Category: Random

I’m puzzled by people who travel to the few remaining parts of our world that are untouched by people, write about how beautiful they are, and encourage us to do what we can to save them in their natural state. The way to save untouched nature is to not go there at all (we could…

Greg Mankiw, a well known economist, has a nice picture of projected U.S. government spending in 2020. Refer to this when you hear somebody say that we can balance the budget by eliminating waste. I believe that this picture does not cover things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush administration funded through…

I spent several hours this weekend pruning back the blackberry bushes in our back yard. It’s not really a yard, as our house backs onto a hillside too steep to build on. We hardly ever go there ourselves, so it’s covered by plants fighting for their little bit of sun, nature green in thorn and…

Roger Zelazny, in discussing why he liked to write science fiction, referred to Northrop Frye’s theory of modes. In Zelazny’s interpretation, Frye described characters in fiction in four modes: The mythic mode is stories about gods. The high mimetic mode is stories about heroes, people who are better than ordinary humans. The low mimetic mode…

Increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a nice demonstration of: The speed and effectiveness of evolutionary change. The Law of Unintended Consequences The danger of hospitals Antibiotics are in effect poisons that don’t happen to affect humans, typically because they interfere with bacterial cell walls that our cells don’t have. It doesn’t take long in…