A blog and other information about the person known as Phronk online.

  • Book Review: This is Not a Test, by Courtney Summers

    When I reviewed Some Girls Are, my greatest wish was for Courtney Summers to write a zombie novel. Follow your dreams, kids, because mine came true. This is Not a Test is, in some ways, a traditional zombie tale. It pays homage to the Romero blueprint without explicitly wink-winking at it: a diverse group of…

  • How Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Science With Thought Experiments

    Think about this: Science—empirical study of the world—only exists because thought experiments aren’t good enough. Yet. Philosophers used to figure out how stuff worked just by thinking about it. They would take stuff they knew about how the world worked, and purely by applying intuition, logic and math to it, figure out new stuff. No…

  • The Best Most Listened-To Albums of 2012: Top 20

    Here are the 20 albums that I listened to the most this year. The first part of the top 35 is over here; as I mentioned there, it was an odd year for music. I don’t even own many of the albums below; rather, I streamed them from various places. Once again I’ve bolded some…

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