Today I Learned

Generated by RG, via Microsoft Designer, 2025 “Trust everybody, but cut the cards.” Finley Peter Dunne Trust is a strange thing. I knew I...

Ferrari 166 S, via Wikipedia I was trying to think of a song about a car, and bounced around a bit before realizing the truth. Red...

Jimi Hendrix Castles Made of Sand  is a classic, by one of the truly great musicians. If you are not familiar with it, go find it and...

Duane Allman, Fillmore East, 6-Jun-1971, via Wikimedia Commons It’s amazing what you can find if you look. All I did was search for songs...

Skeptical Science, John Cook, via Wikimedia Commons Words are fun! Today, let’s ask whether the words “equivalence” and “equivalency” are...

WarGames, 1983: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXzNo0vR_dU I can only hear that question in the voice of the computer Joshua, from the...

Thomas Bayes (maybe), via Wikipedia The portrait above might be that of Thomas Bayes ... but probably not. Perfect! I wanted to talk...

So, it’s HER fault! :) I recently wrote about why Y2K was such a big deal. To summarize, one major reason was the cost of computer...

The exception that proves the rule . We’ve all heard the phrase, but I think most people use it without understanding it or knowing where...

Artificial Intelligence is- Hey! Come on! I haven’t even said anything yet! Ahem. As I was saying, Artificial Intelligence is a term that...

Let’s talk about the end of the world, shall we? Or maybe not. Fortunately, some stories of impending doom are overestimated, and some...

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” George Orwell,...

One of my all-time favourite songs is Welcome to the Machine , by Pink Floyd. While the song appeared on the 1975 album Wish You Were...

It’s been more than two years since I last posted, so I’m trying to remember which buttons to press to make this happen. Life has a...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began (need to be specific here, to avoid confusion ...), I recall a lot of people emphasizing the need to...

“Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth” “δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω” Archimedes is described as a...

As I have noted before , I tend to avoid politics as a primary focus of my writing. But this last Ontario election worries me quite a...

It’s been a while, but the Latin plural should be “Linuces” ( 3 rd declension noun ), but don’t worry – I won’t use that. Non-technical...

#TIL that the iconic image of the album cover for the famous album The Wall was not actually the original cover. In fact, the text “Pink...

When I write, I sometimes have a topic in mind, and look for an interesting way to introduce it. This time, I ended up going down an...