A movie I saw recently called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (view for free here, view trailers here) struck a chord and got me thinking more about food recently, and buying and eating more fresh, organic fruits and vegetables than ever. So I’ll post a few posts on food and diet. The last time I intentionally ate meat was the spring of 1989. Occasionally someone brings me a turkey burger[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I wrote about what I called the heart of freedom, stating that being able to choose your beliefs was more important than being able to change your environment. I quoted Viktor Frankl stating that being able to choose your beliefs was a freedom that could never be taken away. What does that freedom get you? “Just” feelings? Or does it get you more than that? He followed up yesterday’s[…] Keep reading →

Viktor Frankl, whom the Nazis captured and imprisoned as a slave laborer in concentration camps including Auschwitz and Dachau, perhaps best clarifies and shows that you can feel free independently of physical constraints and that feeling free gives you all the value of being free. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They[…] Keep reading →

Continuing yesterdays’ post… In the examples above, the categorization schemes worked because they categorized something with an underlying structure — the photon and its wavelength, the atom and its nucleus and electrons, natural selection and DNA, the (so far) fundamental particles and the laws governing their interactions. But not everything with patterns has an underlying structure. Let’s look at anatomy, for example. As we’ll see, it will reveal a lot[…] Keep reading →

Discovering the periodic table of the elements told us wonders about chemistry and pointed the way toward understanding atoms. Figuring it out pointed the way toward tremendous understanding and improving our lives. We found similar structures that revealed underlying structure in the spectrum of light, life’s family tree, the standard model of particle physics, and others. Wouldn’t it be great to find such a structure for our emotions and motivations?[…] Keep reading →

A friend asked what site to see in New York City if she could only see one. Without hesitation I said Central Park. Thinking about it later, I thought if an alien asked what site to see on Earth if he, she, or it could only see one. I might still say Central Park. I’ve seen beautiful days, but none more so than Sunday, when Central Park exploded with autumn[…] Keep reading →

A friend and reader, es, commented Your posts about North Korea remind me of some parts from Amartya Sen’s “Identity and Violence” and “the Idea of Justice”. Over-generalization, exclusion, multiple identities, basic norms existing in each society and universal norms that should transcend them. Narrow views on North Korea can be attributed to people only focusing on one aspect of North Koreans’ identities through the lens of basic norms in[…] Keep reading →