implies that there are at least  TWO realities, the first reality of the maker or creator, and our second reality, which would naturally be subordinate to the first real...

Published on Oct 12, 2019 Star Trek writers and executives have had a lot of ideas, but most get red-shirted before they hit the airwaves. It's too bad, because some sounded awesome. Here are some great Star Trek projects we never got to see. In 1992, the city of Las Vegas drew up an ambitious and, we have to say it, enterprising plan to bring more families to the Strip and boost the gambling revenue: They would pull tourists away from the flashier casinos, with a full-size model of the Starship Enterprise. The original plan spared no expense. The Enterprise would be built exactly to the fictional specifications of the TV show, omitting, unfortunately, the phasers and photon torpedoes, making it look like the old gal plopped down right in the middle of Vegas. Guests could tour the ship and witness faithful reproductions of the sets from the TV shows and movies, and with no exterior supports (to keep the reproduction faithful) the ship was a minor engineering miracle, somethin...