The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

Math should advertise more.

Insects' mouth parts are modified legs. A similar process may have given us our language of thought.

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

It's worry, worry all of the time / You don't know how to laugh / They'll think of something funny / When they write your epitaph

Friday is covering Saturday and Sunday so I can't have Saturday and Sunday if I don't go through Friday.

I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I would eat it, and I just hate it.

No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.

It takes a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange so far as to ask 'why' of any instinctive human act.

If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.

Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions'?

Natural selection does not forbid cooperation and generosity; it just makes them difficult engineering problems, like stereoscopic vision.

Parental love causes the fundamental paradox of politics: no society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn. Ever since Plato called attention to these tradeoffs in The Republic, most political ideologies can be defined by the stance they take on which of these ideals should yield.

In the laboratory, some early experiments claimed that men and women showed identical physiological arousal to a pornographic passage. The men, however, showed a bigger response to the neutral passage in the control condition than the women showed to the pornography. The so-called neutral passage, which had been chosen by the female investigators, described a man and a woman chatting about the relative merits of an anthropology major over pre-med. The men found it highly erotic!

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

We can well imagine creatures with fewer cognitive faculties than we have: dogs to whom our language sounds like "Blah-blah-blah-Ginger-blah-blah," rats that cannot learn a maze with food in the prime-numbered arms, autistics who cannot conceive of other minds, children who cannot understand what all the fuss around sex is all about, neurological patients who see every detail in a face except whose it is, stereoblind people can understand a stereogram as a problem in geometry but cannot see it pop out in depth. If stereoblind people did not know better, they might call 3-D vision a miracle, or claim that it just is and needs no explanation, or write it off as some kind of trick.

So why should there not be creatures with more cognitive faculties than we have, or with different ones? They might readily grasp how free will and consciousness emerge from a brain and how meaning and morality fit into the universe, and would be amused by the religious and philosophical headstands we do to make up for our blankness when facing these problems. They could try to explain the solutions to us, but we would not understand the explanations.

Great film makers know how to give us lines to read between.

click to play

discapede - source - built with processing

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

If Sir Mix-A-Lot has taught me anything, it is that the anaconda wants what the anaconda wants.

"Improper Bostonian says brine-based garnishes are the new thing."
"Like brine.... shrimp?"
"Dude that's sea monkeys."
"Ew, never mind."

Open Photo Gallery

atlantic city construction a few weeks ago


Alien Seed Pods for sale at Fresh Pond Whole Foods under the brand name "Maxixe"


Nice evening for a Rockport Legion Band concert by the shore! Amber took this next one:

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What is the speed of light? As far as you're concerned, it's nine inches per nanosecond.

if you laid all the cups of tea I've ever drunk end to end it'd be a big mess and a terrible waste of tea.

2010 August❮❮prevnext❯❯