A Gumption Trap is an old school name for an even older idea, coined by Robert Pirsig, in his famous hippie book Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974.It happens when the unforseen occurs, and wrecks your plans, and all your motivation along for the ride. That’s why it’s a trap, because…
The idea that the biosphere of Earth is a single organism, whose cells are each of the life forms, and whose bodily fluids are the winds and rain and rivers, is no revelation, though the notion that it is scientifically accurate challenges our idea of an individual organism. The ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ is an attractive theory,…
Because you’re the one talking about other people’s state of mind. That’s how I know your state of mind is scattered: because you’re looking into your own mind for your conclusions … and finding someone else’s. There isn’t actually a way to observe emotions. You really aren’t Yoda. Here’s the thing: if you’re wrong when…
JustAskingQuestions …is a rhetorical device where people cram a pile of lies into a question in order to develop some plausible deniability about their intellectual dishonesty, or perhaps simply derail the conversation. This is part and parcel of Glenn Beck’s entire career, and conspiracy theorists, AIDSPIGS and other paranoiacs are notorious for it. “Have you…
Aristotle, the inventor of logic and science, considered “Petito Principii” to be the stupidest error. This oversight, also known as “Asserting The Thesis,” “Begging The Question,” or sometimes “Circular Argument” is when someone merely repeats their conclusion or their claim, or restates it in a different way, but doesn’t actually support it by presenting facts…
Is the payoff worth it? Will he be the ‘foreclosure’ President? Quick grammar technicality: “Flotsam” is the stuff you see floating away as the boat sinks. “Jetsam” is the stuff the captain tossed overboard – like the GM bond-holders – hoping to keep it all afloat.
25% is a funny number. 25% is the number of people who simply would not go along with the Asch Conformity experiment. https://youtu.be/NyDDyT1lDhA 25% is close to the number of people who would not go along with the Milgram Authority experiment. We might speculate that the extra stress of the pain and suffering made more…
This is actually a really hard problem – it’s a really neat problem for students of calculus, but it’s hard, like 4 or 5 stars hard. This puzzle is also a real problem, meaning it actually saves someone some hassle or energy or time or money. As with many word problems, if you imagine yourself in…
Reversed Clichés are often more insightful than the original. This is a predictable side-effect of living in a world with so many upside down moral systems operating. With great responsibility comes great power. Spiderman’s uncle actually got that one wrong. It’s the taking of responsibility that convinces people to let you be in charge. Most…
Then mistakes wouldn’t exist. What, you never make mistakes? Super: God himself dropped by my website. …and got lost.
Mutts have been studiously and violently destroyed throughout history because they are destined to be the master race. Those who worship race hate the mixed couples most of all. Once the Mutt-baby is born, they have to deal with it, honorably or not, but, if they can discourage the pairing before the fact…then the purebreds can…
Dave and I once got talking about all those doppelgangers a while back. Both of us keep seeing pairs of people who are sooooo similar. For years we’ve been seeing it. Repeatedly meeting people who look like an old teacher or customer or boss. And not just their facial structures, but often their voices, body…
The Edifice And The Shack is a metaphor for the contrast between some proposed giant articulate system of philosophical or ethical principles, and the actual beliefs revealed in the actions and conclusions of the author. The Edifice is the giant hulking philosophical legerdemain someone has proposed as the way everyone actually operates without exception or…
The Kludge That Won It’s occurred repeatedly in our history. It’s occurred over and over during the evolution of life. Evolution has dozens and dozens of examples of some structure evolving for one purpose, but then, once it’s there, being used for some other purpose. Quite often, the new ‘unintended’ purpose ends up being even…
Feminism is, in some regards, the triumph of the ‘cultural’ culture, AKA alpha-male culture. Remarkably, it’s actually the nerds – the beta males – who are the ideological opposite of the feminists, because they represent Man’s intellectual and physical mastery over nature, plus they aren’t very cool or articulate ergo they get friend-zoned immediately. Not…
Spencer said he’s a “Godologist.” I said “Oh, yeah?” To which he replied “Seriously, Dave, I’m trying to find out if God is real and when I tell my friends, they say I’m not supposed to use logic, and I say if God is real then he gave me the logic to use and if…
When we go to unwrap an ice cream sandwich, we try to open it longways, to unwrap it in one pull, but then it always rips sideways, around the confection, despite all our attempts to guide the rip, so you have to try again, trying to pull the scruffy edge of that thin fragile paper…
The first time someone has a new experience, they have no real notion of it, no category by which to sort or compare those experiences, their brain simply remembers it. The second time someone has a new experience, it is familiar because of the previous experience, but that’s it. It’s not sorted, just connected. The…
Men and dogs… Women and cats… will eat almost anything play with their food like rough play prefer affection or just being held prefer comfort to style groom constantly get louder when angry communicate with hints and looks get dirty a lot must always look good bang into things feel pain when they break a…
I never believed those crazy UFO nuts ‘till just a couple weeks ago. I never thought something like this could be real. It all started one late night as I was headed home after visiting some friends that lived across town. I apparently took a wrong turn, and soon didn’t know any of the landmarks…
The following is 100% true. I wish it weren’t Members of the East Lansing Police force learned recently that they no longer had to rely on disorderly conduct charges to keep local residents from having fun. In a morning briefing early this week, it was revealed that East Lansing does in fact have an ordinance…
Bottle Gardeners “How do you get all the plants in those little bottles?” He was filthy, covered in old ice cream or something; maybe he was eight. At least he didn’t smell. “Well, you use a funnel for the dirt, and a stick for the plants. But you can’t just stuff the plants in there.…
HOW TO SAY NOTHING IN FIVE HUNDRED WORDS Paul McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college English for over twenty years, first at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954), Patterns of English (1956), and Understanding English (1958). Freshman composition, like everything else, has its…
The Bear Hunter This is a mapping puzzle. Drawing a picture, or having a map might help. Part one is 3–out-5 difficult (unless you’ve heard it). Part two is 5-for-5 hard. Famous part 1 A man leaves home, and walks a mile south. He hasn’t found a bear, so he turns east, and continues walking.…
An SEP field is a device for invisibility, and history has an example of a real one: In 1054, a star exploded. (Actually, it exploded about 6000 years previous, but the light from the explosion only reached Earth in 1054. ) The expanding cloud of gas from this explosion is now known as the Crab Nebula,…
Intuition is the Latinesque name for hunches or gut feelings – unconscious thinking. All people constantly use it, but it’s also easy to overlook. And it can go horribly wrong with bad information. For activities such as walking or recognizing faces, it’s pretty clear that the processing is nearly all ‘under the radar,’ yet all…
I have a theory that one way to help people (de)program our conditioned responses is to learn the structures of minds that create the pattern, so we can become CONSCIOUS of what we install in our ‘authority muscle.’ Before I describe a theory about that structure and the language I think will sell for telling people about…
This originally appeared in The State News, Michigan State University’s student newspaper, on June 14, 1999. I was the “community columnist” writing about the conviction of a student for inciting to riot during the MSU riots after they lost to Duke at home during the Spring of 1999: Judgement shows we are responsible for other’s…
There is certainly a grand-champion hall-of-famer MOST annoying question, based on how much turmoil it has caused over the last 2,500 years, and based on how easily you can annoy someone with it today, right now. Thales of Miletus, the “First Sage Of Antiquity” started teaching his students to ask it while his contemporaries…
I really like this puzzle because it does such a good job of illustrating the essential approach to all problem-solving; identifying principles working together, then using them to narrow down the possibilities, ideally to just one result. Sherlock Holmes’ most famous line teaches the same lesson: “once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however…
A principle is a relationship, in every case. When two (or more) items interact, the rules that describe their interaction can only be discovered, illustrated or applied by recourse to the behavior they cause in each other. A single item cannot teach a principle. Hence, The Principle of Unity, taught to each of us before…
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