Social Order & Disorder – Page 10

Hijack the Starship

Nineteen seventy. A great year for music, and a sad year, too. The death of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin.* Many of the great acts were kicked off their record labels and would struggle to find new publishers.** The great psychedelic band, Jefferson Airplane was breaking up, but before it did, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick put together a new band, named Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship (which would change its lineup before finalizing as the Jefferson Starship a few years later). They released a science fiction-counterculture concept album called Blows Against the Empire in 1970. It would go on ……… click below for more ↓

Poor Lao Tzu: He Gets Blamed for So Much

2013-10-09 2013-10-09 Atheism & Spirituality / Balderdash & Hoaxes / History & Biography / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes7 Comments

Poor Lao Tzu. He gets saddled with the most atrocious of the New Age codswallop. As if it wasn’t enough to be for founder of one of the most obscure philosophies (not a religion, since it has no deity), he gets to be the poster boy for all sorts of twaddle from people who clearly have never read his actual writing. This time it’s a mushy feel-good quote on Facebook (mercifully without kittens or angels) that reads, If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are ……… click below for more ↓

Internet Surveys: Bad Data, Bad Science and Big Bias

2013-10-06 2013-10-06 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Politics / Provincial Politics / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / US Politics5 Comments

Back in 2012, I wrote a blog piece about internet polls and surveys, asking whether internet polls and surveys could be – or should be – considered valid or scientific. I concluded, after researching the question, that, since the vast majority lack any scientific basis and are created by amateurs – often with a goal to direct rather than measure public opinion – that, Most internet polls are merely for entertainment purposes. They harmlessly allow us to believe we are being engaged and are participating in the process, and they make pollsters happy to receive the attention. They are, however, ……… click below for more ↓

The Eyes Have It

2013-10-05 2013-10-05 Education & Learning / Personal Reminiscences / Psychology & Sociology / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

This summer my mother was diagnosed with macular degeneration. There is no cure. It is irreversible. It simply progresses. Science has some hope for future cures, and has some treatments to slow the progress, but a cure likely won’t come soon enough for her. At 93, one expects that the body will fail, that organs and parts won’t work as well, will lose efficiency, will fail. But this is particularly tough on her. It was clear during our visit today that this diagnosis troubles her. My parents were both voracious readers, and they passed along a love for books, reading ……… click below for more ↓

I Didn’t Know That…

2013-10-02 2013-10-02 Books & Reviews / Education & Learning / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / US PoliticsOne Comment

One of the great delights of learning is to be able to read or hear something new, something unknown, something that challenges the mind or your previously formed ideas and opinions. Something that fascinates and delights you. That “ah ha!” moment. Last week I stumbled across a website called History of England and I felt like that when I started to read through it. Better yet, I spent an hour downloading the 104 free podcasts of his history (plus the eight or so supplementary ones) to listen to while I walk my dogs.* The site is a blog created by ……… click below for more ↓

Why Spelling Matters

2013-09-29 2013-09-29 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Language & Grammar / My Writing / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

Sometimes I despair when I surf through the social media. Technology has empowered everyone to be able to comment, to post their stories, to share their opinion. Yet it has not enabled their ability to compose a sentence, or to spell the words correctly. It has not made us better grammarians, better spellers. And in my despair, I’m not alone. Others take exception to the general dumbing down and its accelerating spread online. It’s not just the easily-confused homophones like they’re, their and there, board and bored, your and you’re. What’s heartbreaking about those mistakes is that the differences are ……… click below for more ↓

The Unknown Monk Meme

2013-09-28 2014-11-01 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Memes; Internet & Social / Quotes & Mis-quotes / What I'm Reading Now4 Comments

This pseudo-poem popped up on Facebook today. It’s been around the Net for a few years, without any source attributed to the quote, but it seems to be making its comeback in the way these falsely-attributed things do: When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an ……… click below for more ↓

Chemtrails redux: the attack of the tin-foil hat brigade

2013-09-21 2016-11-18 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

My earlier post on the nonsensical chemtrail conspiracy has generated quite a lot of activity recently (more than 1,000 views in a few days – thanks!). So much so that I decided to look online again to see why – had this silliness abated? Were people waking up and laughing at their former craziness? Or was it spreading more among the hard-of-thinking and the anti-science crowd? Sadly, it seems the latter is the case. And after a bit of research, I became deeply distressed that it seems to be spreading rapidly. Or maybe the overall number of gullibles is simply ……… click below for more ↓

Should Latin Return to Ontario Schools?

2013-09-18 2013-09-18 Culture / Education & Learning / Language & Grammar / Science & Technology / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

When I was a young lad, all I ever wanted to be was a paleontologist. Dinosaurs were the most important thing in my life until around age 14 or 15. That’s when I barely scraped through my high-school Latin course. After that, my interests shifted to other, more attainable career goals. Basic Latin was, at least back then, required for a career in paleontology. Greek, too*. My ability to learn languages was, as a young teenager, not up to the mark. I barely passed Latin, probably given a pass by a teacher who felt sorry for my linguistic disability (and ……… click below for more ↓

Of Type and Typography

2013-09-16 2013-09-16 Arts / My Writing / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

Humans have remarkable ability that is shared by – as far as we know – no other animal. We can turn abstract images and symbols into meaning. Words are, of course, the prime example, as old as our history. We can turn a word like dog, tree, table or vacation into a broad and deep understanding of what that word means to us. Of course when I write “dog” and you read it, they’re not the same thing. I need to add qualifiers – adjectives, descriptions, anecdotes – for you to come close to appreciating my meaning. Even then, it’s ……… click below for more ↓

In Wildness is the Preservation of the World

2013-09-14 2013-09-14 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Environment / Urban Design & GrowthLeave a comment

The title of this post is a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Walking, published posthumously in 1862, but which he wrote and rewrote during the 1850s. I was thinking of that line this week when Council officially opened the new Black Ash Creek Park, in the northeast of the Georgian Meadows subdivision.* I was thinking of it not in terms of the park – a pleasant, family-oriented, structured space with playground equipment, a small pavilion, basketball court and a chess table – but rather about the untamed green spaces around the park. It is this small patch of wildness ……… click below for more ↓

Empire of Illusion and the End of Literacy

2013-09-13 2013-09-13 Arts / Critical Thinking / Culture / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

I don’t know whether to feel vindicated, delighted, frightened or depressed as I read through Chris Hedges’s book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Much of what he says reflects many of my own observations and opinions. I started reading this book in part as research for my upcoming conference speech on social media, but it has kept me mesmerized, like seeing a train wreck before your eyes, something you can’t quite turn away from. I suppose we like to read books that reinforce our world view (those of us who read, that is ……… click below for more ↓