What We Can Know for Sure
My golfing buddy and I have been playing golf together for more than ten years now. At least once a week during golf season, and often two or three times a week we drive together to one of the courses we play at. The drive usually involves at least a half hour drive. So we have lots of time to talk about things that matter to us. Sometimes it’s baseball or basketball. Sometimes it’s about cars and driving habits. Often we talk about rules – rules of the road, rules of social interaction, laws - how they control and direct our lives, whether they should be considered strong (non-negotiable) or weak (guidelines). Sometimes we talk about ancient and not so ancien

Merge Strategies and World Views
One of the books I have been reading most recently is called “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt. The subtitle is “Why We Drive The Way We Do (and what it says about us)”. This is not the kind of book you would normally think of as an entertaining read. But like most people who drive a decent amount I have some fairly strong opinions about driving habits, rules and customs. So clearly this is a topic that promises to be of interest to someone like me. “Traffic” takes a very interesting (and detailed) look at some of these habits, rules and customs, and analyzes some of the (often mistaken) assumptions we make about things like speeding, congest

Stick Your Green Tips Up Your…
For the past few months I’ve been conducting an email campaign where I give away “Green Tips for Homeowners” to real estate agents. I make this offer to hundreds of thousands of agents and have hundreds who take me up on the offer. But occasionally (twice to be exact) a guy (so far it’s always been a guy) will say something like “Stick your green tips up your a**. I don’t want anything to do with your green Al Gore-loving liberal bs.” Usually I just ignore this kind of message and take them off the list. But a few days ago when I got this kind of message I decided to send a response to see what would happen. I innocently thou

Talk about stereotypes! There’s this cl…
Talk about stereotypes! There’s this classic image of a guy and a girl sitting across from each other at a cafe. It’s been lampooned in any number of commercials and sitcoms. The girl is yapping non-stop about who knows what and the guy sits there nodding, “Uh huh, Uh huh, Uh huh,” while the bubble over his head is filled with images of cars or golf clubs or whatever… Well, just about every time I go to my favourite coffee shop I see this scenario in the flesh. Tonight I could here this rapid-fire one-way stream of jibber jabber coming from two tables over. How anyone can keep talking that fast for so long about nothing is completely baffling t

Damn! I see Wordpress version 2.8.5 is n…
Damn! I see Wordpress version 2.8.5 is now available. Don’t these people ever stop making changes.