Category: Philosophy


  • An Even Better Reason to Celebrate has a nice longer version of this quote from a NYT OpEd piece on tomorrow being the bicentennial for the abolution of slave trade to the United States. WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of…

  • Emergence

    Right…. Forgot there is a term for growing complexity in the Universe: Emergence

  • Back when I was Catholic, the two masses I enjoyed the most were Christmas and Easter. I listen to Christmas music throughout the year. Birth and death are a fascinating duality of life. A material death is simple… The Second Law of Thermodynamics represents the scattering of the particles of which we are composed. Life…

  • Being single, people offer up lots of places to find love offline and more frequently of late online. Almost everyone knows of the common profile browsing or question testing dating web sites. This site scares the hell out of me…. Welcome to a new era of human relationships. We’re the only introduction service that creates…

  • Much of my adolescence was spent bullying my male peers with snide remarks. While, I don’t think there is one kind of humor, I can see part of humor coming from male hormones. Creatures with horns butt heads. We human males use humor to express our dominance. The best is the sly offhand comment where…

  • Is the Internet really a bad invention? According to Doris Lessing, yes. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing,…

  • The xenophobes around us have cause to celebrate. We are making it difficult for aliens to find us. As Frank Drake explains for in an article, our improvements in transmissions means less bleeds out into space. The parallel he makes is alien civilizations may only have a 60 year blip where they pushed massive amounts…

  • Melungeon

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    Mom dropped me a note last night. She ran across the word melungeon while doing some genealogy research. It describes someone who is of European, African, and Native American descent. It was popular in the Appalachian Mountains and similar in use to Mulatto in being a negative term. I haven’t talked about this much on…

  • Albert Einstein Memorial, originally uploaded by Ezra F. This morning I ran across an email asking for permission to include this photo in the Schmap: Washington DC travel guide. They are not asking for offering any money to publish it. I find it interesting they like this one. I gave permission for them to use…