Is it damaging to let someone’s misunderstanding of what you’ve said go uncorrected? Depends on what you mean by damaging, but it’s unlikely to ever be a good thing, except in the most mischievous of cases. As wonderful as it might be for your opinion of yourself to be completely independent of what others think…
Physical attractiveness is not simply a function of physical features, but also depends on the relationship that exists between the person gauging attractiveness and the person whose attractiveness is being gauged. “Gauging” is an inappropriate verb insofar as it evokes the image of someone using a considerable portion of their attention to the task, when…
As usual, I welcome this political season with yawns of indifference. I seek out someone who intends to vote in a fashion directly opposing my own, such that our ballots would cancel each other and we can both save ourselves the trouble of having to go to the polls. Amid the rumble of pundits, rhetoric,…
The first three letters of a license plate I saw the other day were EYB, which led me to think immediately of eyeball and has made me temporarily/mildly interested in shorthand. The incident was doubly amusing because the trio of letters corresponded to the organ I was using to read them. I’d like to develop…
When considering how small a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum visible light constitutes, it’s difficult not to feel cheated. I would like to additionally see ultraviolet and infrared. Technology could give me this ability now, but I’d much rather it manifest itself naturally through evolution, though it’s hard to imagine why such evolutionary developments would…
Here’s something obvious that nonetheless deserves to be written. A person’s reaction to stimulus (a comment, a picture, etc.) depends in part on their mood. This is illustrated below in words with the help of a language invented especially for this purpose, so that the reader is limited in their opinion of what is said…
Person M’s opinion of person N is influenced by the company person N keeps. This contributes to the notion that person N could be embarrassed as a consequence of what the person(s) in their company is/are doing, and hence phrases of the nature “Don’t embarrass me!” I don’t like this notion that part of how…
There are buildings which act as a buffer between the sidewalk and my preferred walking path. Occasionally I’ll see people in the distance leaning up against the buildings or walking in circles, taking smoke breaks from work or just killing time. Or there might be a USPS or UPS delivery van unassumingly parked in an…
Game developers need to stop striving to emulate reality. Eventually, virtual worlds are going to be so convincing that people will claim they were playing a video game when they committed a crime. “Um…your honor, when I took out the high school principal with a headshot, that was actually part of a covert operation that…
The process of creating a piece of work that didn’t formerly exist in the world can surround the author of the work in a cloud of bias that doesn’t dissipate for a long time. This may not be true for a majority of people, but I’ve noticed it in myself. I’m rarely more proud of…