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.
I love to read. I love books and the written word in general. One of the greatest pleasures of my life is to curl up on my couch or stretch out on my bed with a good book‒a real book, with a binding and pages made of paper‒no batteries required. I like having good books on my shelves, and when invited into someone else's home, the presence or absence of tangible, physical reading material, and when present, the subject(s) of the reading material can often, fairly or unfairly, inform my opinion of those whose home it is. I am not rich, or even well-off, by any measure, but I am proud of the depth and breadth of the works in my library of bound books. As long as there are at least some people that like to collect things like stamps, baseball cards, music and motion pictures recorded on a physical medium (i.e. CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays), I suspect there will also be those that will enjoy, and continue to purchase physical, bound books. From a marketing standpoint, if book publishing w...
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...
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