Today I Learned

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

The School of Athens. Print by Giorgio Ghisi, of painting by Raphael, via Wikimedia Commons What most people call “debate” really is not. I found the Wikipedia article quite amusing. My favourite bit was where it says: “...debates emphasize logical consistency, factual accuracy, and emotional appeal to an audience.” I guess one out of three isn’t bad? Even so-called “formal” debate, where there are rules, judges, and guidelines for acceptable conduct, are more about competit

Pac-Man Fever, by Buckner & Garcia, via Wikipedia A Pac-Man song? I should not have found that surprising, but I did. Originally called...

Star Trek Title Sequence – Original Pilot – via YouTube Probably everyone has heard the iconic line: “Space: The Final Frontier.” I hear...

Louis Raemaekers – To your health, civilization, 1916 The subversion of expectations is an interesting tool, used by artists of all...

Jason Zhang, CC BY-SA 4.0 < https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 >, via Wikimedia Commons Many years ago, I was sitting in an...

Cover of Billy Joel’s single "The Downeaster ‘Alexa’", via Wikipedia The Downeaster ‘Alexa’ was a song on Billy Joel’s album Storm...

Mark Carney & Mike Myers, via YouTube Canadians are an odd breed. While I think most of us love our country, we do not brag about it, or...

Is Religion Like a Drug? | Rev | BBC Comedy Greats, via YouTube “You’ll feel that God reached out to you with his love.” “What does that...

Emo Philips, Opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theatre Today I learned the word “ paraprosdokian ”. According to Wikipedia, the...