Many of us boomers grew up in the 1960s and can remember to our astonishment that the reason we could pick up our phone and call someone in Paris was the transAtlantic cable. Speaking for myself, it blew my mind that the technology of the day enabled us to navigate a boat across an ocean and spool out 4000 miles of thick wire (with even thicker insulation around it) from the East Coast of the United States to the shores of Europe.
As if that weren’t enough, there are similar cables that went back to the age of telegraphy in the mid-19th Century. On July 13, 1866 the cable laying ship Great Eastern sailed out of Valentia Island, Ireland and on July 27 landed at Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, completing the first lasting connection across the Atlantic. It was active until 1965.
I considered myself cool when I strung two cans connected by a string from my bedroom to my best friend’s in our neighbor’s house in 1961 or ’62. See photo below. My room: house on the left, second floor.
This may be a long way of saying that the graphic at left is total bulls***. The distance is 2700 miles, and the idea of transmitting energy for no reason is stupid beyond words.
Minnesota is home to intelligent, well-educated people whose approval of Trump is lower than that of toenail fungus.
If Lindell wants to lead a state, he needs to choose one at least 800 miles away. Oklahoma?
He may also want to consider that Trump is easily the most detested person in this nation.
I wouldn’t say that the burden of proof lies on religion. No one knows how the universe got here.
The Big Bang was an event in which there was no chaos, no “entropy,” as we say in thermodynamics. How did all this orderliness get there 13.87 billion years ago? No one knows. This is an issue in cosmology which is quite likely to outlast human civilization on this planet.
I’m an atheist for a few reasons, one of which is that saying that God created the universe doesn’t get us any closer to an understanding of the cosmos, if only because it raises the question: Who made God?
More to the point, there are hundreds of moral reasons to disbelieve in God. Each year, 9 million children will die unbaptized on this planet before their fifth birthdays. In the bible, we learn that God punishes them all with an eternity of torture in hell. To what sort of weirdo does this make sense?
At left we have another good reminder that our cognitive biases can render us incapable of thinking critically.
Some of us believe anything we want to.
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