Memories of the 28th Century

I don't meet everyone, but the people that I do run into seem to be less intelligent than people used to be, and they seem to be less willing to accept correction. I fear that Donald Trump is responsible for part of that. When people who have IQ's in the 80's and low 90's saw one of their own as president of the U.S.A., they seem to have gotten the idea that if he can do that, then I should do whatever I want to do, and no one can condemn me. Part of this thinking is that I have been among the lowest ...

In these modern times ignorance has been winning against knowledge and science. Stupidity is more admired than intelligence. Fallacy is more common than logic. Maybe I’m just getting crotchety in my middle age, but I find it absurd that ignorant people hold their ignorance with pride and expect other people to treat their misunderstandings about the world and what is in it as if they were actual facts.

I started thinking about this in regard to an interview that Trump had with Hugh ...

I asked someone what I should write about next, and the response that I got was, "Mysteries, the unknowable."
That is a fairly good topic, and it is somewhat related to what I have written along the lines of consciousness, epistemology, and Turing test, etc. Then that person suggested that I write about god, the unknowable. That's completely different, because there are many Gods and Goddesses, and most of them are quite knowable, and some are downright friendly, so that can't ...

I recently saw posters looking for canvassers to collect money for Clean Water Action. I suspect that this is a scam, because in the U.S.A. surface water is cleaner now than it was before Europeans started to settle here. There are a few particular places where the water is polluted, but just fifty years ago much of the surface water was polluted. I still wouldn’t drink from most streams, but that’s because I know what giardia is, and there are problems around farms and after rain storms, but there ...