The teaser trailer for The Last Jedi was released today. It has one huge problem. It is promoting a movie that is a sequel to The Force Awakens. And The Force Awakens was a really bad movie. It wasn’t, “I like the originals better,” kind of bad or the, “I’ve seen better,” kind of bad. It…
Major League Baseball made the decision to move the 2021 All-star Game out of Atlanta because of the new Georgia voting laws. This is absolutely the right decision, but I have to admit to being a little surprised. It’s been a long time since Jackie Robinson, and in my experience, MLB can’t even make the…
Before you get mad, try to think about this in the abstract. Don’t worry about what’s happening in the world, your political affiliations, or anything like that. What’s the difference between being anti-vaxx and anti-GMO?
There are three common bases for moral reasoning that drive me crazy: capacities, rights, and essences. They bug me because they don’t, and can’t, work even though they dominate the popular discourse. They are different in most ways, but I believe their appeal is what they have in common. I will look at each one…
I’m tired of people saying there’s no such thing as magic. That’s one of my least favorite features of the modern world. We have science now, so no more magic. There’s Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When people say that, they usually mean that whatever we are…
I read this article today. It talks about how there probably won’t be a universal designated hitter in baseball in 2021, but it will be here in the near future because that is one of the few things the players and the owners agree about. I hate the universal DH, and if I’m going to…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is about Lady Anne Conway. Lady Anne Conway was a seventeenth century, English philosopher. Philosophy, in general, is very male (and very white). It…
Philosophy Phridays is a series where each Friday, I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click on “random entry,” and then write about whatever comes up. This week’s random entry is Plotinus. Plotinus is something of an odd figure in the history of philosophy. Any way you look at it, he is one of the…
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the…
Snow is my favorite kind of weather. It doesn’t matter how inconvenient or dangerous it is, if there’s snow, I’m happy. Snow looks beautiful. I even like the sound of snow. Well, maybe not the sound of snow itself, but the way snow changes the sounds of other things. It softens everything which creates a…
