BC

Wise words. Formal education prepares one for life-long learning, IF one is willing to practice it.

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller ...

Inebriated people, me among them, have ideas and they might be quite good ideas. The problem is in working out the details, expressing them clearly, a...

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum. I don't know what the consequences of more complex technology will be on the tech sector. Some work can be de-skilled...

I hope not, given the British reputation in the food department.

Gawd, I'm tired of hearing about QEII, KCIII, et al.

It's a 'paradoxical' effect when drugs have the opposite effect -- sedatives that agitate, anti-depressants that make one more depressed, and so on. O...

When did Australians figure out that bidets were not drinking fountains?

I heard they will stuff the queen's corgis into the coffin to accompany her into the nether world.

I'm sure it will. The death of a reigning monarch is probably not the moment when calls would arise to abolish the royal system. A crisis of some sort...

Balmoral consists of 50,000 acres. Altogether, the wicked Windsors are sitting on 287,000 acres of the peasantry's real estate.

Credit goes to mathematician Tom Lehrer of Harvard who turned 94 this year. He wrote satirical songs in the 1960s. The quote in question is from a sur...

The 'real question' isn't whether the humanities and social sciences have a useful place in academia, it's whether your brother has a good reason to g...

It's an academic joke.

So, why are you quoting drunks as useful sources, even if he's your brother? I have no regrets studying literature and social sciences. Academia is li...

Sadly, the little daily baloney eater died an early death as a result of excessive fat and preservative intake. Where baloney was a rarity, children l...

Nothing wrong with that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBBimEB8QgY

An active topic of debate is whether we have closed in on the point of no return or whether we have a few more weeks to screw around. I suspect that i...

Nice.

“This isn’t going to stop,” Mr. Allen said. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” What makes the new breed of A.I. tools different, s...

I didn't see the Hobbit. In my mind, the book could not conceivably support 3 separate films, so I skipped it. One of the elements the Second Age text...

What I meant by "no key problem" is that our problems are entangled with each other--population, food production, global warming, CO2 emissions, globa...

Nothing has happened since 2019 that changes our grim situation. What was true (false) in 2019 is still true (false). We were screwed in 2019 and we a...

I watched episode 1 of The Rings of Power on Amazon tonight. This is a prequel to Lord of the Rings trilogy. It takes place in the Second Age. Galadri...

If you get a dental implant, chances are good that cadaver tissue will be included. The cadaver bits are not connected with getting a used implant. Al...

Some people just seem to react more to vaccinations, antibiotics, and so forth than other people. I don't know whether that's good or bad. It is what ...

I had a complete rebuild done about 5 years ago -- or thereabouts. It cost under $40,000 to crown all of the teeth (molars with gold, the rest with li...

A 45" root canal? The dentist had no patients ahead of you? I'm with Banno. The good dentists are busy. Was he licensed? Had he a degree? Was he weari...

You can take care of this yourself, really. People used to pull out their own teeth all the time to cut costs. All you need is a pair of pliers. Just ...

You might have fractured a tooth, but more likely the root is the problem. Time to see an endodontist for a root canal job. Oh joy!

Right. One doesn't want too many hyperactive cytotoxic effector cells going nuts.

Everyone used to live without AC, of course, and not that long ago. One of the features of life-as-we-know-it, is that a lot of environments are crisp...

Thank you for the encouragement!

Herpes zoster (shingles) is a pain, for sure. I haven't heard much about it as a follow-on to Covid, but I'm not surprised. Shingles is most apt to oc...

One of my sisters has a heat pump. In Minnesota, at least, one still needs a secondary heating element in the hot air or hot water system for the cold...

I do have Covid -- day 5 today. It has not been terrible; along the lines of a cold, but maybe with more fever. Not a high fever --100.3 is the highes...

In what way does the US have the kind of employee protections that exist where Tom Storm is from?

Too short. Say more.

That sounds altogether too enlightened for US employers to put up with.

Indeed!

I'm not a boss, never have been a boss. My "from the bottom-up view" is what I said about problems within organizations: they're usually stacked up se...

I wasn't suggesting that lawyers were dishonest, but rather that the individuals and entities you represent (honestly, of course) might on some occasi...

There's an old theory in the sociology of organizations (not disproved so far) that every problem is stacked up several layers deep.

Was there a significant consequence for the company resulting from his actions, a material or reputational loss? Was the file-deleter authorized to ma...

There isn't a lot of evidence to support the idea that we either assimilated or exterminated our cousins. There was never a large population of Neande...

Thanks!

Oppressors also tend to be prejudiced against the people they oppress. It is, briefly, hard to think positively about people you have screwed over, no...

Excellent!

After 2 2/3 years, being careful, getting vaccinated, and getting boosted I have finally become infected with Covid-19. Not terrible (so far) but some...

My impression is, based on observation, reading, and experience is that most people have their most creative and productive years between by age 40, a...