Over the past couple weeks Georgia Public Radio ran their fall funding campaign for National Public Radio. (We get to go through this again in the spring.) These funding campaigns are the least I listen to GPB. And they actively discourage me from wanting to donate. So when the campaigners lament about how so few…
The Science of Healing Places was on the radio this morning. A statement near the end to the effect that healing is life or a part of life reminded me of something. Entropy, aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the force behind why when you break a glass it cannot be reversed and come back…
A recent event reminded me I should read Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I picked it up in August to read, but since my copy is a hard back the Georgia heat would warp it, so I left it forgotten in the bedside table. So here I am, thoroughly…
This passage comes from the book Big Bang. [George] Gamow was infamous for his limericks and his sometimes offbeat application of physics. On one occasion, he argued God lived 9.5 light years from the Earth. This estimate  relied on the fact that in 1904, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, churches across Russia had…
One of the many times at the beach as a teen, I recall a horseshoe crab and something blue on the sand near it. Years later I learned their blood is blue. Our blood is red due to hemoglobin which contains iron. Iron binds with oxygen to make rust. Rust is red. So our blood…
I found 50 Experiences of Racially Mixed people (PDF) interesting. That Americans consider race to be a singular identity makes sense. Claiming to be biracial or multiracial makes no sense in that paradigm. The experiences listed were very familiar. Number 28, “You have been mistaken for another person of mixed heritage who does not resemble you,” brought…
Today the United States Government went into a partial shutdown. Also, I happened to have lunch with employees of the Georgia State Archives. (The past couple weeks I have worked on helping with working out the kinks of their move to the Board of Regents information technology infrastructure.) The restaurant where we ate appeared to…
My main page on quotes is Quotes to Make You Think. Additional ones can be found under the Quotes tag. Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. ― Franz Kafka No one can drive us crazy unless we…
Better Answers & How I Learned to Defrag My Brain first posts this video on Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Then it moves on to talking about Johnson’s blog post The Spark File. (Doesn’t Getting Things Done have something similar?) We have outgrown our ability to remember everything that…