Over at Pharyngula, PZ dared me to take this test to assess my personality defects. I’m never one to shy away from a challenge, so here are the results:

Your Score: Robot

You are 71% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 14% Arrogant

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact,
this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless
machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem
human. For instance, you are very humble and don’t bother thinking of
your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are
also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that
these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a
human being. You are not like the robots they show in the movies. Movie
robots are make-believe, because they always get all personable and
likeable after being struck by lightning, or they are cold, cruel
killing machines. In all reality, though, you are much more boring than
all that…

And it goes on. Boring? I’ll have this test know that I find myself endlessly fascinating. Also, I prefer to think of myself as a cyborg–part man, part machine. The Terminator was a cyborg and he was pretty cool. And that uber-hot blonde on Battlestar Galactica is a cyborg, kinda. Maybe she and I could go out for coffee or something.

I’m supposed to tag the next few victims:

Is That All You’ve Got?
Day Al-Mohamed
Outside Counsel

This movie teaser has all of us film geeks trying to figure out the identity of the Big Bad that is trashing mid-town Manhattan. Giant space alien? Cthulu? Giant robots that can change into…wait, that’s been done. Whatever it is, it’d better be cool because it takes more than some clever marketing to get me to see your movie. Like some generically hot actresses. Oh, I see you have that already. Never mind, I’m sold.

I’ve neglected to point out that the latest Disability Blog Carnival is up at Retired Waif. This month’s theme serves to remind us that people with disabilities are just like us. Or rather, like you. And you. And you. Yes, you. You think you’re so special, don’t you? People like you just bug me.

For decades, parents and educators have extolled the virtues of Sesame Street. Millions of parents have plunked their children down in front of that staple of public television, confident that their children’s minds were soaking up all kinds of educational goodness. I know, I was one of them. I spent countless hours lying on the brown corduroy sofa in our family room in the company of Grover, Oscar, Kermit, and the rest. But I’m here to tell you that Sesame Street has inflicted untold amounts of psychic damage on the nation’s youth.

After reading a BoingBoing post where readers shared the Sesame Street skits that induced childhood terrors and panic attacks (the orange singing Carmen, the yip-yip aliens), I was reminded of Don Music. This spawn of Jim Henson’s dark imagination, with his manic eyes and violent self-injurious behavior, would completely freak me out every time he appeared on the screen. I would tearfully beg my mom to turn off the television until that horrific puppet was finished terrifying the other children of America. To this day, the sight of long-haired keyboardists makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Beware, parents. Sesame Street may teach your kids the ABCs and the importance of sharing, but it will also teach them the true meaning of fear.

Robert Charles Wilson has become one my favorite science fiction writers because he melds intriguing ideas with fully realized characters and an elegant narrative style. Unlike many SF authors, his scientific musings never overwhelm the underlying story. Spin follows the intertwined lives of twins Jason and Diane Lawton and their childhood friend, Typer Dupree. On a cold autumn evening, they watch the stars and moon disappear from the sky. The sun continues to rise and set every day, but the confused and scared inhabitants of Earth soon realize that something much more momentous is happening. Whatever made the stars disappear has also disrupted satellite communications. Probes sent into space (and then returned to Earth) reveal that the planet has been enclosed in some kind of artificial membrane. And for every year that passes here on Earth, 100 million years are elapsing beyond the membrane. In the span of a few decades, Earth will be incinerated by an aging sun.

This phenomenon–the Spin–defines and shapes the lives of these three friends. They cope with impending doom in different ways–by joining religious cults, by overseeing a determined scientific quest to determine the intent of the Spin’s unseen creators, or by simply attempting to lead a relatively normal life. Wilson constructs a plot that is cinematic in scope but that remains grounded in the intertwined paths of Jason, Diane, and Tyler. His slow reveal of the Spin’s true purpose is expertly handled, as is the unfolding destinies of the three main characters. This is one of the best SF novels I’ve read in some time and it richly deserves the accolades that have been heaped upon it.

I’m now reading Lee Child’s guilty-pleasure thriller The Hard Way.