The Daily Bluster

I’ve always been a reader. The very first book I’ve read (I might have been a fourth or fifth grader) was a kid’s version of Henry Ford’s biography. Lots of black and white photos of weird-looking cars, and no mention of union-busting or Mr. Ford’s infatuation with the Nazis and rabid anti-Semitism. I then discovered the Hardy Boys , and I must have spent a good chunk of my allowance on these books, for I seem to remember entire bookshelves filled with hard-bound Hardy Boys books. Where they are now I have no idea. A happy place Then I got on to Mark Twain, then to the more “serious” authors—Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and many others. My library cards have always been filled with library stamps. It got so that librarians in the schools I attended (from high school to college) would let me search  for myself the books I wanted to borrow—they got tired of searching for books that I wanted, which was often located i...

And I wonder if you know That I never understood That although you said you’d go Until you did I never thought you would. Empty Chair is my absolute favorite Don McLean song. The song’s lyrics somehow capture heartbreak without being sappy. He sings about steps echoing in an empty room, a whiff of fragrance left behind, an empty chair, and facing another night of silence staring at the moonlight, at shadows that are no longer there. Beautiful lyrics, haunting tune. Best listened to when alone in a half-dark room.  It was said that singer Lori Lieberman heard Don McLean singing this song in a concert, and inspired her to write a poem, which in turn inspired the song “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” (Lori Lieberman recorded the original version of Killing Me softly…) Turns out to be not the case. As Charles Fox, the composer, recounted , "I think it's called an urban legend. It really didn't happen that way. Norman Gimbel and I wrote that ...

Much have been said about the world ending in 2012, because of that Mayan calendar . However, scientists have discovered an extended Mayan calendar that doesn’t stop at 2012. So if you are planning to attend (or hold) an end-of-the-world-party this December, you might want to rethink that.  It turns out that the Mayan calendar extends further than 2012; and, like all calendars, it really has no limit on the number of years it can count. The Mayan calendar has its own units of counting the passage of time, its own “cycles,” that would be comparable to our days, months, or years. For example, the current Mayan “cycle,” or baktun (a cycle approximately 394 years long) , will end this year. However, it is a repeating cycle, much like our years, decades, and so on. So there is a good chance that a new baktun shall begin again. (image is from here ) In any case, there are scientists that had already questioned the accuracy of the conversion of dates from the Mayan...

Since ancient times, people had been digging up bones and other mineralized remains of creatures that lived and died a long, long time ago. When dinosaur bones were unearthed in China about a thousand years ago, people wondered about the kinds of animals that had these bones. This was probably the start of dragon legends. All over  the world, there are places that if one digs deep enough, one may find some ancient shells, bone fragments, a piece of petrified wood, or even a leaf print. These relics are called fossils. They are usually found through digging. In fact, the term "fossil" comes from a Latin word that means, "to dig." Fossils are remains of ancient life; they give us clues about the distant past. Countless animals and plants that lived a long time ago were preserved in different ways. In hot and dry places, actual bones or teeth of an extinct creature are sometimes preserved; in moist places, the relic may be replaced by a rock-like copy of ...

Simply put, monotheism is the belief in the existence of a single god, in contrast to polytheism, which is a belief in the existence of many gods. Until the advent of monotheism, polytheism was the norm among the early civilizations. Civilizations that worshiped many gods were traditionally more accepting and more tolerant of the gods of other people, e.g., the Sumerians, Hittites, etc. (Hittite state documents unearthed by archaeologists often bear the invocation “The Thousand Gods of the Hatti.”)  The first monotheistic religion may have been the worship of the Sun God Aten in ancient Egypt, which was established by Amenhotep IV (1364-1347 BC). Aten However, this did not last, as a subsequent pharaoh eradicated the worship of Aten. Then sometime before the 6 th century in Persia, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) founded Zoroastrianism, which many  scholars believe to have influenced the three major religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.   Zoroastr...

Below is the text of Dr. Richard Dawkins' speech at the Reason Rally held last March 24 in Washington D.C.   What a magnificent, inspiring sight! I was expecting great things even in fine weather. In the rain -- look at this: This is the most incredible sight I can remember ever seeing. The sharper, critical thinkers among you may have discerned that I don't come from these parts. I see myself as an emissary from a benighted country that does not have a constitutional separation between church and state. Indeed it doesn't have a written constitution at all. We have a head of state who's also the head of the Church of England. The church is deeply entwined in British public life. The American Constitution is a precious treasure, the envy of the world. The First Amendment of the Constitution, which enshrines the separation between church and state, is the model for secular constitutions the world over and deserves to be imitated the world over. How sad it wo...

Probably one of the most pointless and depressing activities one could do in this day and age is read the comments section on Yahoo. Or participate in an Internet forum debate about politics and religion. Which, to my eternal regret, I did, these past few months. So what did I learn from reading all those caps-locked posts, ad hominems, straw man arguments, and other fallacies that I didn’t even know existed? Absolutely nothing, except that I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with this country’s educational system. Yes, random strangers hiding behind stupid user names, your posts are a scathing indictment of how rotten our state of education is.  Either that, or majority of humans are just naturally idiot scumbags. Easier to blame education (or the lack of it), I think. I wish I could take back all those hours reading those posts, and trying to explain to faceless strangers that no, evolution does not say that we evolve from monkeys, and that the exi...