Depressed Metabolism

David Stove’s book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies is a remarkable collection of essays. As a staunch positivist ,the author is not impressed with most of what constitutes “philosophy” (or the quality of our thinking in general). As Stove laments in the preface, “there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories.” But [...]

This past weekend Motel X, the Lisbon (Portugal) International Horror festival, had its third anniversary. It is one of the smaller international horror festivals around, but this year they managed to have both Stuart Gordon, director of several Lovecraft adaptions, and John Landis, director of the horror classic An American Werewolf in London, as special [...]

Today is the second anniversary of Depressed Metabolism. As of writing, this website has close to 200 feed subscribers. On an average day the website has 150 unique visitors, which is an encouraging increase in traffic since our last update. This is even more remarkable in light of the fact that new blog entries with [...]

My good friend Veronique Rinaldi has launched a blog called Lisbon Noir that features beautiful photography of various locations in Lisbon, Portugal. So far the blog has posted entries on abandoned industrial locations, water reservoirs, cemeteries, chocolate stores, and the minimalist art of Dan Flavin.

In ‘The Rise of Scientific Philosophy’ the logical positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach writes:

In Leibniz’s philosophy the rational side of modern science has found its most radical representation. The successful use of mathematical methods for the description of nature made Leibniz believe that all science can be ultimately transformed into mathematics. The idea of determinism, of [...]

The genre of “torture porn” seems to be at the height of its popularity. The 2009 Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam featured a non-trivial amount of horror movies with excessive violence, torture and sadism. But perhaps the most trustworthy indicator that this trend may be nearing its peak is the French movie “Martyrs.” The movie [...]

How seriously should we take William Warren  Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment? Despite its emphasis on critical inquiry, the work has a lot of elements that would place the book in a more obscure tradition.
The first thing that strikes the reader is the enormous number of pages that are devoted to the “search for identity” [...]

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality:
Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science’s picture of the way we think – the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, or fulfill our goals.  The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of [...]

The philosopher Karl Popper has published on a wide variety of subjects but his most lasting contribution is his answer to the problem of induction by drawing attention to the asymmetry between verification and falsification. A theory can never be proven, but it can be falsified. Popper’s falsification criterion can also be used  to distinguish [...]

Patrick Millard is a Michigan based artist who works with different media including photography, painting, mixed media, sound, and installation. He currently works as an adjunct professor of photography at Grand Valley State University and Grand Rapids Community College and is a photography instructor at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids.
One of [...]

Abandoned sites are found in (former) industrial areas, as highlighted in the post on the Monteponi mine in Sardinia and as photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who are famous for their photographs of industrial buildings, or in cities, as highlighted in a previous post about Abandoned London Underground Stations.
And even Antarctica, although sparsely populated, [...]

Mark Samuels’ bleak novella of urban horror, In the Face of Twilight, is set in London. Living in London, and being somewhat familiar with the settings in this story, this created a unique opportunity to see what places in his book actually do exist.
What follows is a selection of photos taken of locations that feature [...]

Like Fritz Leiber and Thomas Ligotti, the setting for the weird fiction of Mark Samuels is often an urban environment. The British horror writer Ramsey Campbell describes Samuel’s stories as ‘Urban Tales of Terror’ in the introduction to Samuels’  latest collection of short stories, ‘Glyphotech and Other Macabre Stories.’

The setting for these urban tales of [...]

Minimalism was first recognized as an art and design movement in the 1960’s. The essence of minimalist art is the reduction of the art work to its bare essentials, which is expressed through simple geometric forms, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials. Minimal  art downplays self-expression  in favor of the object itself,  which is a [...]

From David M. Friedman’s The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever:

The initial stages of these studies were performed in Carrel’s operating suite, which the two men now entered. Lindbergh had never been in an operating room before, and this one defied his expectations. The floor, walls, and [...]

The Prisoner is a British television series from the 1960’s which over the years has reached cult status because of its intriguing story line,  themes such as mind control, dream manipulation and various forms of social indoctrination, and ultimately, a lot of unanswered questions as to the meaning of the series.
The series is about a [...]

James Warren is to be complimented for writing a thorough and persuasive book on Epicurean thinking about death. In Facing Death: Epicurus and his Critics, Warren offers a detailed review of Epicurus’ view that “death is nothing to us.” His treatment of Epicurus’ critics should be considered a success for the following three reasons. The [...]

In the introduction to his collection of writings, Socratic Puzzles, Robert Nozick writes that  he never responded to the sizable literature on Anarchy, State and Utopia. His natural inclination would be to defend his views. As Nozick notes, “How could I learn that my views were mistaken if I thought about them always with defensive [...]

Can politics become an addiction? A more realistic question is to ask why politics is an addiction for so many people. The most straightforward answer would be that a compulsive interest in politics just reflects a natural preoccupation with advancing one’s interest (or that of others). But as was discussed in the previous installment, The [...]

Is it rational to vote? For most people the question may seem absurd but quite a few economists and political scientists have made the claim that it is not. The reasoning is that in large elections the probability that your individual vote will decide the outcome is so small that voting is a futile exercise. [...]

At The Hoover Hog there is a fascinating interview with Alan Dawrst on utilitarianism and suffering:

In practice, the world really is a big pond with kids drowning all the time: There are billions of people suffering from preventable poverty, disease, and violence, billions of animals enduring dreadful lives on factory farms, and orders of magnitude [...]

The website TopTenz recently published a list of the Top 10 Most Famous Preserved Body Parts. The list includes Galileo’s finger and Albert Einstein’s brain. As has been discussed on this blog before, the preservation of human brains (no matter how frivolous the intention) raises a number of important questions about the nature of death [...]

The Italian Island Sardinia is known for its beautiful beaches, wild countryside, rugged mountains, valleys and plains that formed the background for some of Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti western‘ films, but also offers a rich history dating back to the nuragic age circa 1500 BC and is famous in the mining world for the richness of [...]

Ever since first tasting port wine, it has become my favorite drink.  On my last visit to Portugal we therefore decided to visit Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia, the birth place of port and the economic heart for the production and distribution of Port.
Port is produced from grapes grown in the Douro region. The [...]

On a recent trip from California to Oregon we decided to pay a visit to the Howling Acres Wolf Sanctuary in Williams, Oregon. Since we wanted to spend the night in the area as well we also decided to take the opportunity to ‘Camp with the Wolves.’

Upon arrival a volunteer from WWOOF showed us our [...]

The blog Grim Reviews draws attention to a new interview with horror writer Thomas Ligotti, one of the most important writers of bleak fiction since Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. In this interview, Ligotti talks about his upcoming book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror. In this book, the [...]

Edvard Munch’s painting “Death in the Sick Chamber” (1895) portrays death as expressed through the survivors. A striking aspect of this work is that all the people in the room do not console one another and are physically and emotionally isolated.

In “Modern Art and Death”, Carla Gottlieb writes:
….the faces are contorted, not in mourning for [...]

If there is one beer style that can compete with wine in terms of complexity it is the lambic beer. Unfortunately, if lambic beers are known at all, it is typically because the name is also used for the sweet fruit beers that are produced by some macrobrewers. Traditional lambics, however, are rarely sweet and [...]

As mentioned in a previous contribution, Arthur C. Clark was no stranger to cryonics. The famous science fiction author once stated in a letter in support of cryonics, “Although no one can quantify the probability of cryonics working, I estimate it is at least 90% — and certainly nobody can say it is zero.”  And [...]

BLDGBLOG reports on Mysterious Chinese Tunnels:
“Zimmerman claims that “mysterious” tunnels honeycombed the ground beneath the city of Tacoma, Washington…It’s like a geography purpose-built for H.P. Lovecraft, or something straight out of the work of Jeff VanderMeer: down in the foundations of your city is a mysterious network of rooms, excavated by another race, through which [...]

How do you teach a child about something that is so far “unproven”?  How do you bring up the subject of cryonics and how it may allow someone to be reanimated in the future?
I am a cryonicist, I’ve been a signed member for years, I’m also a mother, social activist, environmentalist and author.  I teach [...]