Recent Posts

Personality Selection in a Two Party System

The binary nature of out political system has many disadvantages. The primary disadvantage is that many solutions are more complicated than the "either/or" choices offered in a two party system. Worse than that, these two parties appear to be selecting members by one particular personality trait. Psychologists call this trait "Openness". The positive side of this trait is an expectation that the changes that the universe presents us with are overall going to be good for me. The negative side of the trait is a fear that any change in the world will be detrimental to me. Conservative folks tend to be on the negative side of this personality trait, while Liberals tend to be on the more positive side ...

Long Project Completed

In October of 2016 I decided to start a project to replace the wooded front deck of our house with a more permanent brick deck. As I started laying brick at the east end of the house, I discovered gravel in the yard just east of where I was working on the brick when I dug up an ornamental plant that was in the way. It was growing in a rather large patch of gravel. I already was "mining" gravel from another location on my land for use as a foundation for the brick work, so I separated this gravel from the dirt using screens to separate it into two sizes: pea gravel, and larger. in the same way I ...

Two Riddles

There are two riddles that I have never seen solutions for in print. I believe I have an answer to both of them. The first riddle is from the story of Alice in Wonderland. One of the characters in the story asks the following question: Riddle Number 1: "Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?" My answer might be considered to be a palindromic homonym, as there are two ways to say this where the numbers are homonyms and their order is palindromic. A Reven is a 2 legged 4 warning. A Writing Desk is 4 legged 2 write on. Or A Writing Desk is 2 write on with 4 legs. A Raven is a 4 warning with 2 ...