Category: Philosophy


  • My main page on quotes is Quotes to Make You Think. Additional ones can be found under the Quotes tag. As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself. — Shunryu Suzuki I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much…

  • Re-Imagining Work

    Guess Drive made me think about happiness at work more. How can we get people more engaged, more productive, and happier at work? Is technology part of the problem — and could it also be part of the solution? Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer at Microsoft, imagines what might be possible if more organisations embraced the…

  • Over the past couple weeks Georgia Public Radio ran their fall funding campaign for National Public Radio. (We get to go through this again in the spring.) These funding campaigns are the least I listen to GPB. And they actively discourage me from wanting to donate. So when the campaigners lament about how so few…

  • The Science of Healing Places was on the radio this morning. A statement near the end to the effect that healing is life or a part of life reminded me of something. Entropy, aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the force behind why when you break a glass it cannot be reversed and come back…

  • Motivation 3.0

    ,

    A recent event reminded me I should read Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I picked it up in August to read, but since my copy is a hard back the Georgia heat would warp it, so I left it forgotten in the bedside table. So here I am, thoroughly…

  • This passage comes from the book Big Bang. [George] Gamow was infamous for his limericks and his sometimes offbeat application of physics. On one occasion, he argued God lived 9.5 light years from the Earth. This estimate  relied on the fact that in 1904, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, churches across Russia had…

  • Blue Blood

    One of the many times at the beach as a teen, I recall a horseshoe crab and something blue on the sand near it. Years later I learned their blood is blue. Our blood is red due to hemoglobin which contains iron. Iron binds with oxygen to make rust. Rust is red. So our blood…

  • I found 50 Experiences of Racially Mixed people (PDF) interesting. That Americans consider race to be a singular identity makes sense. Claiming to be biracial or multiracial makes no sense in that paradigm. The experiences listed were very familiar. Number 28, “You have been mistaken for another person of mixed heritage who does not resemble you,” brought…

  • Today the United States Government went into a partial shutdown. Also, I happened to have lunch with employees of the Georgia State Archives. (The past couple weeks I have worked on helping with working out the kinks of their move to the Board of Regents information technology infrastructure.) The restaurant where we ate appeared to…