The Comfort of Analysis In the expert witness business there are four basic functions that one must be able to handle. The first involves reading large quantities of evidence, testimony and reports. I have never been a particularly fast reader. I didn’t get glasses until I was in fourth grade. For some reason, my mother didn’t notice my vision deficiency until it was quite debilitating in school. I just could not see what was on…
The Ripple In The Pond This morning I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, which we believe is the best of the Sunday morning news magazine shows. They are interviewing Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, the guy who had to fill the very big shoes of Steve Jobs a dozen years ago. He has presided over a 9X growth of Apple to being a $3 Trillion company, the largest company in the world. That means…
Everyday Ethics For the first time in several years, I am not teaching ethics this semester. In fact, I’m not teaching at all and may have hung up my teaching spurs for life at this point. What I remind myself is that teaching ethics was much harder than I ever thought it would be. That is much like the degree of difficulty we all face each and every day with ethical dilemmas that present themselves…
As you all know by now, I succumbed and sold the Tesla for a For F-150 Lightning EV. So much for temperance.
Automotivation When I turned sixteen I lived in Rome, Italy and all I cared about mechanically were motorcycles. I was on my third off of four high school motorcycles (a Gilera 125) and cars were an afterthought. What motivated me at that age was two-wheeled vehicles with names like Gilera, Triumph, Laverda, Moto Guzzi and Ducati. When I was applying to colleges, one of the biggest reasons I liked Stanford was that as a freshman…
Ribbit I have had an episodic relationship over the years with frogs. As a kid who spent six of his first seven years of life in the tropics, frogs were a daily part of life. I’m sure they were all over the place in Venezuela, but where I remember first encountering them with high frequency was in that little tropical valley in Costa Rica, where we lived for two years. I’m not being entirely accurate…
Kennedy Gone Mad I just watched a YouTube video of a debunking of an interview by Joe Rogan of RFK Jr.. It was a great reminder of what I respect and don’t respect in human thinking. It has long been a head-scratcher for me when you hear MAGA people denigrate liberals for being over-educated elitists. I was raised to believe that education was not just a good thing, it was a necessary thing and a…
Light Up The Town About seven years ago, Kim spent the summer in her home town of Wabash, Indiana putting on a show at the local arts center. A dozen years before she had put on another show in Wabash called Wait Til You Get To Wabash, which was written and scored by her old choir director at her local church, Suzy Jones. That original show was about the town being formed by the westward…
Modern Family It’s that time of year when we all gather as families on one occasion or another. I know fewer and further traditional families and then today I see that there is a new sitcoms being aired this season that is based on how to make a divorce work successfully for you. I am the product of divorce and Kim comes from a more traditional nuclear family, but none of that causes or prevents…
The Third Prophet I haven’t thought a lot about AI since I stopped teaching last semester. I realize that Chat GPT may provide a better means of searching the internet for information, but even though I have it downloaded, I usually still just use Google search. Then, over the past week I have read about Sam Altman getting booted from Open AI. Over the past fifty years I have read a lot of stories of…