Memorial Weekend Observed

The lake was calm and the day was beautiful on Sunday. Denice and I spent much of the day lounging in a boat.



One of the locals told me our hedge is called Bridal Veil. Makes sense that it's blooming at the end of May.

Jacob attended his friend Jimbo's wedding this weekend. Attending a friends wedding has got to be a milestone event for Jake.

A Broken Spirit

NASA recently announced that they will end attempts to contact the Spirit Rover on Mars. It looks as though Spirit may have frozen to death.

Spirit has a plaque that remembers the crew of the space shuttle Columbia who lost their lives on February 1, 2003.

Laurel Clark was one of the Columbia crew and her name is on the memorial plaque on Mars. That means my name is also on Mars and will be for a very, very long time.

With that thought, the sun sets on Mars, as recorded by Spirit.

The Call-Up

Below is a picture of then Private Benjamin and parents on the occasion of graduating boot camp, Fort Jackson, SC.

Now Specialist Clark (of one class or another) has been called to active duty by the North Dakota US Army National Guard. He reported at Minot, ND yesterday, after a 12-hour train ride on the Empire Builder.

It seems that persistent high water levels are straining the dikes and levies and The Guard is being deployed to monitor the situation.

Before boarding the train, dad had some words of wisdom that have been passed down the generations: "Don't let some know-nothing send you down into an unsupported, unprotected trench."

I try to teach my kids using current topics from the news. You may recall that a construction worker was buried in a trench in the last month. And more recently, some surfer buried himself in a hole he dug along the beach in California.

The advise continued..."As you feel your ribs breaking and the air being forced from your lungs, it may occur to you that, 'Dang! my dad was right. I wonder what else he may have been right about?'"

Are those the last thoughts you want to have in this life?

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My grand-daughter the cyborg

Harper is a cyborg!

My grand-daughter has a misshapen head. Seems that twins are under a lot of pressure. Pressure to conform. Conform to the shape of their mother's rib cage, or her pelvis, or maybe the brother's foot in her face. Anyway, Harper is deformed.

Now my daughter, the mother, isn't putting up with that. Her little girl is going to be perfect!

So what does she do? Turns her over to The Borg for repairs.

Now she's been assimilated!

Don't believe me? Look! Here's the design of the helmet they created for her to tie her into their hive-mind.








Need more proof of what has happened?


Look! I've got pictures.

Resistance is futile!
Prepare to be assimilated.

I'm Skeptical

Recently, the question of whether to release Osama bin Laden's death-photos was in the news. Pundits warned that the skeptics might need more evidence. I found my self shouting, "stop calling them skeptics, they're conspiracy theorists!" A skeptic avoids the rush to judgement and waits to find what can be understood from available information. A conspiracy theorist embraces notions of unseen agents pulling their strings and is inoculated against information that reasonable people would accept. To heck with them!

Michael Shermer is a prominent skeptic. If you liked his discussion of the apocalypse, you may like his review of a study that finds statistical significance for phychic precognicance. The title, "Extrasensory Pornception", is a shout-out to Stephen Colbert.

I have a few critisisms of Shermer:

1. His third point, that "paranormal effects, which are rarely allegedly detected at all, are always so subtle and fleeting as to be useless for anything practical" sounds like bias on Shermer's part. If their detectable, their detectable. Does a scientist assume that such effects would be of no practical value? Am I missing his point?


2. And maybe I'm not understanding point four. If "Bem’s 3 percent above-chance effect in experiment 1 was not consistent across his nine experiments" was that because a 3-percent result only occurred in experiment 1, or do the experiments average 3-percent, in which case, some must by higher than 3-percent?

Anyway, there is a taste of skeptical thinking.

I suppose you might be thinking that skiptics and conspiricy theorists are just two different kinds of cranks.

Alright then, here's a joke:

(My brother likes seal jokes. You know, with punch lines like "just don't give me a Canadian Club.")

So a seal waddles into a bar and the bartender asks, "What'll ya have?"

The seal says, "I'd like to toast the Navy Seals with a bin Laden."

"How do you make a bin Laden?" the bartender asks.

"Two shots and a splash..."

Preparing for the End of the World - by Chicken Little

It's May 22 and I'm still here. Did I miss the rapture?

Oh well, I have been wrong before...with any luck, I will be wrong again.

Michael Shermer has swapped his Christian world view for a scientific one. He discusses why people are attracted to apocalyptic explanations of this life here and here. This is scary stuff. Jesus takes his hits as do some of our favorite scientific theories. Even Ayn Rand gets roughed up. Oh this is fun!

Shermer and other theorists are speculating as to how could evolution have selected a brain that thinks as the human brain does, giving rise to minds that 'believe' as ours do and, ultimately, lead to human culture, society, institutions that are adaptive in the Darwinian sense (enhancing our ability to survive and reproduce). The theorist often try to express their insights through stories in which some human(s) get to survive and pass forward a certain adaptation, skill, behavior, or way of thinking, (see social systems above). Turns out, the human mind is very influenced by stories or narratives.

And this too must be adaptive!

Application for Reinstatement of Credentials

Am I a blogger?





The Berg-Williams blog has put us on notice...that our blog spot may be decertified for a non-blogging offence (see the Blogger Latency clause in the Blogger's Role and Responsibilities of your contract). I will attempt to rectify the situation with a few rants and reflections.





Perhaps a re-blogger?





I blog, therefore I am.