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 …
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Rush 2112 album cover.
We all watch the world evolving from one where individuality and self-reliance was highly valued to one where social saturation and centralized everything is the norm. If knowledge is power (it is), then more and more power is concentrated …
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 …
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Time's a cruel-hearted bastard.
Nature's a cold-hearted bitch.
Both will surely wear me down,
and scoff at my last twitch.
From the day that I was born,
Until the day I die,
They push and prod and poke and pinch,
and dare me to defy.
Their hand is cold. So …
read moreSome time ago, one of the GPIO pins on WeatherPi stopped working. It was the one the tipping bucket rain gauge was attached to. I was able to move the wire to another pin, and change my program. Problem solved.
When the rain gauge stopped working again, I assumed I …
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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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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