Sometimes I wonder if you’re still alive. I know you could be, even though I’m almost 70 years old myself.
Here’s a recent picture of me . . .
I’m taking a lot of naps now that I’m older. Although come to think of it, I took a lot of naps when I was younger too!
I can’t move my legs very well now — my back legs, mostly. They don’t hurt, but I can’t feel them very much and I can’t tell where they are. It’s funny that I used to be the fastest pug and now I’m the slowest.
I remember you told me that dogs teach people about two things:
Alternative medicine is not a real thing. You don’t have a choice between medicine and alternative medicine. You have a choice between medicine and Things That Have Not Been Proven to Work.
Alternative medicine that works is called “medicine.”
Some people tell me that regular doctors don’t know about alternative medicine because they don’t teach it in medical schools.
They don’t teach it in medical schools? If I didn’t know anything about my job beyond what I learned in school 25 years ago, I’d be in bad shape. I’d be unemployable.
If there are any doctors out there who’ve never learned anything outside of medical school, those are not the doctors you want to be going to.
They were rescued on Monday of this week when one of the women screamed through a small opening in the front door, “I need help! I need help! I have been kidnapped for 10 years.” Two men in the neighborhood heard her screaming, kicked the door in and the women were able to escape.
(Why it took 10 years to think up the Scream for Help strategy, I don’t know. I wish the reporter had asked about that.)
A childhood friend of one of the women said, “I’m so thankful, God is good. I’ve been praying. Never forgot about her, ever.”
So let’s see . . . 10 years of prayer = no results. Screaming for help = instant results.
I know some wiseass is going to say that prayer did bring results because God sent someone to kick the door in, but did he have to wait 10 years to do it? It’s a good thing the guys who heard the screams didn’t take 10 years to mull over their next move . . .
I hate to admit it but I’m getting old. My mind is still sharp and I’m still handsome but I can’t move my legs very well anymore. I feel like pretty soon I won’t be able to move them at all and when that happens . . .
My owner promised to take care of me all the way so I’m not scared. He tells me he loves me. He never used to tell me that but I knew anyway.
He asked his wife the other day if it’s okay to say “Love you” to a dog. “It feels a little silly,” he said, “but maybe he understands it.”
I think he knows that our time together is almost over . . .
I never actually noticed it before, but the gas station where I buy sodas every morning has a sign out front showing the current jackpots for Powerball and Mega Millions.
Both of the jackpots were three digits this morning (nine digits if you add six zeros for the millions) — one a little more than 200 and one a little less. Maybe that’s why I noticed them today, because there were so many digits. Or maybe it’s my destiny to win the lottery and the hand of fate turned my eyeballs to the jackpots.
“I noticed the numbers out front,” I said to the clerk. “Give me a ticket for Powerball and Mega Millions.”
“That’s a lot of millions,” he said.
“It sure is. I’ll still stop by in the morning for sodas though.”
The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled — the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor — refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired. . . .
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Most days I park on Level 5 of the office parking structure because that’s where the open spaces are at the time I arrive.1
This morning I got a spot on Level 1! A guy was pulling out just as I was pulling in and I got the spot. 🙂
Unfortunately, when I went out for lunch, I walked up four levels out of habit and couldn’t find my car. 🙁
1There are actually a lot of open spaces on lower levels but they’re “reserved” for people who aren’t there, which is rubbish. If you’re really that important, you should be the first person in every morning and you can have any parking space you want.
What does it mean to say that you “know” something is true?
According to traditional philosophical thinking, you can be said to know that some proposition P is true if and only if:
P is true.
You believe that P is true.
You are justified in believing that P is true.
These three conditions jointly form the concept of justified true belief (JTB).
As an example, let’s examine my claim that I know Paris is the capital of France. Unless an edict to the contrary has come down in the last few minutes, Paris is the capital of France, I believe that Paris is the capital of France, and I’m justified in believing that based on available evidence. So according to the concept of justified true belief, I know that Paris is the capital of France.
Gettier Problems
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say I wake up in the morning, look at the clock (let’s make it an old-fashioned analog clock), and it shows the time as 7:30. And let’s say that the time is in fact 7:30, but that, unknown to me, the clock has stopped. Do I “know” that the time is 7:30? My belief that the time is 7:30 is correct, but is it knowledge — or is it more of a lucky guess?
Another thought experiment: Given the following scenario, do I “know” that my wife is in the house? I come home from work and see my wife in the kitchen. As it happens though, what I see in the kitchen is actually a perfectly rendered hologram. My wife is in the house though, but she’s upstairs where I can’t see her. Again, the three JTB conditions are true, but my justification for belief has nothing to do with the truth of the matter.
These types of thought experiments are called Gettier problems, named for Edmund Gettier, who in 1963 published a paper called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”
Photogravure of Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In democratic societies, there exists an urge to do something even when the goal is not precise, a sort of permanent fever that turns to innovations (which) are always costly.
This picture was taken just after I said to Mark Twain, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
And Twain said, “That’s a good one! I’ve got to write that down!”
Actually, the Twain statue is just inside the main entrance of Doe Library at UC Berkeley. I asked the nerdy-looking Asian girl at the front desk, “Who’s the guy on the bench?” She stared at me for a second. “Kidding,” I said.
“At first, I thought it was Albert Einstein,” she said, “so it doesn’t surprise me when people don’t know.”
From Salon, before the bombers were identified, captured and/or killed:
Shame on everyone who assumed that the bombers were Muslims from a foreign land! Wait — what? They were Muslims from a foreign land? OK, never mind.
Calling out “far-right extremists” for “demonizing bogeymen” is either hilariously ironic or depressingly symptomatic of American decline. Since Salon is not known for its satire, I have to go with the latter.
Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They’re Better — PBS NewsHour
An academic says that Silicon Valley is “not a meritocracy.”
He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce.
The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X.
In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do.
Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to see them sometimes?
The fact that more men than women are founding startups is not evidence that women are being discriminated against. The simplest explanation is that women just don’t want to do it as much as men do.
