Whether or not you believe in one or more deities or even in life after death, there are advantages to being religious.  This is counterintuitive but true. Being an atheist is not the same as being faithless, not the same as believing in nothing. Many atheists, are vigorous enough in opposing the widely accepted canon of Western…

In a earlier blog I talked about the extended period of dependence seen in our millennials. Many are living in our basements, having failed to find work, marry, buy homes, have their own families. Here I am wondering out loud, whether this extended period of adolescence might not turn out to be all bad. If…

Animals have devised a period of dependence and apprenticeship for their immature offspring called childhood. That strategy is meant to improve the fitness of the next generation but is expensive in time and effort. Most animals, for example dumb mollusks, and all plants too, take an opposite and equally efficient approach in producing in large…

Kids have more fun surprising us and themselves. They have youthful enthusiasm deriving from newness, the first time experience. Children wonder about everything and are questioning all the time. And when hormones kick in, young love waxes hot. Nothing trumps the depth of feeling of a childhood crush. Never mind that you are more likely…

  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By…

Am I taking the contrarian view in saying Ebola is a tempest in a teapot? Compared with what I call major league infectious diseases, like TB, measles, malaria even dengue, it’s a drop in the ocean. By that I mean history is littered with  thousands of infectious mini-demics dead of their own accord. That is…

  Written as I’m reading that some 3500 US troops are winging their way to West Africa. Not all scourges require aggressive action. I got to thinking about this being exposed to organizations like the Cato Institute from one of my conservative acquaintances, advocating nil to minimal government intervention. The Ebola bug (EVD) exploded into…

  I’d nearly forgotten how much courage it takes to ask a woman out. Today we are told men and women are the same  but in former times, men attracted women partly on their brashness, not always physical attractiveness or current financial success. Everyone has noticed young men and women failing to tie the knot,…

How much of available information is true, and good? Historical Crisis, a science fiction novelette by Donald Kingsbury, is about how psycho-historian “Pscholars” rule worlds far into the future. Pscholars have the corner on statistical esoterica of probable behaviors and historical outcomes. They are forbidden to publish their findings as knowledge of behavioral probabilities will…

The ancient Egyptians mummified the dead to preserve the physical body. The body was needed in the Afterworld. While the Egyptians seemed to have concept of the animating facility as provided by a soul, the soul for them resided in the heart, famously weighed against a feather, to determine if the heart was freighted with…