I collect quotes. They come from many places. Many of them come from the quote of the day page of The Quotations Page--it's my browser's home page. Here is a sampling of quotations that I've especially enjoyed over the past two months: Last night I stayed up late playing poker with…
It's that time of year again, when we gear up for the rewards (or disappointments) promised in our celebrations of the Yule Season. Christmas Time! Days of saccharine movies, maudlin songs, a hope for fluffy white snowfall that is somehow miraculously easy to drive through and falls only on grassy…
Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace. When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter. This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.
I never once thought it was her fault.
How could you? She’d been deceived. Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.
History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality. Especially among adolescents. We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain. The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development. It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely …
Periodically, I become a bit disoriented in the swirl of life, which gives rise to the question: “Who am I?” We aren’t static beings, of course. We are complex adaptive systems, communities of relatively simple cellular life that number in the trillions. Many of “our” cells (in fact, the great…
Why would a scientist pull a paper that he had out there for over 50 years? Because he is embarrassed that Creationists are eagerly citing parts of it as proof that life cannot have arisen spontaneously. Here's the story. That is not because he objects to religion, he said... “Religion…