Sunday, April 27, 2008

Fuckin' weird shit

This book is either amazing or really stupid.

Notice the site is hosted at my beloved university! (More on this at the bottom...)

It's called Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves, by Cliff Pickover. It's supposed to be this grand synthesis of all sorts of strange physics/mind/philosophical/mystical/scientific ideas. SOUNDS good, but it seems on the verge of being a fakey New Age type bullshit. For example, the website has a picture of a pineal gland as the illustration for Chapter 4. Presumably, then, Cliff here is going to be talking about how Descartes viewed the pineal gland as the point at which the soul interacts with the physical world. Well, that sounds all mystical, and it would be except for the fact that Descartes just made it up because he couldn't think of any better explanation for how his particular brand of dualism worked.

Still, it could be interesting. No way it can be better than my favorite.

Anybody else know of any books like this?

Edit:
Also, this guy's main site is just great. Lots of good stuff like aliens, mobius strips and an amazing graphics page.

He is also somehow involved in some of the weirdest blogs I've ever seen, including the Women of Wikipedia. He's pretty creepy, actually, and he definitely has some of the crazy charismatic cult leader thing going on. Notice the "crew" he has to moderate this really weird blog; they're all young women! Polygamist???????????????????

I also cannot find any information on WHY this site is hosted on wisc.edu--he doesn't say he has any connections to University of Wisconsin. Looks like this guy named Clint Sprott (what's with these weird names? Something weird going on here...) just wants to host this stuff for him. Cool, I guess.

Fuckin' weird shit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

BRING BACK PSEUDY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Michelle said...

That is a very strange man. I think that he must work for that professor somehow. I mean, just looking at all his pages and links, he has to do nothing else besides be on the internet. Unless he never takes links down and theyve all accumulated there somehow. All of his books look pretty strange.