Today I Learned

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...

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...

Emo Philips, Opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theatre Today I learned the word “ paraprosdokian ”. According to Wikipedia, the...

Tuwiuwok Bluff, via Haven, Maine fan wiki When I thought about the TV series Haven , I remembered vague details, and thought it must have...

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...

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...

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

“‘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...

“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...

The Greek philosopher Diogenes is famous for carrying a lantern during the day, claiming he was “searching for an honest man”. Yet...

“Why can’t we all just get along?” This was the question asked by the incomparable Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks! Nicholson’s...

“That is the question!” Or is it? The problem with many questions nowadays lies in the motivations behind the asking. By quoting out of...

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 ),...

Some films age well. An example is the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still , which was fairly successful when it was originally...

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...

A farmer asked a physicist to help him figure out how to increase milk production. After gathering data and studying the problem, the...