The U.S. is all about freedom and the automobile is a key symbol of that freedom. “See the USA in your Chevrolet” was sung by Dinah Shore on our old RCA TV. In reality, Americans spend hundreds of hours a year stuck in traffic. Very little driving involves seeing the Rockies or wheat fields that […]
Today was an interesting news day. The Supreme Court just ruled that “bump stocks” cannot be banned. Even though these devices effectively turn legal guns into machine guns. And even though the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 banned civilians from owning any machine guns manufactured after that date. The bump stock ban was a […]
I recently had lunch with a former coworker friend. He doesn’t like talking politics, but I had to know if he was still a Republican after Trump. He agreed with most of my positions on most issues. And he agreed that Trump was not a good president. But he could not ever imagine voting for […]
Star Trek is my religion. I grew up imagining a future of contact with alien beings who we could learn from. Back in 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi asked, “But where is everybody?” If our galaxy is teeming with planets and our planet is nothing special, why haven’t we encountered any evidence of aliens? We have […]
Campuses are in turmoil across the U.S. with protests. I won’t discuss the substantive issues they are protesting. But I will raise this Big Question: How does an issue become a protest issue? I claim that it is not based on what is most important or on what is most urgent. Clearly, some issues are […]
Merlie and I have just returned from three weeks in Japan. Very fortunate to catch the cherry blossoms. It is risky to offer impressions after such brief exposure, but I will try. Many things are exactly as you would expect. Things are orderly. There is no trash or graffiti. People are extremely polite. But guess […]
My wife and I came out of a party recently just in time to catch a rocket launch in the sky. I took some photos of the beautiful colors and patterns and posted them on Facebook. A Facebook childhood friend “Bill” replied, “The rockets that go nowhere under the firmament.” Was he pushing the bizarre […]
Jerry Lettvin was one of several treasured mentors in my life. He was an MD and an electrical engineer, holding positions in biology and electrical engineering at MIT. I was a student in a most unique program he ran at MIT called “Concourse.” We did the usual classes, but we were in a smaller group, […]
Do you ever check your email spam folder? This may not seem very cosmic, but it reveals some odd biases. If you send an email to someone and they don’t reply, do you feel frustration that they didn’t check their spam folder to find your message? That is fair. But only if you also regularly […]
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) gained attention recently, due to some of its employees participating in the atrocities of October 7, including kidnappings and murders. It was not the first time U.N. workers were accused of atrocities. U.N. workers caused a cholera outbreak in Haiti. They committed sexual abuses […]
Back in July 2006 I watched a BookTV interview with Francis Collins, talking about his book The Language of God. At the time, Collins was Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute; the massive government project to map the human genome, initiated by President Clinton. Privately funded projects actually reached much of the goal […]
My recent article on slavery, abortion and states’ rights promised a follow-up. This is it. My college lady friend was volunteering at a community medical clinic in 1981 for her pre-med program. The clinic was in a very poor minority neighborhood. They educated the volunteers and patients about the history of oppression as part of […]
Geoengineering is the controversial idea of altering the earth in some way to offset human harms to the climate. Some fear it could make us complacent about the real solution: Reducing fossil fuel use. “Can $500 Million Save This Glacier” was the title of a recent New York Times article. British glaciologist John Moore attended […]
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked by a voter in Berlin, New Hampshire, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” She treated it as some kind of trick question. After three rounds back and forth, she never mentioned the word “slavery.” Obviously, she did not want to alienate racists in her base. […]
Happy New Year! Traditionally, a new year is seen as a time for a fresh start. Even if there is no physical significance to this time, it is an opportunity to reflect on where we have been and where we want to go. Many people make resolutions for the new year and, sadly, few last […]
I recently attended an international Skeptics Society conference. One of the highlights was an interactive demonstration and experience of “Street Epistemology” by philosophy professor Peter Boghossian. Our current times are famously tense, with people choosing sides on a wide range of issues and digging in to defend their side. In many cases, the actual issues […]
People are surprised that I don’t own any Apple products and don’t plan to. I developed an aversion to Apple as a grad student, designing scientific instruments based on the newly emerging personal computers. Apple kept their hardware “closed” to outside connections. The IBM PC had its own problems, using the horrible Intel processor of […]
My last article was about the need for direct government investment in solving the Climate Crisis. That getting rid of bad subsidies and incentives is helpful, but not enough. This point was made by Simon Sharpe, who worked on counterterrorism for the UK Foreign Office. But Sharpe made another vital point: A lot of climate […]
I have written before about bad subsidies and incentives that have gotten us into the Climate Crisis. But there is another way to view the problem. “Nobody thinks we made the transition from horses to cars by taxing horseshit. Nobody thinks that we created the internet by taxing letter writing. Why would it be any […]
In ancient Greek tragedy, exile was considered a worse punishment than death. In modern times, woke cancel culture applies exile with little regard to its devastating impact on the target and on society. “Woke” originally meant a person was awake to actual racial and social injustice. Leftist Susan Neiman wrote a book Left is Not […]
I usually consider myself to be a secular Humanist. But events like the brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Israel make me feel very Jewish. Everyone wants peace. The question is on what terms and how to get there. The Humanist Society of Santa Barbara (HSSB) hosted a refreshingly innovative talk in 2018 offering a way […]
I recently was delighted to reconnect with one of my favorite high school teachers, Wesley Walker, over 45 years since graduating from high school in the D.C. area. He was my English teacher, but he was much more. He was a gifted musician and a great philosophical thinker. He and I would have heated arguments in […]
Trump claimed that he was going to go after “bad hombres” who were illegally in the U.S. But then he went after people like Juana Flores, right here in Goleta. She had been in the U.S. since 1988. Her husband and her many children and grandchildren were all legal U.S. citizens. She probably would have […]
“Even Conspiracy Theorists Are Alarmed by What They’ve Seen” was the title of a recent New York Times article. I grew up in an era of real conspiracies. Senator Frank Church of Idaho conducted hearings after Watergate investigating the horrific abuses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Perhaps most shocking for U.S. citizens: Operation MKULTRA, […]
Three and a half years ago (April 2020), I wrote an article “What is Normal?” It was the start of the COVID pandemic and people were asking for a return to “normal.” I asked: “Is that what we really want?” Is it “normal” that tens of millions of Americans have no access to health care? […]
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This line from William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 is a widely spread meme on t-shirts and more. Those spreading the meme see lawyers as the enemy. But the original meaning was probably the opposite. The line is stated by “Dick the Butcher” who is […]
Merlie and I travelled for most of July in Iceland and Greenland with Overseas Adventure Travel. Upon arrival, the Litli-Hrutur volcano erupted near the airport. I thought we might be stranded. Instead, it was an opportunity of a lifetime: We got to fly over it in a small plane! Along the way we also saw […]
Almost 10 years ago I was flying to a psychology conference for my work and I picked up a book called The Power of Habit while changing planes at LAX. I learned something in that book almost as valuable as anything I learned at the conference. Author Charles Duhigg told the story of a Procter […]
Growing up in D.C. in the ‘60s and ‘70s, my parents took me with them to marches, rallies, and demonstrations against the U.S. War in Vietnam. Note that I do not call it the “Vietnam War.” For my parents, I think they saw it as an extension of the lessons of the Holocaust: that we […]
Our Humanist Society of Santa Barbara followed other organizations in moving to Zoom meetings during Covid. But we do now have occasional social gatherings. At one such gathering recently I talked to a member who said she “hates Zoom” and will only attend in-person events. I realized that she did not understand the concept of […]
We hairless apes are notoriously bad at estimating probabilities. I plan to write more about other such “cognitive biases.” For example, if you see several coin tosses coming up heads, do you think that the odds go up for the next toss to be tails? Assuming a fair coin, the odds for each toss are […]
Do you roll your eyes or get angry when you hear the words “thoughts and prayers”? This is an expression increasingly associated with the gun lobby trying to force us to accept endless mass shootings. But it is also an example of magical thinking. Does anyone think that their thoughts or prayers have any actual […]
“Government shouldn’t pick winners” is the constant refrain from the “free market” crowd. Except when they want government to pick their chosen winners. “President Trump has ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to ‘prepare immediate steps’ to stop the closing of unprofitable coal and nuclear plants around the country” was the lede of a June 1, […]
“Don’t Drink and Drive: You might hit a bump and spill your beer.” This bumper sticker is a perfect microcosm of our ape brain absurdity. The same absurdity of using phones while driving. When a friend first told me about a new law banning texting while driving, I thought it was a joke. “Are they […]
As I write this, the Republican Party is holding the entire world hostage. The immediate issue is the “debt ceiling.” The threat is very real. If the debt ceiling is not raised, the U.S. government could default on its loans. This has never happened before. The debt ceiling is about repaying money that has already […]
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This quote by George Bernard Shaw provided the title of a wonderful film about the heroic life of Ralph Nader, An Unreasonable Man. How do you respond when you […]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the greatest innovation since the invention of fire or the wheel, according to recent talk. It may also be our last invention. I first became aware of the amazing potential of Artificial Intelligence as a teen, ironically, when I read a book by Berkeley philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus called What […]
“Everyone is basically the same” is how many of us were raised. The intention was to see our commonality, rather than our differences. But, what if we truly see the world in very different ways? It’s as if we are alien species, trying to live together. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has tried to help us […]
Intel Corporation founder Gordon Moore died on March 24. Moore helped pioneer the development of the silicon chip at the heart of our modern electronic world. But his greatest contribution may have been “Moore’s Law” – his observation in the 1960s that transistor counts on a chip were increasing exponentially, the count doubling every two […]
The recent failures, negotiated bailouts, and buyouts of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank, and Credit Suisse are a reminder of how life is different for different classes of people. “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” is how Michael Harrington described it in his 1962 book, The Other America. Detroit […]