Memories of the 28th Century

I don’t often think about the moral or other principles by which people live their lives, or try to live their lives, but the question came up recently as to whether or why people live according to what they read. Unfortunately, the question was poorly written, so the answers were not what was being sought; the asker intended to ask why people didn’t actually live by the moral principles that they had learned, and that is a valid question. There are several ways to regard the answers and the question. ...

I don't bother with conspiracy theories when I can avoid them, but today I went into a coffee place and they had a question posted by a register for a get it right and save a whole ten cents. I usually know the correct answer, and I did today. The question was "Which branch is the Federal Reserve part of?" Obviously it is part of the Administrative branch. The clerk looked at the answer, and it said that is was privately owned. I was shocked that they would have that. I thought that foolishness ...

I have known a good number of very intelligent people, and with a few exceptions (people with Asperger’s Syndrome) those intelligent people were perfectly willing to admit error when they learned that they were wrong. Unfortunately, that seems not to be true of some other people.

A few days ago I was talking to a college student, and the matter of climate change came up. I explained the major problems with the matter as it has been presented in the press, and my student friend expressed ...

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (From “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” by Arthur Conan Doyle)

Doyle presented an interesting idea, but I have to take exception to it; although it may just be a result of how we think of probability. There are some things that are possible that are so improbable that they might as well be impossible. It is easy to look at normal probability distributions ...

Whether one believes that evolution is factual or that everything was created on October 23, 4004 BCE is of no consequence, because there has been evolutionary change since 4004 BCE, but that may have changed within the last couple of centuries. It is possible that human evolution has been brought to a stop. I suspect that this hiatus will fail in the end, but it may have some ill effects, or this hiatus may simply turn out to be a different step in evolution. The specific matter to which I refer ...