I will be expounding on everything under the Sun
On the one hand: We now have secret laws, with secret interpretations, by secret courts. There is massive surveillance of everyday activities of all US citizens. All Internet activity and phone conversations are monitored. Some recent revelations approach the farcical: “Who Are We at War With? That’s Classified”. Taken at face value, the above facts could make one think we are living…
One day, when my daughter was seven years old, we were looking at some old pictures and there was a picture with “Santa” visiting some gathering of children. I said “Oh, there’s Santa”. She said “No, that’s just Bob (a family friend) dressed up as Santa”. I said “How do you know?”. She went on to use some logical arguments, based on how…
When I hear people mention that the electoral red/blue state map of the US looks mainly red (which is even more pronounced when you look at the red/blue divide at the county level ), and which I’m reminded of when reading Paul Ryan’s statement about Obama winning due high urban turnout, the thing that comes to mind is simply: “Land can’t vote. Get used to it.” No…
While looking at the medal rankings of the London 2012 Olympics, the US is the clear winner, with 104 total medals over the second country’s 88 medals, and 46 Gold medals of the second country’s 38 Gold medals. China, Great Britain, and Russia also make a strong showing. Below are the top 10 countries: However, since the US is around 300 million people, and China is even larger (1.3…
One day when trying to figure out what I really, truly wanted to do with my life, I realized that it’s hard to isolate what it is you personally want from the extraneous burden of satisfying people’s explicit or implicit expectations of you. When I tried to imagine how happy/content I would be if I did an MBA, or got a philosophy degree, or opened my own business, stayed on my current…
Originally posted June 26, 2012
It has been evident since 2000, after the Gore-Bush decision debacle, that the US Supreme Court is less a bastion of Constitutional Truth, and more a motley crew of partisans & ideologues, who were selected based on accidents of history regarding which justice died during whose administration, and who can and will put their ideology/party before any quest for Constitutional Truth. Since then, with…
Imagine some aliens for whom our solar system is an atom in their universe. Also, suppose their physicists are studying the Earth like our physicists study subatomic particles in our universe. One can imagine them discovering some mass flowing/moving on the surface of this Earth, and it turns out that this moving mass corresponds to all the Earth’s animals and humans. Since we are too small…
I’ve been thinking for a while about what effect jobs have on the human psyche, in particular jobs that have projects that last for months or years on end. I call these “jobs with memory” because when you show up for work the next day, there is a memory of not only what you did the previous day, but what you did for the past several months or years. Project decisions you made two…
A few nights ago, I awoke from a nightmare. Instantly, I felt that familiar feeling of relief, as I realized that the situation I had been in and the problems I had were all fake and no longer had any bearing on my real life. I went back to sleep, and a little later started having a second nightmare. When I woke up in the middle of this nightmare, as I instantly realized that the terrifying and…
A few years ago, I was landing in San Diego for a couple days’ visit. As my plane was touching down, I thought that I could have called my friend Mike* to pick me up from the airport. That would have allowed us to catch up, since we hadn’t seen each other for a while. He’s a busy guy, and I would be busy for most of the trip, so the ride from the airport and a possible lunch…
I’ve always been a very scientific-minded person, and I guess I implicitly assumed that once science had advanced enough, perhaps at some time in the distant future, there would no longer be any practitioners of unscientific mumbo jumbo, such as psychics and fortune tellers. Science would so thoroughly describe the world we live in and so thoroughly debunk psychics that no one would ever…
If you do an image search for ‘iPad case’, what you will find will be very similar to what’s shown in the image below Basically, people want cases that (a) prop the screen up and (b) have a keyboard. The thing is, we already have a gadget that does these two things. It’s called a laptop. I originally bought an iPad, and after holding the screen for a long time, I bought a…
The cliche that “life is what you make of it” is actually true. In a free and developed country, whatever job, friends, or relationships you have are all dependent on you. You have the power to change any of them, just by choosing to do so. And whether you become a wildly successful author, artist, inventor, entrepreneur, or marry a wonderful person, or have a fantastic set of friends,…
It started dawning on me recently that the things I read in any given day (on news sites, in magazines, newspapers, blogs, internet forums, etc) are all mostly useless. That is, after reading them I am in almost no way better than if I had not read them. And yet, I still go through the daily rituals of reading my usual set of information sources. It seems like many others are reaching similar…
Last night at the 2012 Grammys, Lady Gaga sat there in an expected-by-now loud costume and saw the three awards that she was nominated for pass her by and go to Adele. Moments like these bring to mind the expression “It’s the music, stupid” (to paraphrase Bill Clinton ). When Lady Gaga burst onto the scene with “Just Dance”, it was such a great tune, a refreshing…
Yesterday I saw a truck with two incongruous elements: a big cross on the left and a huge National Rifle Association sticker on the right. Whether these two specific items are actually incompatible with each other may be debatable, but they did remind me of the strange make-up of beliefs and ideologies of the two political parties in the US. Specifically, it’s strange that there is a large…
I was watching Frontline a while ago about domestic spying by the NSA, CIA, etc, and they were talking about the fact that all of our day-to-day actions leave electronic trails that can be traced, more and more places are getting video cameras (e.g. they are nearly ubiquitous in Las Vegas), and the data mining capabilities of computers keep increasing. The logical conclusion is that, at some…
One of the principal arguments against net neutrality regulations is that there are some websites that simply cause too much traffic to providers’ networks, so therefore, these websites should pay more than other companies to have their data carried over the network. In addition, if the networks don’t get this extra money from the data-heavy websites, this “would prevent…
When your car is new, you take it for granted, and what dominates discussions with your friends are all the wonderful places you will go with your car, without ever giving much thought to how your car will get you there. When your car is old, it starts to malfunction, and what dominates discussions with your friends is the state of your car, what’s broken and what’s working, and tips…