Recent Comments

1. about 3 years ago on Herman

   Our produce alone has been worth the trip.

2. about 5 years ago on Jim Benton Cartoons

   You must be trolling. Birds eating worms is so common. It’s like saying, “I’ve been an avid bird watcher my entire life; Never seen one fly though.”There’s no shortage of videos online showing birds eating worms.

3. about 8 years ago on Reply All

   Techies have taken forced security way too far! “Follow these 20 rules, and don’t forget to make your password easy to remember!” “And you’ll have to change it every 3 months, but you can’t use an old password.” Yeah, right.

4. about 8 years ago on Zen Pencils
   “Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing.”

   Provided that what you like doing is starving to death out in the cold.

5. over 8 years ago on The Awkward Yeti

   I haven’t seen anyone say “You’re supposed to say Happy Holidays” but I’ve seen a ton of people ranting that “You’re supposed to say Merry Christmas.” Jesus wasn’t born in December; When did obnoxious Christians come to own a monopoly on the month?

6. about 9 years ago on Wrong Hands

   Vs. ManOnly 2 legs.Comes in different colors.Sometimes smells funny.Sometimes needs reupholstering.Dies.

7. about 9 years ago on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

   Well said, BrassOrchid!

8. about 9 years ago on Basic Instructions

   Notice that there is absolutely no attempt whatsoever to understand Edison’s reasons or determine his motivations here. Only an attack on his reasons by assuming evil motivations.

   This takes actual thought, but suppose Edison actually believed that electrocution was a more humane form of execution. At the time, they were executing murderers by hanging – highly unreliable and often resulting in a long and torturous death. Electrocution is imperfect and looks horrendous, but it’s much quicker and more reliable in comparison with hanging. Edison had been besieged with requests to develop a more humane method of execution. Ask an early 20th century expert on electricity to come up with a method of execution and guess what he’s going to come up with.

   Electrocution seems barbaric compared to lethal injection, but lethal injection is a later development. Obviously it’s not fair to judge someone by standards of a later century, nor is it intellectually honest to say that Edison was “trying to kill people” while leaving out the fact that the people who were electrocuted were convicted murderers who had been sentenced to death and who would have been killed by some less reliable means. There have been a ton of negative assumptions and accusations here, and an accusation equals a conviction when the defendant is not around to defend himself, or face or cross examine his accusers. Guilty until proven innocent is the presumption.

   Suppose Edison actually believed that DC was safer than AC (which he had every reason to) and that he would in fact save many lives by promoting DC over AC. In that case, his motivation would be altruism, not greed. (For someone supposedly obsessed with greed, he certainly spent a lifetime caring more about hard work than about money or spending it, in practice.)

   Suppose Edison wasn’t omniscient and couldn’t beam himself into the 21st century and look back with 20-20 hindsight. Suppose he was, by trial and error, venturing into unknown territory to try to come up with the best solutions to the problems of invention for the benefit of people in general. And suppose he was inventing for his time and not for all time.

   But no, forget about understanding. It’s the fad these days by people who are still benefitting from his advancements to attack the man who gave us practical electric lights, sound recording, and who advanced motion pictures etc. etc. Of course, he gave us all of these things only because he was evil and greedy – just accept it without research, logic, understanding or question (Obviously if he wasn’t so greedy, he would have given us LED lights instead of incandescent ones.) Just close your mind and repeat after me “Tesla good, Edison bad, Tesla good, Edison bad…” Then pat yourself on the back for being so clever and enlightened.

9. over 9 years ago on Zen Pencils

   Too bad Carl didn’t bother to do the research on the subject. How unscientific. By now, though, he knows he was wrong.

   Making statements like “I know of nothing to suggest it is more than wishful thinking” is meaningless unless he was omniscient. He apparently had far too much faith in his own omniscience. That’s the arrogance of pseudo-science posing as science.

   Commenting that “There is no evidence of any kind for a life after death” proves nothing other than one’s own abysmal ignorance of the subject.

10. over 9 years ago on Zen Pencils

    Or, maybe you only think that because you’ve been well brainwashed according to the approved hierarchy. You wouldn’t know if it were otherwise.

    The point of the cartoon is not that everyone should do nothing but dance and forget about math. The point is that arts and science are equally important in life, but science has been treated as all important while art has been treated as unimportant. You’re only echoing the point of view that the cartoon illustrated, which has already been beaten into us for generations.

    Yes math and science have given us some great things: nuclear bombs, pollution, the elimination of thousands of species including maybe us soon, etc. Maybe if people danced more it would give them the sense of balance and perspective to realize when they are pursuing destructive paths obsessively.

    Arts and science are not mutually exclusive. There’s a reason why Da Vinci was not just a scientist. Watch the PBS series “How We Got to Now” to see how great inventions and progress are often the result of activities in other fields that you would have thought to be unrelated. How, for example, the technology used in every cell phone today owes its existence to a Hollywood actress.

    Just a few examples off the top of my head as to how science is blind without art:

    Look at string theory, in which scientists theorize that the universe is made up of vibrating strings. If that’s true, it’s probably important to have a sensory concept of vibration.

    Scientists are using three dimensional models to create drugs to kill viruses. They need more than just a guy running numbers through his head. Three dimensional modeling is now being used in many scientific fields.

    Motion pictures were developed because a photographer studied the movement of horses. It wasn’t a mathematician isolated in a room that came up with the idea.

    Music has done more for race relations than any mathematician or scientist has. If we cannot co-exist, we cannot survive.

    There’s a documentary that makes an excellent argument that the music of the Beatles had more influence in subverting the political order of the Soviet Union than any politician. Not a scientist, not a mathematician, but four artists creating art.

    Who knows what breakthroughs we might have made if the arts were given as much weight as math and artistic geniuses hadn’t been quashed?

    You say that dancers are not going to find a cure for cancer, although, so far it’s been shown that exercise and sufficient oxygen intake decrease the risk of cancer, partly by improving the immune and lymph systems. Not to mention the psychological benefits, which translate to physical benefits. So while a scientist ponders the cure for cancer he can die of it. He may have been better off and lived longer dancing.

    Physical movement and spatial and sensory perception are essential to human life, and the development of them fall within the realm of art. In the end, we will come to the inevitable conclusion that the arts are essential for survival, and even if they weren’t, they provide all that we survive for. If there’s no reason to survive, than the act of surviving is worthless.