One of the most obvious ripostes to the doctrines of unfettered capitalism is that all private property was at one time granted to people by some type of governing entity. Depending on where you live, this was probably done either informally and long before records of such a transaction exist (if you are living in Scotland, for example), or relatively recently, and in an organized manner (in America, many people still live on property homesteaded by their grandparents). Even people who think that…

This short review refers to the 2009 James Cameron film of the title Avatar.

Review

This review might be considered late; I wrote it roughly a week after seeing the film and so it might suffer in the accuracy stakes. It will also contain spoilers. One could level the further criticism that this has been said elsewhere, in much the same language. This is not because I have read other reviews before writing my own, but rather because the same awful points stick out in absolutely…

Consider what Santa Claus does. He travels to several hundred million households in a single night, and yet manages to find time at almost every stop for interaction with the occupants (winking at hidden children, eating cookies, getting frightened by M&M's, grabbing a cola out of the fridge). How does Santa do it?

Recent experiments have indicated the possibility for quantum entanglement in biological systems. Now we all know that…

The first all-in-one, hardwired synthesiser with a built-in keyboard was the Minimoog, designed by Bill Hemsath and Robert Moog and released by Moog Music in 1971. It's hard to say how much of its design was carefully considered, and how much was arbitrary. Regardless, other companies -- including the Japanese trio Yamaha, Korg and Roland -- soon started to imitate the Minimoog's placing of elements as well as its sonic features. Ever since, almost every…