Today I Learned

Polly Darton, via Muppet Wiki Dolly Parton was a cultural icon, and her list of accomplishments and accolades is truly astonishing. Describing her as a “singer-songwriter, actress, and businesswoman” represents a profound level of understatement, but I guess we need to start somewhere. Referring to her as 'Queen of Country' is a bit closer, with over 50 albums of her own, over 200 compilation albums, 25 Number One songs, 41 Top 10 country albums, over 100 million record sales

Cover of The World of Null-A, by A. E. van Vogt. 1st edition cover, via Wikipedia.org A truism does not a scientific discipline make. I last mentioned A. E. van Vogt’s Null-A novels a long time ago, noting the phrase “the map is not the territory”, which is a key concept of the Null-A universe. The phrase is actually a quote from Alfred Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, which formed the foundation for the school of thought known as General Semantics. Described by its

Cartesian Flowchart The influence of René Descartes is hard to describe, and harder to demonstrate, but there are a few clues out there. Even if you discount most of his contributions to mathematics, physics, and philosophy, the phrase ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) and the fact that we use the term ‘Cartesian geometry’ are a bit of a giveaway. With the ‘cogito’, Descartes was attempting to establish a ‘first principle’, upon which other ideas could be based.

SpongeBob, via Wikimedia Commons I was not familiar with Eric Shaw, nor have I ever really watched SpongeBob SquarePants, though I am familiar with the characters through their impact on popular culture. According to Wikipedia, Mr Shaw is a television writer, credited with a number of episodes of SpongeBob, along with a number of other works. With that in mind, I was a bit confused when I heard the reference to Eric Shaw on Smashing Security Episode 476, in a conversation bet

Great Pyramid of Giza, via Wikimedia Commons NOTE: An edited version of this article appeared on The Skeptic (UK). “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, section 5.6 Language may be the most powerful tool we have, and I believe it must be used responsibly. But what is language? What’s a tool? What does it mean to use it responsibly? Such questions are deceptively simple, because “everyone knows” what langu

Flag of Russia, via Wikimedia Commons Everyone seems to need a villain. For many, that villain is Russia. I won’t go into the long, complex history, or discuss how our current geopolitical situation evolved, but I do wonder about the degree to which people have an enemy because they want or need one. Several years ago, I posted about Theory X and Theory Y, where X assumes that people are inherently unmotivated and need to be actively ‘managed’, while Y assumes people are gene

Football, via Wikimedia Commons I wanted to talk about the political football that is Bill C-22 in Canada, so I found a picture of a football, and - What? Wrong type of football? Oh. Right. Sorry. So much soccer lately, and my main interest in the other type of football is the halftime show, particularly when it causes fascist heads to explode, like the 2026 show where Bad Bunny ended up collecting nine Emmy nominations for a performance that was really a full-on attack again

Artificial Intelligence, via Wikimedia Commons NOTE: An edited version of this article appeared on The Skeptic (UK). We live in a sea of cognitive biases. Everyone is affected. All of us. All the time. Psychologists study them, as do economists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, but no one is immune to them. Skeptics need to understand them, and I suspect that most are able to rattle off a list as easily as they can a list of logical fallacies. It is essential, however,

Cover of The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, 1975 I sometimes hear references to one “futurist” or another, making pronouncements regarding current trends and where they may lead, and I must confess that I have been unimpressed. My impression is that this area of study is still in its infancy, so the level of scientific rigour applied to the work ranges wildly. Sometimes, I see the incremental analysis of trends and cautious suggestions of possible hypotheses for future res

Da Vinci sketch of the human brain and skull (c. 1510), via Wikimedia.org NOTE: An edited version of this article appeared on The Skeptic (UK). “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill, 11-Nov-1947 The term “neurodiversity” has been used in recent years to describe the natural variations in human neurolo

Bubbles, from Finding Nemo, via YouTube.com Finding Nemo was a great film, filled with endless references, sight-gags, and characters, making it the sort of movie you can watch again and again. Among the wonderful scenes is one with Bubbles (voiced by Stephen Root), who gets a bit... excited when he sees bubbles. As Gill says, “Fish aren’t meant to be in a box, kid. It does things to you.” But why would people be thinking so much about bubbles? It’s not as if we’re in the mid

Bronze coin of Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judaea © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. dixit itaque ei Pilatus ergo rex es tu respondit Iesus tu dicis quia rex sum ego ego in hoc natus sum et ad hoc veni in mundum ut testimonium perhibeam veritati omnis qui est ex veritate audit meam vocem dicit ei Pilatus quid est veritas et cum hoc dixisset iterum exivit ad I

til-technology.com When we hear music, there’s usually a go-to association, which can say a lot about the listener. Take, for example, Wagner’s famous Ride of the Valkyries, from Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). While I have heard it many times (in isolation, as I have never actually listened to a Wagner opera in its entirety), the version that my mind always goes to is the one in What’s Opera, Doc?, with the famous lines: “Kill da wabbit! Kill da wabbit! K

Alan Turing, 1951, via Wikipedia.org It’s been over seventy-five years since Alan Turing came up with the Imitation Game in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and I have previously written written about the Turing Test. After so many years, and so much work on Artificial Intelligence, there is a lot of criticism of the test, and discussion of how to beat it, and systems which can now “beat” it, but not much on what comes next. Does beating the Turing test m

Blown Away Guy – Maxell ad, via Wikipedia.org “Is it real? Or is it Memorex?” For those under fifty, the answer is probably a blank stare. For the rest, I apologize for misremembering the slogan. Imagine my surprise when I found that it was actually “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” Do others remember it that way? Is this an example of the Mandela effect? Nah – I just remembered it wrong. I need to apologize for the image as well, but this one was deliberate. I only vaguely rem

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Experience is learning the hard way that something won’t work, is harder than it looks, or will come back to haunt you. Learning from history is where you find that something didn’t work, was harder than it looked, or came back to haunt someone... and then you go ahead and do it again. The well-known quote that “history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” is, of course, attributed to Mark Twain. Quotes like this can be very hard to tra

Minion Sculpture – Brisbane 2024, via Wikimedia Commons Minions have a wonderful combination of traits which make them both dangerous and sweet. They want to help, but usually end up creating more problems than they solve. It seems as if their purpose in life is to be the henchmen of a villain, but they’re comically bad at it – incompetent and easily distracted, though not evil. At times, they seem almost like old stereotypes of interns – eager, but inexperienced and a bit c

Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone, Auguste Rodin, via Cleveland Museum of Art When I first read Stranger in a Strange Land , I was too young to fully understand much of it. Of course I only realized that when I read it again, several years later. Over the years, I have read the book a dozen or so times, and picked up a bit more each time. This is the nature of good books – you can read them again, and pick up something new. Sometimes, you pick up some subtlety in the story o

Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), from The Princess Bride, via YouTube.com “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” For anyone not familiar with The Princess Bride , go watch it. I’ll wait. (The tragic death of director Rob Reiner may lead to many new people watching this wonderful film, and many others to re-watch it. A true masterpiece.) For everyone else, just enjoy the exchange between Inigo Montoya (played by Mandy Patinkin ), and Vizzi

Charlie Chaplin, in The Great Dictator, 1940, via Wikimedia Commons Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about fascism. While I already had a fair degree of familiarity and understanding of the big picture, I’ve been picking up (and often blogging about) items which are new to me. Predictably, most are disturbing, but I occasionally come across something wonderful. Charlie Chaplin was an immensely influential figure in the history of cinema, and his “Tramp” character has been an