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“In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
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Elbows Up!
Mark Carney & Mike Myers, via YouTube Canadians are an odd breed. While I think most of us love our country, we do not brag about it, or...
2 days ago5 min read

Drug of Choice?
Is Religion Like a Drug? | Rev | BBC Comedy Greats, via YouTube “You’ll feel that God reached out to you with his love.” “What does that...
Mar 195 min read


Pragmatic Optimism
Emo Philips, Opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theatre Today I learned the word “ paraprosdokian ”. According to Wikipedia, the...
Mar 125 min read

Castles Made of Sand
Jimi Hendrix Castles Made of Sand is a classic, by one of the truly great musicians. If you are not familiar with it, go find it and...
Jan 225 min read


Blue Sky
Duane Allman, Fillmore East, 6-Jun-1971, via Wikimedia Commons It’s amazing what you can find if you look. All I did was search for songs...
Jan 153 min read

Shall we play a game?
WarGames, 1983: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXzNo0vR_dU I can only hear that question in the voice of the computer Joshua, from the...
Dec 18, 20244 min read

The First Programmer
The exception that proves the rule . We’ve all heard the phrase, but I think most people use it without understanding it or knowing where...
Nov 27, 20245 min read


AI Big Brother
Artificial Intelligence is- Hey! Come on! I haven’t even said anything yet! Ahem. As I was saying, Artificial Intelligence is a term that...
Nov 20, 20245 min read

Who controls the past
“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” George Orwell,...
Nov 6, 20245 min read


Let’s Get Weird!
Words are weird. The word “weird” is a particularly weird word. Aside from the spelling, the way it has been used is hard to pin down,...
Oct 23, 20244 min read


Welcome to the Rage Machine!
One of my all-time favourite songs is Welcome to the Machine , by Pink Floyd. While the song appeared on the 1975 album Wish You Were...
Oct 16, 20246 min read


Rasputin
It’s been more than two years since I last posted, so I’m trying to remember which buttons to press to make this happen. Life has a...
Oct 9, 20245 min read


Move the Earth!
“Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth” “δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω” Archimedes is described as a mathematician,...
Jun 26, 20224 min read

Silos!
“Why can’t we all just get along?” This was the question asked by the incomparable Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks! Nicholson’s...
May 1, 20223 min read


Just asking questions!
“That is the question!” Or is it? The problem with many questions nowadays lies in the motivations behind the asking. By quoting out of...
Apr 24, 20224 min read


Relativity!
M. C. Escher has always been one of my favourite artists. From the moment I first saw his work (I think it might have been Waterfall), I...
Apr 17, 20224 min read


The Name is the Thing!
Some films age well. An example is the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was fairly successful when it was originally released...
Apr 10, 20223 min read

All in this Together!
When I write, I sometimes have a topic in mind, and look for an interesting way to introduce it. This time, I ended up going down an...
Mar 27, 20224 min read

Moo!
A farmer asked a physicist to help him figure out how to increase milk production. After gathering data and studying the problem, the...
Feb 13, 20225 min read

Lingua Franca!
Recently, I was listening to an old episode of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, (actually, episode 803, dated 28-Nov-2020), in which...
Feb 6, 20226 min read
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