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March 30, 2011 02:27 PM UTC --
"Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds." —John Gray, in Straw Dogs
For most of my life I've been the most skeptical person in the room -- the one . . .
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November 23, 2010 07:36 PM UTC --
Genealogy is a treasure hunt: a quest for truth, or at least for plausible hypotheses. I've recently been exploring my family tree on http://ancestry.com (which has lots of resources and has just . . .
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July 04, 2010 04:04 PM UTC --
Can you find Flanders in this recent ad?
Not hard, since it's smack in the middle between Holland, France and Belgium. But wait, isn't Flanders part of Belgium? Well yes, technically. . . .
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July 04, 2010 12:52 PM UTC --
The things that I "believe" divide into three broad categories: Empirical beliefs, hypotheses and true beliefs.
First are things that I'm confident (but not certain) are true. I'll call them "empirical . . .
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January 20, 2010 06:05 AM UTC --
The fun in solving a sudoku is using your brain so it's only a curiosity to see how someone programmed MathLab to automatically solve sudokus: http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/2009/clevescorner.html?s_cid=MLD0110naTA1&s_v1=6977238_1-B3971 . . .
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January 13, 2010 10:35 PM UTC --
America is ungovernable. Everyone knows this, and the health care debacle makes it glaringly obvious. The only way to correct this is a revolution, either violent or constitutional. . . .
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August 23, 2009 06:54 PM UTC --
I thought it would be fun to post some of my poems here. Fortunately, I've only written around a dozen in the past two decades so it won't be too onerous. I'll add them as I run across them . . .
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July 03, 2009 03:45 PM UTC --
Here are links gleaned from various sources.
Find but can't book:
http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch (search +/- one day)
http://www.kayak.com/ (omits AA, request weekly alert) . . .
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April 17, 2009 07:36 PM UTC --
Multiple choice tests are a staple of education, because they are relatively objective and easy to grade. The pattern is familiar to every student: One correct answer and several wrong answers. . . .
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March 20, 2009 07:16 PM UTC --
I'm fortunate in the fact that there isn't much that I truly regret, even though I have made a lot of mistakes over the years. In fact I recall only three occasions that truly give rise to the emotion . . .
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March 17, 2009 05:39 PM UTC --
I think a common idea about happiness and sadness is mistaken. There often seems to be an assumption that happiness and sadness are the positive and negative of a single quality, so that you can . . .
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December 10, 2008 02:19 PM UTC --
I don't know a lot about Kant's philosophy but I suspect that his Categorical Imperative may point the way to resolving the knotty problem of people "saving seats." I don't . . .
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December 01, 2008 03:20 AM UTC --
Chiang Mai, Thailand. December 1, 2008.
The political situation here is Byzantine, and changes by the hour, but the underlying cause is easily grasped: Poor, working class, rural and . . .
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August 31, 2008 02:31 PM UTC --
I got stuck on the sudoku in today's Boston Globe and had to guess to solve it. This has never happened to me on a Pappocom puzzle so I must be missing a logical inference. Can you point . . .
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February 13, 2008 03:03 PM UTC --
I broke a tooth a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't surprised, since it was a much-filled rear molar with a visible crack. Yesterday my dentist installed my beautiful new crown: shiny, perfectly . . .
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September 01, 2007 07:53 AM UTC --
The debacle in Iraq has exposed America's weakness as a nation builder. Despite our military supremacy we were unable to transform a brutal dictatorship into a functioning democracy. To . . .
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April 17, 2007 08:52 AM UTC --
Here is another Sudoku I encountered on my New Zealand trip, this one rightly characterized as "diabolical":
. . .
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April 06, 2007 07:56 AM UTC --
On my recent trip to New Zealand I encountered the first sudoku that required me to guess. Up to now I've always been able to solve them -- sooner or later -- by applying the system described . . .
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April 03, 2007 01:00 PM UTC --
When was the last time you ran into a promising approach to either Iraq or Afghanistan? An op-ed article in Sunday's Boston Globe by Robert Rotberg introduced me to an idea which I think could . . .
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April 02, 2007 08:32 AM UTC --
I was annoyed yesterday to see the phrase "peak my interest" in the paper. Of course you, as a sophisticated Gather member, know that this should be "pique my interest." . . .
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