I'm a great admirer of yours, they say. Why is it that even when we're trying to express admiration for somebody else we end up aggrandizing ourselves?

--Altadena, 4/16/2007, by an admirer of great you

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that The ancestor of every action is a thought.. Conversely, I'd say, every useful thought must lead to an action.

--Altadena, 4/6/2007

To achieve true democracy and restore power to the people, America needs to change electoral law to stop each state from sending a uniform block of electors and start representating each party in proportion to the number of votes it received. This will get candidates to pay attention to non-swing states and rescue initiatives that a majority of Americans favor but which are unpopular in swing states --such as cleaning coal use to slow down global warming.

--Altadena, 3/5/2007

To calm a crying 11-month-old baby trying to sleep, silence him with a loud Shh and stop calming him every time he starts crying, resuming your calming actions when he shuts down. This will both distract him from the original reason for crying (willingness to cry is a local state of mind, from which distractions can easily divert) and train him to avoid crying altogether.

--Altadena, 3/5/2007

You can learn a lot about a nation by the language it speaks. To refer to a person's material wealth as their net worth implies that a life is worth only as much as the sum of its owner's material possessions. Many would regard this as rather misguided.

--Altadena, 3/5/2007

America needs to move away from measuring the cost of wars in Americans killed. The worth of lives is not measured by the color of their passport.

--Altadena, 3/5/2007

One of the major causes leading to misunderstanding in the world is the fact that almost the totality of people's knowledge of the world is indirect, i.e. derives from other people's versions of events. As anybody who has played the telephone game knows, even well-intended communicators tend to lose a little something in the transmission, so just imagine how much is lost in translation when communicators are not neutral. This paradigm of indirect knowledge has the potential of changing in the next few years, as the WWW, the ubiquitousness of video recordings and automated translation make direct knowledge for anybody of any relevant world event a reality.

--Pasadena, 1/30/2007

In judging two versions of reality to judge which is truth and which a lie, believeability is of little help, for the man telling the truth is constrained by the facts, whether they are plausible or not, while he who tells a lie can distort the facts at will to make them more believable.

--Pasadena, 1/30/2007

It has become clear to me that our perception of remembering our lives is only an illusion --that memory is extremely selective, and that the only reason we seem to remember a continuous and cohesive picture of our past is that we don't remember what we don't remember. If you have ever watched half a movie before you realized you had previously seen it, you know what I am talking about. Movies are particularly vulnerable to forgetting because they are isolated and unrelated to the rest of our memories, making the chance that they will be recalled subsequently slimmer. I would venture that this selective memory --and selective perception in real-time, too-- is a major source of human misunderstanding. Within our lifetime, much of this misunderstanding has the potential to go away through the recording and digitization of our entire lifestream, or perceptual stream, making it available for instant replays and search. While this will not eliminate the subjectivity of perception, , it will at least lessen the selectivity of recall.

--Altadena, 1/12/2007

If software is to learn like humans do, it will need to start playing. Learning systems need a chance to learn the boundaries between right and wrong before mistakes have grave consequences.

--Altadena, 1/12/2007