The Ash Twins Blog

A guy on Rotten Tomatoes reports:

I was very curious to hear Murray’s answer. He’s not as available to the press or public as Dan Aykroyd or Harold Ramis and he also seemed to be the least enthusiastic about a Ghostbusters sequel…

But tonight he said that he knew “some writers from THE OFFICE” were taking a stab at the script right now (which we already knew) and that he thinks that’s a good start. He paused for a few seconds then said that he thinks enough time has passed and that “the wounds from GHOSTBUSTERS 2 are healed” and that he would definitely be into doing another GHOSTBUSTERS movie, stating that the first 40 minutes of the original film is some of the best stuff he’s been associated with and the whole shoot was an amazing amount of fun.

He also went on to say that his enthusiasm for Ghostbusters was heightened after recording the voice of Peter Venkman for the video game over the summer. In fact, he said he found himself walking down the street singing the Ghostbusters theme song and then thought people walking around him were going to start yelling at him to “get over yourself, Bill,” so he stopped… But the enthusiasm was there.

The New York Times’ Charles M. Blow notes the striking difference in religiosity between Americans and the citizens of other developed nations. He asks for comments, and I replied:

America’s free religious market forces individual religious organizations to compete with each other for adherents. Modern civilization and technology has provided superior substitutes for religious goods, so now religions have to compete with secular substitutes in addition to the substitutes provided by other religions. Religious substitutes for goods like music, art, psychotherapy, community, medicine, and sex are oftentimes inferior to their secular counterparts, so a popular strategy for making up the difference is for religious leaders to demonize secular substitutes. This demonization contaminates secular goods and lowers their value (and thus demand) for religious believers.  That’s why religious groups that demonize modern medicine can be so effective; if the adherents believe that medicine doesn’t work, then the only way to ward off illness is to “buy” the substitute provided by the religion.

Dark flow.

Along with dark matter and dark energy, astronomers can now add dark flow to the lexicon of cosmic mysteries. Researchers have discovered that 700 distant clusters of galaxies, gas, and dust are all being pulled in the same direction, apparently toward something invisible and possibly very large, confounding current cosmological models. So far, what that “something” is remains speculative, but it could turn out to be a vestige of the universe’s earliest days…

The researchers had been surveying the motion of 700 clusters of galaxies to test an unrelated astronomical phenomenon when they made a startling discovery: All 700 clusters are flowing basically in the same direction and at speeds of as much as 1000 kilometers per second–or more than 30 times faster than Earth revolves around the sun. As the team reports in this week’s online edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters, the clusters, which appear headed toward a region of the sky where the constellation Centaurus resides, are moving faster than they should be if their acceleration were due only to dark energy, the mysterious force discovered a decade ago that is slowly ripping the cosmos apart.

To quote Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

For a primer on dark matter, check this out.

For those who miss the glory days of Napster, a glorious day has arrived: the release of Vuze.  Vuze is an open-source BitTorrent application with a fast and friendly file search built into the client interface. Search results are sorted by user ratings, so the highest-quality versions come up first.

Download Vuze here.

Naturally, peer-to-peer file-sharing software presents the opportunity for activities of ambiguous legality; if you intend to engage in such activities, you may want to install PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian is an open-source IP blocker that specifically conceals your computer from the entertainment industry panopticon.

Download PeerGuardian here. (Vista users should choose the “Windows 2003″ installation option.)