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Lynda.com

lynda.jpgUnsolicited advertisement:

Do you know about this site? Lynda.com offers video tutorials on a LOT of different software. They have thousands of videos on just about everything I’ve wanted to know, and you get unlimited access to ALL of it for just $25 a month (less if you get a full year membership).  

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been a subscriber and have worked through lessons on e-commerce and creating online shopping carts, lessons on Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, PHP, and more. They’ve been immensely helpful.

Maybe it seems odd that I’d be advertising this commercial service, but when I find something cool, I like to share it.

Lynda rocks.

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Jeez.

wilbur.jpgBen Stein, actor and, uh — I almost said comedian, but he’s not that funny — former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and former speechwriter for President Nixon, is turning out to be a serious nutcase.

And I don’t mean “lovable nutcase,” like dear old Aunt Clara from Bewitched who collected doorknobs. I mean malignant, nasty SOB nutcase, an enemy, in his own way, to core American values.

I know whenever you hear “American values” you automatically think of family-related stuff, like raising your kids right and staying married to the same woman (or  man). Saying the Pledge and honoring the soldiers, eating watermelon at the county fair.

But science is a core American value too, one that stretches back to before the founding of the nation. Ben  Franklin is known as a scientist, for instance. Thomas Jefferson is less known as an experimentalist but was no less a rigorous rationalist and scientific thinker. Wilbur and Orville Wright are quintessential American heroes.

Continue reading “Jeez.”

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Man and Animal

animalman.jpgI’m carrying on a mostly-cordial argument over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable with a fellow named Michael M, an Objectivist and admirer of Ayn Rand.

I’ve been an admirer of Ayn Rand too – I think she was brilliant in the extreme – but I don’t revere her, as some people surely do. Some things, in my opinion, she simply got wrong.

This is my most recent answer to one of Michael’s points, that humans have reason and free will whereas animals have nothing but instincts.

…

Okay, this is absolutely, positively my last 2,000 words on the subject. 🙂

Seriously, one of the problems with replying to the arguments of a, for instance, anti-evolution type, is that they can pop out with a single sentence that contains three major mistakes, each of which can take pages to explain and correct.

So I’m focusing again on a single issue:

Continue reading “Man and Animal”

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Who’s There?

cartop.jpgI’m curious about who reads here.

Outside the few regular commenters, mostly familiar to me, there seem to be a number of lurkers who read only, and the stats detail on my server identifies the places they’re from. Some of them seem distant and unexpected.

So: Who’s from Great Britain? Germany? Austria? France? Spain? Portugal? Belgium? Italy? Who’s here from the Emerald Isle? 

Hungary? The Netherlands? Poland?

Sweden? Norway? Denmark? Finland?

G’day mate, and who’s here from Australia? And who’s from New Zealand?

South Africa? Hong Kong? Japan? India? Israel?

Canada? Brazil? Mexico? Chile?

South Korea? Latvia? United Arab Emirates? China?

The Russian Federation? Romania? Slovenia??

Love to hear from you. Take a minute to say hello!

And those of you in the States, give me a shout and tell me what state you’re in.

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What do you have to be afraid of?

cop1.jpgEverything is deep. Everything.

The simplest thing you can imagine – a grain of sand, or the fact that you have five toes on each foot – is filled with unimaginable complexities.

Even something as simple as sunlight, taken for granted for thousands of years by humans, turned out, once someone invented the prism, to be a mix of colored light. Strange to think that when you look into a bright white light, you’re also looking into a bright blue light. And a bright red light. A bright yellow light, and so on. But you are.

Light is deep, and so is everything else.

Continue reading “What do you have to be afraid of?”