The COVID-Restaurant Paradox

The restaurant paradox on COVID. You are quarantined or sequestered. Restaurants are closed. You crave social contact from the outside or with friends. You invite people to your home. No masks, close contact, loud voices, belching and sputtering all night - like for three-four hours. COVID is in the air.

Elsewhere else you go to a restaurant. Masks are worn to the table and from. You are separated from other guests. The conversation is subdued. In one-two hours, your social need is satisfied. You go home mostly safe, happy.

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On knowledge. An investment in knowledge sits idly by until just that moment it's needed. Then, big interest is paid – sometimes in money and satisfaction but better in tickets to ride.

If your plan is to learn it when you need it, you’re running late. For one thing, if you don’t know it, you will not know you need to know it.

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Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality 1. Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...

No Sympathy From Me

Suicide Coming Home Many years ago, a friend hung himself in his basement. I was a pall-bearer at his funeral. I was shocked I was so asked. I did this. I did not understand why a good-looking fellow, intelligent, kindly, and true could do such a thing. He did. I do not. His family suffered greatly. Yet he left no issue. Thankfully. To my mind Country singer Mindy McCready, 37, showed us the very height of personal selfishness by committing suicide. By giving birth to two offspring, she accepted the responsibility to raise her newborn and six-year old son. She abrogated it spectacularly. (As did the father a month ago.) Though she may have suffered depression for any number of reasons, she has little sympathy from me for leaving behind a legacy that is now lost, is now parent-less, and may drift into problems of their own in the future. There is shame and heartbreak in all this, but blame should be...

UNCERTAINTY IS CERTAIN

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