This disturbing photo was taken by an acquaintance about a week ago. While this is, of course, a true statement, the disturbing part is that they seem to think reason is a bad thing.
When I was a child in the early 1970’s, I was diagnosed as being “hyperactive,” today I would have been diagnosed as having Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Many of those who know me best today think that I still have ADHD. Normally, I like my somewhat scatterbrained “stream of consciousness” intellectual style, one way in which I describe myself is “The tangent is my favorite trig function, I’m always flying off on one.” However, as a 42 y/o student going for an Electrical Engineering degree, in classes with students half my age, many of which were in honors math classes throughout high school, while little old me got straight D’s in 9 th grade algebra, I found I had to work that much harder at putting in a 6 hour concentrated study session and staying focused throughout. This is now harder than it once was; when the “math light” however dimly, came on in my early 20’s, I started taking college courses and found that through a ...
I am continually frustrated when I hear people in public forums, i.e. news programs, letters to the editor and the like, make bald assertions that in 5 minutes of web searching can shown to be without merit. This piece was originally written in response to a letter to the editor published in the Rapid City Journal the week of 22 April, 2007. My original reply was never published due to length. As I observed to the editor of the Journal , it is pathetically easy to spout a great deal of nonsense in 200 words or less but to clear up nonsense takes far more than 200 words, especially if one cares about the truth and in communicating it clearly and in enough detail to be compelling. In the original letter to which this was meant as a reply, the author asserted that it would take thousands of years for the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere to double so how could anyone be so gullible as to think there was any real danger? He sought to make his case by throwi...
Our courts go to great lengths to ensure that trials are as fair as possible. One way in which they do this is the thorough screening potential jurors are subjected to. This is intended to not only exclude those that have already made up their minds about the case but also weed out those candidates that have even a subtle bias that would prevent them from dispassionately evaluating the evidence and testimony presented in court. Should a potential juror that has already reached their own decision about the case misrepresent themselves during the screening process in order to sit on the jury, simply put, they have lied. They were selected under false pretenses and are quite literally, bearing "false witness" to the proceedings, a violation of the 9th Commandment (the 8th for Roman Catholics or Lutherans). Were such a thing to happen, and it unfortunately does from time to time, the juror is guilty of the crime of perjury. The procedures used by our courts (screening of potentia...
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