First Blog

Why did the chicken cross the road???  This is an old one, with a few new entries.   When my dad played this one on me, he delighted to say, "To get to the other side."  Ha, ha.  But leave it to the professionals to interpret.  In the compilation below, there are too many authors to attribute - indeed I don't know most of them.  My humble contributions are the last two, though I feel certain they are not original to me.   The pleasure of this piece is in the humor of extravagant interpretations in philosophy, politics, physics, mathematics, and sociology. Aristotle: To actualize its potential. Plato: For the greater good. Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road Sigmund Freud: The fact that you thought that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity. Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you. Martin Luther King: It had a dream

There are two infamous publications in the world of scholarly activities, "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" and "How to Lie with Statistics."   One is a spoof on science truth published regularly (http://www.jir.com/); the second is an actual book.   The journal is interesting and funny.   But the book is well known to all practitioners, and the best of them know how to use statistics as needed to make a point, a claim, or a theory.    In a recent NY Times article by George Johnson (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/new-truths-that-only-one-can-see.html) the veracity of many publications are taken to the veracity task.   It is claimed that up to 80% of all publications are in error or just plain false. To quote from the article "It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassur

As most everyone knows, the NSA is compiling meta-data on us all.  This means that phone numbers each of us dials, the origin of the call, and the length of the call are compiled.  Who knows what is compiled about email and  text messages?  Who knows what is happening with social media information, though most anyone can get at this.  The effort is to catch the bad guys before they have a chance to be bad.  There are several arguments of why or why not this is moral, ethical, necessary, or even works.  But it happens now and will continue indefinitely.  Companies are even more invasive.  When my daughter thought her job was at risk, she began circulating inquiries about other employment.  Her then current employer, apparently reading her email, cautioned her about this.  She stopped making such communications. Just about one year later she was suddenly and abruptly terminated.  Is there a connection?  Circle  of Friends . Here we have all this data, just sitting on some massive dri

This morning I'm in Greensboro, NC.  The temperature is just at freezing.  It looked foggy.  Then I wondered if the fog was mostly micro-ice crystals - perhaps suspended in the air or slowly falling downward.  Then, I wondered how this was true could be proved.  Most solutions I considered would affect the crystals - melting them if they were there - or form new ice crystals. This is kind of an uncertainty.  Almost anything you can imagine to do may change what you want to prove.  That is, you cannot see the micro ice crystals without changing them or creating them. So, how can this be done? BTW, how small can ice crystals be?  Micro-size?  Nano-size?

Vision for the blind By trade, I am a mathematician.  I can do lots of tricks in math, but only in math.  But there are so many things I just don't know.   Why don't I know?  What prevents me from knowing?  Why can't I answer so many questions?  This has to do with mental capacity, of course.   (See, http://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-teach-ant-how-to-read.html )   Still I keep trying.   This is despite the serious models presented to us by scientists and theologians to help me along. Let me explain understanding through the metaphor of sight. We use this metaphor all the time.  "I see it," is the most familiar expression.  Yet the deeper questions are how clearly you may see it, or how deep is your vision.   Vision-type statements involving understanding include. ·          I see what you mean. ·          It is still fuzzy, but I am getting on to it. ·          I saw through it at once. ·          They recognized the facts of the situat