My list won’t surprise you if you know me well. Continue reading →

Here’s a cool list of essential Life Skillz from Easily Distracted. The insides and workings of a computer, and how to replace and add components to one. How an operating system works. How to customize an operating system. File systems. … Continue reading →

I made this claim a couple of years ago When we create laws to prevent immoral behavior, we make society less moral. hoping that Jeff’s philosopher neighbor would confirm it as a well-known ethical principle. I just listened to a … Continue reading →

About ten years ago, I was very taken with The Straight Dope, and every now and then – and against my better judgment – I go back and read it for old times’ sake. The same things about the style … Continue reading →

One of my new favourite blogs, Secular Right, has an open thread on Ayn Rand. I have never met a real life objectivist but the ones I have come across online have been batshit crazy and they are always engaged … Continue reading →

Michael Shermer has a review of Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred. I’ve often wondered about the attempts to either explain phenomena like conscsiousness, free will and intelligence in terms of physics, chemistry and biology. Kauffman has written a book about … Continue reading →

In today’s NY Times, David Brooks’s column seems almost enlightened but there is an undercurrent of dishonesty about it. He characterizes the debate about the Nature of God as being between two groups of fundamentalists. One group – the assertive … Continue reading →

and…. The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and “American Idol” would go away, but I put up with them in return for … Continue reading →

In which Steven Pinker defends the notion that “Dignity Is a Useless Concept.” Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy–the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, … Continue reading →

One of the people who was involved in the Milgram experiment wrote his own story. In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often … Continue reading →