Posted in Books

The Astrologers Can No Longer Predict The Future

I haven’t looked at a weather report today but last night they were saying possibly a foot of snow. The weather people run a Monte Carlo simulation then incorrectly take an average of the results. This is stupid because the European model is sometimes so far off the American models that the average is wrong, […]

Sometimes There Is No Movie

Conversation: K: It just ocurred to me. A major flaw in the premise of the movie “Signs “. Why would anyone go to a planet that contained such vast quantities of a substance so extremely toxic to them? Me: USUALLY they don’t. In those cases the native species all die and there is no movie. […]

Best Books EVER

A conversation with my husband: DH: How could you not have read “Tale of Two Cities”? It has the most famous opening line ever… Me: “Call me Ishmael?” DH: Ok, the second most famous opening line ever. As it happens, we read the same authors but different books. In grade school I slogged through Dickens’ […]

Epiphanies

Cthulhu: Genetic risk and stressful early infancy join to increase risk for schizophrenia Me: Dr. Fuller Torrey says schizophrenia caused by cat shit. Pfffft! Cthulhu: Ah, the Toxoplasmosis link? Yeah, I’m a little wary about that myself. I’d have to see more data on that published than has been. Me: Empirical data shows that sometimes […]

My 1990s Reading List

Found an partial list of books I read in the late ’90s to early ’00s. In some cases I had read earlier books in a set and included them in the same year. In the interest of actually publishing the blog entry, many entries have no Amazon link yet. 4/1997, J. Frøyland, Introduction to Chaos […]

Vagus Nerve & the Mind-Body Connection

The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve, a honking big nerve that runs from your skull, down your chest and into your abdomen. The punch-in-the-gut feeling of a jolt of adrenalin/the start of an anxiety attack is carried on the vagus nerve. The usual paradigm for emotions is they start in the brain. Most of […]

On Meddling

“Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do […]

Man’s Uniqueness

Man’s uniqueness among species rests upon his capacity to perfect the arrangements for his own Judgement Day, instead of waiting for nature to do it for him. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations

The Power of Irrationality

If you haven’t read Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament” run out and get a copy. She is a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins and is bipolar herself. “I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital […]

Stone Him With Stones

Just in case anyone is still complaining that Islamists are violent, here’s something from the KJV bible. It’s pretty clear what a good Christian is supposed to do to non-Christians. Deuteronomy 13 6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy […]

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