On Understanding Herd Mentality
I have complete confidence in the aggregate wisdom of the. . .people, if they are given and made to understand the facts. The wisdom of the mass is always greater than the wisdom of the individual or of the group…
Essays
One Result of Quarantine: Increased Herd Stupidity
March 13, 2020. Not a day most people in the United States are likely to forget soon. President Trump issued the “Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak” and in one giant stroke effectively…
Are People Stealing Library Books to Sell Online?
A trip on the internetarchive.org’s Wayback Machine will remind you that, well, way back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Amazon got its start selling books online. I personally used Amazon’s half.com to purchase many of my text books…
Why It’s Important to Look and Behold
To look (verb) direct one’s gaze toward someone or something or in a specified direction; think of or regard in a specified way. To behold (verb) see or observe (a thing or person, especially a remarkable or impressive one); to…
Data Consumption: COVID-19 Edition
Rooted firmly in the world of data and analytics, my mind often wanders to the bits and bytes of things. One such thought caught hold of my mind recently. How much disk space is being used up by mentions of…
The Eagle Who Thought It Was a Chicken
A rancher with hundreds of chickens often enjoyed walks in the woods near his home. One day, he found a baby eagle on the ground as he walked through the forest. He searched for the nest in the trees and…
Participating in Creation
In early 2012, a group of Russian scientists discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla — a flowering plant native to Siberia — that were radiocarbon dated to be approximately 32,000 years old. The team carefully extracted the tissue from…
The Case for a Living Prophet
To Moses, Jehovah said, “Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be thy mouth, and teach thee what…
My Thoughts on Now
What is going on in the world right now is a result of people letting their emotions run wild and the media fueling the fire, I think . A friend asked me to share my thoughts on the current state…
Human Anguish and Divine Love
In 1971, Truman G. Madsen wrote the awe-inspiring essay: Human Anguish and Divine Love . It is one of the greatest answers to the question: why do bad things happen to good people.¹ The most basic of all human challenges…
Fact and Story
Fact: Where I live, at the moment I’m writing this story, the sun hasn’t appeared yet. Story: I occasionally enjoy getting up early when I know I’ll be free from the distractions that come from other people in my house…
An Antidote to Greed
Let’s do a thought exercise. Suppose you go to a store and discover everything is free, today only. Do you take only what you need or as much as you can fit into your vehicle? Like me, you probably answered…
3 Life Lessons from Yard Work
A six-foot thistle hiding among my lilacs taught me three lessons about life: meaningful living requires consistent maintenance, genuine connections with others, and the willingness to put in effort.
