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Historical Time
One of the things I try to teach my daughter is how to live in historical time. By this I mean something in between deep time and the present. I try to regularly explain what is new in our environment and what is old. “When your mother and I were young, nobody had cell phones.”…
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Jesus Philosopher
This is an unkind thought, but I sometimes wonder what percentage of the people who declare themselves to be followers of Jesus really take to heart what the Bible says that he said. I know the percentage is way above zero, but I suspect that it’s also way below one hundred. Look at quotes like…
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Super Rationality
Douglas Hofstadter sketched out a theory of super rationality in a couple of his Metamagical Themas columns in Scientific American in the mid-80s (he later collected his columns into a very interesting book). It was an attempt to solve the prisoner’s dilemma. The basic idea was that you should act as though everybody else is…
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The Choice Dilemma
Since I just mentioned it in a comment for my entry two days ago, I will mention the book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, by Tom Slee. It’s an interesting book that applies game theory to simplified versions of real world problems. Although this is working at…
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Handheld Internet
A week ago I got an iPhone. I’m using it to write this entry. It’s an interesting device, since it shows, once again, an old lesson: the more a tool does for you, the more you notice its deficiencies. I say this not to dis the phone, which is actually quite nice. The interface in…