Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Long Reads

Stories that take a bit longer to get through.

  • Social Purge

    I have been threatening to clear my Facebook account for a while now, and with the EFF’s latest revelations of how the site attempts to “zucker” private information from its unsuspecting users, today seemed like as good a time as any. And so it is done: zero friends. This has certainly been a long time…

  • Our Collective Ophitoxaemia

    Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body. One of the most egregious examples is…

  • Articulatory Excellence

    Not only is Lolita excellent writing, it tells a tragic story worth reading.

  • Exiting the Nest

    Over the weekend Rachel and I drove up to Penn State Hershey for the College of Medicine’s second look day. The whole thing was organized by the med students, and while they did squeeze a lot of information and activities into the day, I was impressed once again. I was also quite surprised by how…

  • iShenanigans

    There’s been quite the foofaraw surrounding the leak of the latest iPhone prototype (Spoiler: one of the employees left it at a bar, a guy found it, Gizmodo bought it from him and posted a teardown). It’s the expected incremental upgrade scheduled for release this summer that continues the process of making the iPhone more…

  • A Perceptual Error

    A while back the leasing office started advertising a “breakfast on the go” event for this week. It sounded great and the time included when I normally leave for work; unlike most events, I planned to avail myself of it (this was assisted by the placement of the ad above my mailbox). The night before…

  • Heaven is Socialist

    It might ruffle some feathers, but the more I think about it, the less I understand how a “Christian Right” can exist in politics without serious cognitive dissonance. In the all the seething furor against so-called socialism in the United States, they seem to have forgotten that egalitarian values predate Marx. While I’m no theologian,…

  • The Corporate Sense of Entitlement

    IP apologists like to say that people such as myself who don’t like seeing ads, installing malware on our computers, or paying for copies of an infinite good have a “sense of entitlement” to content. As you might have guessed, I think this is hogwash. Corporations and content creators have gotten used to controlling the…