Tag: General nonsense

Holy crap. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a positive response to a new comic. (See yesterday’s comments.) It looks as if about 80% of you like it a lot. Let me put that in perspective. Dilbert is in 2,000 newspapers, and I would guess that only 20% of…

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, when people associate with a point of view, they begin to lose objectivity. For example, if you were President of the Unicorn Association of America, and spent your days explaining how wonderful unicorns are, you would become married to that viewpoint. If 400 peer-reviewed…

In yesterday’s post, I reprinted an e-mail I allegedly received from a 10-year old fan named Bobby. Many of you believe it was a hoax. Some say the kid seemed too smart to be real. Others point out that he could have easily Googled the answers to the questions he…

Every now and then I get an e-mail that makes me feel optimistic about the future of humanity. Last week, a 10-year old sent me a fan letter. I verified his age with his father and got permission to reprint it here. Remember, he’s ten. Dear Mr. Scott Raymond Adams,…

I always wonder why people do research to discover the obvious. Now researchers have “discovered” that smart people have less intercourse than people of average intelligence. http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php One reason the dimwitted get so much action is that they tend to be more attractive than smart people. That’s not a coincidence….

Okay, I have enough responses to the previous post asking how many of you would enter the doorway in the fog. Without crunching the numbers of my biased sample, it looks as if 95% of you would pass through the doorway, regardless of gender. But that wasn’t all I was…

Imagine yourself floating in a foggy environment. You can see only one thing in front of you. It’s an open doorway to somewhere. Without knowing anything else, including where the doorway leads, or what your needs and desires are at the moment, or even why you are in this foggy…

In yesterday’s post I described an argument that reminded people of something called Pascal’s Wager. In a nutshell, Pascal was a dude who argued you should consider Christianity because if it’s true, the downside of not believing is eternal Hell. But if you become a Christian and there’s no God,…

Lately, with the popularity of President Bush in the low twenties, and the Supreme court tilting toward the right, and no one trusting voting results, I wonder what it would take to spark a revolution, or a coup. The thing with history is that nothing seems likely until after it…

Can we ever be sure about anything in life? Is a feeling of 99% certainty enough to say you “know” something? Or do you need to feel 99.9999999999% certain before you’re willing to commit? If you say you need to be 100% certain, you don’t understand how human brains work….

I hate waiting for my computer to do something, or a web page to open. Why can’t someone invent a replacement for the little hourglass, or the browser progress bar, that is more interesting to look at? For example, I think it would be hilarious to see a little graphic…

People always ask me where my ideas come from. It feels as if my ideas originate in my mind, in a something-from-nothing way. But sometimes I think my brain is some sort of zeitgeist vacuum, sucking in scraps of ideas already floating around the universe until there’s enough of one…

When I was a kid, it was common knowledge that you would get cramps and drown if you went swimming within an hour of eating. It never occurred to me that if eating and swimming was a deadly combination, the bottom of every pool would be covered with corpses. I…

It’s hard to talk about immigration without sounding like a racist. So let me just say this and get it out of the way: I think Mexicans are superior to me. By “me,” I am referring to people who are part English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, German, and Native American….