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 ...
Over the last 12 years or so my writing has changed, and not necessarily for the better. As I recuperated following seven weeks of radiation treatments for tonsil cancer, I happened to come across a printout of an assigned essay I wrote as an undergrad in 2008. At the risk of sounding immodest, I was surprised by how much clearer and cleaner my earlier prose was than much of my later writing. So what the heck happened? As I reread some of my other undergrad writing, what struck me was my focus on sharing the joy, pleasure, and satisfaction of learning about the world around us. Around 2010, the focus and tenor of my writing morphed into an outlet for my frustration and annoyance at—to be blunt—the stupidity of large numbers of my fellow human beings. As a result, my writing became denser and more detailed, increasing the likelihood og my flying off on a tangent—my favorite trig function—but also took much of the joy and pleasure out of the writing process. Though ...
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...
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