Month: January 2008

Suppose a stranger starts beating you with a stick for no reason other than his own entertainment. He’s got you cornered, and no one is around to help. Luckily for you, he loses his grip on the stick, and drops it. You grab his stick, and without it the stranger…

In a recent post I said that if elected president I would support the majority view for social issues. Readers jumped all over that as a recipe for oppressing minorities. Would that oppression happen? Most Americans are not gay, but the majority supports gay rights. Most Americans don’t want to…

In Yesterday’s Blog Post, I asked if the fact that all creatures with brains and eyes have some innate and individual sense of beauty is evidence of God. For the most part, believers said yes or maybe, and non-believers asked what is wrong with me. In fairness, I didn’t develop…

I wouldn’t want to be president. I worry enough about being assassinated for what I write on this blog. There’s no point in making it worse. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about how I would run my campaign. If I ran for president, I’d have to get past…

That got your attention, didn’t it? Scientists haven’t disproved evolution. But I found it interesting that some cosmologists are putting a lot of effort into doing just that, albeit indirectly. To be fair, in this context, the cosmologists can’t prove a negative. They can’t demonstrate that evolution didn’t happen. They…

When I was a kid growing up in a small town, and I imagined my future, I could think of maybe fifty types of careers. They were all the obvious ones: lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, banker, store clerk, mailman, cartoonist, etc. I always wonder how different the world would be if…

The other day I asked you to contribute nonsense lyrics that could be combined into a hit song, under the theory that many hit songs have nonsense lyrics, so writing them can’t be that hard. A band in Germany, called RIVO DREI (http://www.rivodrei.de/en/ [no longer available]) picked out the best…

In 1997 The Dilbert Future was published. One of my predictions was that the media would start killing celebrities just to generate new sensational headlines. I based this prediction on three inescapable truths: 1. The media can influence people’s actions2. Death is the most interesting form of news3. The news…

I confess: I’m a word nerd. I found it fascinating that when I asked you in the last post to describe yourself in one word, the following were typical of the non-joke responses: ComplicatedCuriousEccentricFlexibleMisunderstoodDeterminedInscrutableFabulousEclecticObliviousMoistProvocateurSkepticalAwesomeEnigmaticClever Then I did a Google search on positive personality adjectives, to see how they line up…

Suppose you had to pick one word to describe yourself. Your first reaction, I assume, is that it is impossible. You are so many different things, in so many different contexts. No one word can capture more than a tiny slice. Now suppose I ask you to think of people…

The FDA has decided that meat from clones is safe. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18110949 This is a big relief, because I have a long term goal of cloning myself and then eating my clone. I don’t have a compelling reason to do it, but most goals are like that. No one really needs…

Recently I discovered I am a talented lyricist. This came as a big surprise to me. It all came together when I realized most songs I enjoy are gibberish. I can TOTALLY write gibberish! For decades I believed my favorite songs revolved around deep thoughts artistically embedded in metaphors and…