Today I Learned

Nine Princes in Amber, cover, via OpenLibrary.org My Dad didn’t particularly like Roger Zelazny’s work. He thought it was a bit too...

Monty Python – Spam, via Wikipedia Even fifty years later, the influence of Monty Python  is felt, as older generations reminisce and...

Joni Mitchell, 1983, via Wikipedia I’ve been hearing the song Both Sides Now  since earliest childhood, but I had no idea just how many...

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...

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...

Skeptical Science, John Cook, via Wikimedia Commons Words are fun! Today, let’s ask whether the words “equivalence” and “equivalency” are...

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...

Thomas Bayes (maybe), via Wikipedia The portrait above might be that of Thomas Bayes ... but probably not. Perfect! I wanted to talk...

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...

Artificial Intelligence is- Hey! Come on! I haven’t even said anything yet! Ahem. As I was saying, Artificial Intelligence is a term that...

Let’s talk about the end of the world, shall we? Or maybe not. Fortunately, some stories of impending doom are overestimated, and some...

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” George Orwell,...

Contrary to the apparent belief of some in the world today, the book Nineteen Eighty-Four  was not intended to be an instruction manual...

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,...

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...

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...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began (need to be specific here, to avoid confusion ...), I recall a lot of people emphasizing the need to...

“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,...

Who’d have thought that music could be political? Or that musicians might have political views? Let’s take the song Killing in the Name...

As I have noted before, I tend to avoid politics as a primary focus of my writing. But this last Ontario election worries me quite a...