Conspiracy theories speak to the deep parts of our meaning-making brain, the part that draws patterns from the chaos of life. Meaning-making is, in a deeper mythic sense, the struggle of the hero to master the forces of evil. In a pre-modern forest—dark and filled with wolves—meaning is the light…

We find it easy to write what a man should not be, but it is impossible to write what a man should be without finding yourself saying things that cannot be said. To be a man is to take up the way of strength, for better or for worse…

Emma Watson gave an excellent speech to the UN where she claimed that men suffer from gender stereotypes, too. She called men to join women struggling for feminism, and asked men to draw from experiences of being stereotyped because of their gender in order to join in the struggle for women’s rights…

I am often puzzled by our culture’s need to supersize a story out of the realm where ordinary people can relate to it. Why must we make all things epic? When was the last time you faced an absolute evil that required you to don full chain mail…

In a world where patent companies control the world, Jack pirates drugs for the poor. In the course of cloning a productivity drug, she accidentally unleashes a wave of lethal addictions to banal tasks. But did she make a mistake cloning the drug? No…

Yukio Mishima’s work has the delicacy and grace of a Japanese garden. In his book The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, he sketches the story of a hero who falls in love and is pulled to shore…

Energy swirled around the book: what secrets were trapped between those dense pen marks? Histories bled through its thin pages when held to the light. He studied it in secret and hid it deep beneath the hoarded Vac bric-a-brac in his closet…

It is inevitable that all sufficiently intelligent systems will confound their creator-gods. Tron’s story is the story of the war of angels from Paradise Lost, which is in turn the narrative of what it means to create a child, a being differentiated from the self, with a will that can confound the will of its creator…

Kurt Willems asks whether or not nonviolence helps or hinders evangelism. I believe that some of our metaphors for personal change and God, when read in the context of a violent state, are rendered utterly terrifying to late modern people in the United States…

When a dev first adds TypeScript to a project, they often complain that it slows them down. But like a linter, it catches mistakes before you break production. Here’s some advice on getting started, including when it’s okay to take shortcuts…

Sometimes, I’ve had a rule that fails continually, because data on it is bad. Maybe it was created in development, maybe it’s just gone rogue—data with a broken-off arrowhead lodged in its side, tearing through trees until, foam crusting its lips, it lays down to die…

The landscape of paid OCR solutions is, well, expensive. And the unbiased folks from the tesseract homepage say, “Tesseract is probably the most accurate open source OCR engine available.” Tesseract OCR’s images, but pypdfocr uses tesseract as an engine to convert whole PDFs…