my moral standing is lying down

Came across this little factoid:

Randy Pausch — Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, author of the “Last Lecture,” and devoted Star Trek fan — appeared in the 2009 movie Star Trek. He died on July 25, 2008, [at age 47] of pancreatic cancer.

(In case you were wondering, he's the crewman on the Kelvin in the very beginning who says, "Captain, we have visual.")

Came across his website here: http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

And the video of his "Last Lecture", entitled "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". It's an hour and 15 minutes of inspiration, truth and humor. I listened to it while working, occasionally clicking back onto the page to view the presentation visuals. It's really worth listening to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

After lots of stuff about Objectivism in pop culture lately, I've become more curious about it. Terry Goodkind is an objectivist, but from what I'd heard tell about Objectivism, I couldn't quite reconcile Goodkind's fantasy series about the value of life and compassion, with the extreme viewpoint depicted in Bioshock and what Austin had described of it.

So I went to the Wikipedia article about Objectivism, and from what it describes, it seems mostly rational.

Now, it could be that Rand's stance is the extreme one, and what's described in the article is the moderate stance, and maybe Goodkind is kind of doing an "I intellectually agree with Objectivism, but I'll throw in a healthy dose of compassion" (and whether that's because he's a compassionate person, or because he's smart enough to know that people generally prefer epic fantasy series with compassionate protagonists, I don't know).

Sean, could you ask Austin to write me an email/facebook msg/LJ comment on this, if he doesn't mind? I know I've asked him to explain before, but now that I looked up some more info, I'm more confused. And I know he likes to talk about philosophy anyway~.

And actually, anyone else on my flist who might be able to shed some light on this is welcome to comment.

[edit: Just saw that they'd announced at the end of July 2006 that Sam Raimi had optioned film rights for the Sword of Truth series. According to imdb.com, the TV mini-series is in pre-production and is scheduled for release in 2008. How weird is that.]