Bachelor philosophers

I am reading an excellent book titled The Infidel and the Professor that I will review in more detail once I have finished it and had time to fully digest it. The book is an intellectual biography of two Scotsmen David Hume and Adam Smith who were so influential in shaping modern western thought and were also good friends, with each of their ideas building on the other’s, though since Hume was twelve years older and a far more prolific writer, his ideas went into print before Smith’s.
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Why do I do this?

Yesterday I was working on several documents on my computer and so there were several windows open as I shifted my attention from one to another. The overlapping open windows were scattered across the screen so that I could make any one of them ‘live’ by just clicking on it. I noticed at one point that if the document I was going to work on was at the right end of the screen, I would first move it to the left end before working on it.
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Don’t people have better things to do with their time?

I have not seen the recent Wonder Woman because I am not a fan of comic book superhero films. But it has been a huge hit and the fact that the superhero in this case is a woman acting alone rather than as a member of a team dominated by men has clearly resonated with a lot of people. So it was not a surprise when two young Sri Lankan women, inspired by the character, dressed up as her at a Comic Con event in that country, where they were photographed in costume.


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Swearing in sign language

Swearing can be quite cathartic. I myself do not casually swear (though I do use the word ‘hell’ a lot) and never swear in anger at other people. But I cannot prevent the occasional “Oh, shit!” escaping from my lips when I do something stupid or careless or when some unfortunate event occurs. In the video below, we see how swearing is done in sign language for those who cannot verbalize it. It may also come in useful when the recipient can see you but cannot hear you. (Language advisory, obviously.)

A story about dog loyalty for National Dog Day

Today is National Dog Day so I would like to share this story about how dogs can be extremely loyal and dutiful. I heard it on the radio program The World on Friday, August 25, 2017. It tells the story of two dogs of Lynn Landry, a sheep rancher in British Columbia, who was forced to evacuate due to raging forest fires.

Landry and her husband took their four border collies, but they had to leave behind their flock of 90 sheep and their Maremma sheepdogs, Tad and Sophie.

“There was nothing we could do,” says Landry. “We had to leave.”
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Another Leopold and Loeb-type murder?

Some readers may be aware of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case where two young undergraduates at the University of Chicago who came from wealthy families kidnapped and murdered a 14-year old boy in 1924 just for the hell of it. They felt that with their superior intellect, they could get away with carrying out the perfect murder. They were found and convicted.
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When metaphors metamorphose

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch caused some eyebrows to be raised when he sent out a Tweet that said, “We’re not going back to healthcare. We’re in tax now. As far as I’m concerned, they shot their wad on healthcare and that’s the way it is.” It was the phrase “shot their wad” that caught people’s attention because that phrase is now associated with male sexual ejaculation and not something that one might expect a senator to use in public.
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