If I had my choice, I would be writing by typewriter. I worked on newspapers for 10 years. I typed with the touch system, and unfortunately, you can't keep typewriters going today. You have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked. You have to - it's ...
I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go do...
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions on so many different subjects all at once, and switch...
My post-cruise sabbatical would spark the idea for my first book, Cheaper Than Therapy: How to Keep Life’s Small Problems from Becoming Big Ones – The Lesson of the Paper Clips. How? In my data entry job all I did for 20 hours a week was paper cl...
A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can th...
Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-...
Look at our culture. Look at the computer-enhanced people we compare ourselves to. Look at the expensive cars and trinkets we're all supposed to have. Look at how many people are wrapped up in that! Imagine how much money and worry we'd save ourselve...
While we may continue to use the words smart and stupid, and while IQ tests may persist for certain purposes, the monopoly of those who believe in a single general intelligence has come to an end. Brain scientists and geneticists are documenting the ...
We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.
Whereas the Xerox researcher "was eager to juggle multiple threads of work simultaneously," the skeptical questioner viewed his own work "as an exercise in solitary, singleminded concentration." In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about ...
What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guid...
New Rule: Stop putting psychedelic screensavers on computers. I sit down to check my e-mail, and the next thing I know it's three days later, I'm in the desert, I'm banging on a drum, I'm naked, and somebody's pierced my dick.
Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connect...
A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the ...
And if we don't keep moving, we won't make it to a computer in time to stop the submarine sale because we'll have to spend a second night in the jungle, surrounded by friggin' pit vipers. In the rain. And I am sick and tired of the rain. I want to ge...
I can’t remember the moment I was labeled bitch for the first time, but it sure wasn’t in the blogosphere of 2008. It was well before the blogosphere, let alone the World Wide Web, existed. The first time I was called a bitch, the home computer o...
If it is the case that we are merely slaves to the natural processes computing our advanced fight and flight responses, then we are never truly thinking, which means that logic and reason - the things we hold so dear - do not exist either.
I’m going to name my firstborn son 0123456789, because I want him to learn to count before he learns the alphabet. And my second son I’ll call 01, because I want him to get into computers at a young age.
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary in...
The very definition of what it means to be alone has changed. To be physically alone is still relatively easy, but many of us struggle daily to turn off e-mail, computers, or cell phones... Our students...find requests not to text during these activi...
One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that...
