I have only now, in the evening of my life, come to understand that civilized society is a dream, not a reality.
Day after day the paint peels a little more off the facade of my world. The civilized world. The 'First World'. As a species, we homo sapiens had …
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UNTENABLE adjective
Something that cannot be defended or maintained. A situation that is not sustainable for the long term.
Arisotle suggested reason, that is, rational thought, was the thing that mainly differentiated human-kind from other animate life-forms on the Earth. Since then …
read moreThere's been quite a bit of stuff published in the past few weeks about the "dangers of spreadsheets". Excel in particular is being spotlighted as a dangerous tool hurting millions of people.
James Vowles, Robin Harris, Tim Worstall of Forbes are a few such …
read moreWe are full to overflowing. Synapses connecting, linking, birthing ideas.
Surely the world needs to know what's on our mind. Our thoughts, our griefs, our passions, our angst. Our burden will not be confined. Our compulsion to exposit is strong. The urge …
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There is an attitude that permeates our culture these days. I know you've felt it, it's impossible to ignore.
It's "me first" and "winning is everything" with a strong dose of "make the money now, worry about the consequences later" tossed …
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Image: It all started here: a condenser fan motor.
When I was a child I rarely needed a good reason to do a thing. When asked why I had done a thing, quite often my first response was, "Uh, I dunno. Just …
read moreIt seems easy enough. Just think about everything you know not existing. Go ahead. Do that.
Nothing is a term we use a lot, but it's actually a conundrum, a paradox, a falsehood. It is not possible to conceptualize nothing; to create …
read moreIn 500 B.C. that may well have been true. Even 100 years ago, that may still have seemed true.
However, the expanding mass of humanity has engendered new perspectives, and from those perspectives we draw new conclusions.
Careful examination of the …
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We are either the giver or the receiver in interactions with our world. We stimulate, they react. They stimulate, we react. Both sides provide feedback to the other. This goes on …
read moreI recently read an article about how to speak in a manner that would make me sound more confident. There were good points in it.
While the writers were technically correct, their advice was sharply focused on a single aspect of communicating: presentation. There is much more to communicating than …
read moreNothing has really changed. Sure, we speak with sophistication, wear finely woven fabrics and adorn our feet with coverings to enhance or protect. We are able to keep ourselves out of uncomfortable circumstances for the most part. We adjust the way we smell to make close proximity less revolting, or …
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We engineering types want to know how things work. We'll spend tons of time learning how things works so that we can make things do what we want them to do. So …
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I want to talk about truth. ("Oh boy, here he goes . . . ")
You might be inclined to think the definition of truth is pretty well settled. A lot of people believe that, and for a lot of those people, there's no need to even talk about what truth is. So I'm …
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I don't think we will EVER get there. I've been sitting in this back seat for most of my life. Every time I ask the people in the front seat how much longer, they say stuff like, "About two minutes less than the last time you asked."
The day is …
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My dear mother gave me one gift that has been more valuable to me than anything I know or can imagine. She taught me to laugh at myself.
It's easy to laugh at other people or at situations that …
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We are not all the same height. We are not all the same build. We have different smiles, different hair, different tastes.
We do not all make the same first …
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