Memories of the 28th Century

A number of years ago, an old friend told me about the book that he had just read. The premise of the novel was that humans do not actually use speech to communicate; speech is an attention getting signal only; the actual communication is direct , mind-to-mind. We were staying at a friend's house, and the next morning someone else who was staying there was looking at albums to play, and mentioned something by the Moody Blues. I was not wildly enthusiastic about the Moody Blues, but I like some of ...

Back in 2013 I started writing about the demise of the major political parties in the U.S.A., and it is taking a long time for them to get with the program, but it appears that we are approaching the end. W and the tea party fatally wounded the Republican Party, so much so that they nominated Trump and even got him elected. The final coup de grace will take place in the Fall election. The real problem will not be Trump’s defeat, but the attempt to put the party back together together with the attempts ...

I was thinking about writing about the misfortune that people are acting up about racism, but I was listening to TV coverage of an electrical storm that has produced a tornado, when the reporters said many things that were false. It was clear that they didn't know much about weather and probably never studied meteorology, and they certainly never bothered reading the National Weather Service information about warnings and watches. They tried to make the thunderstorm sound like something exciting ...

The concept of reality being a computer simulation has been popular for some time, and I understand that is the hook in The Matrix, which I have never seen. One of the earliest serious consideration of the concept was Bostrom’s paper in 2001 (link below).

Bostrom’s concept runs into trouble with Occam’s Razor; it introduces a complication that is unnecessary. I have never seen the point of creating a huge simulation, when it would be easier to simply go and take a look. Bostrom ...

I don’t espouse conspiracy theories, but something along those lines is the best explanation that I can find for the trend in recent decades away from high quality foods and toward foods that are minimally nutritious and sometimes toxic. When I was younger, beans were eaten seldom and always properly cooked, but in the last few decades there has been a trend toward eating more beans that are poorly cooked beans and various bean derivatives, even though it is well known that beans contain toxins ...