“We like to think of ourselves as rational actors who make our way through life by careful reasoning and logic. For better or for worse, this is almost certainly not the case. We constantly rely on all sorts of pre-cognitive or non-conscious  or visceral operations. Most of these are grounded in our bodies and their perceptual equipment.”

“…growing up in evangelical Christianity, and now practising Tibetan Buddhist rituals, I have come to understand….Some rituals are designed to help us ‘keep ourselves together’. Others are designed to help us fall apart.”

Phil Plait fisks a climate change denail article in The Telegraph

“An amateur astronomer discovered asteroid J002E3 orbiting the Earth in 2002. By observing how the object was moving and measuring its spectrum, it was determined that the asteroid was man-made and probably the third stage of Apollo 12’s Saturn V rocket.”

This essay about how Twitter kills the desire to write long essays is pretty accurate for me. Where I differ, perhaps, is if that’s a bad thing or not. (A) Writing long essays can be just as addicting as Twitter. (B) Writing long essays takes a lot more time. (C) The essay is BETTER that the tweet, of course, but is it important to my life? Writing is not necessarily my raison d’etre. If I have other priorities higher than writing, then Twitter killing my desire to write long essays is a GOOD thing.