Monday, October 14, 2024
The Gender Gap
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Taxes Should be Raised
Tom Kando
Friday, September 13, 2024
Trumpism and McCarthyism: Deja Vu?
TomKando
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Is Trump Two Fries Short of a Happy Meal?
After last night’s debate (during which I had to mute the sound when Trump’s ramblings got too much for my poor head), I got to thinking about the possibility that he might become our next Commander in Chief.
Some people say that even if that were to pass, we should not worry too much, since at least Trump’s lack of focus and intelligence would prevent him from implementing his worst ideas.
But according to Italian economist Carlo Cipolla, stupid people are the most dangerous kind of people. He defines a stupid person as ‘someone who causes losses to another person [or group] while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses’.
In his satirical essay ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity’, Cipolla enumerates the laws as follows:
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Traveling to the Past
If you are one of our faithful readers who might be wondering why I haven't posted for a while, rest assured: I haven’t expired or gotten sick, which would be a valid reason for not posting (and not such a far-fetched possibility at my age).
Granted, my regularity of posting has dwindled over the previous year: pressure of working seven days a week and so on. (That’s a lie, I am happily retired). It couldn’t be blogger’s block since writing is something I enjoy, (to the chagrin of some of you, who are more sensitive to the mediocrity of my writing).
The truth is, my silence is due to a side step into my past. A friend of mine (whose name will rename undisclosed) let me borrow his time machine and I landed in Hungary at the turn of the 20th century. This was not a random choice, mind you. I wanted to find out what the hell by grandparents were up to.
While I was away, I discovered that living in the present is not the only option we have. Despite the horrors of that time - a lot of wars and dead bodies floating in the Danube - taking a break from the present can be invigorating. Living in the past is a lot safer, since you don’t have to make choices of who to vote for, what to spend your money on or which college to send your kids to. It has already been decided for you. And it is much less stressful since you know what the outcome will be, good or bad.
Of course there is the ever-present looming shadow of regret, but regret is not the past. It is the present. Come to think of it, the present is an awfully stressful, high blood pressure raising demon. Think about it. Don’t we all try to find a break from the present? Even the chipmunks with their cheeks full of seeds and the birds fighting for a perch on my birdfeeders take a break from the ever present. It’s called sleeping.
So, if you are suffering from Trumpitis, Harrisitis, Tendonitis or Presentitis, take my advice. Go visit the past. Not only will it give you a well-deserved vacation, but you might actually come back with a suitcase full of stuff that you thought you had lost forever. leave comment here Read more...
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Who Owns the American Flag?
Sunday, August 11, 2024
America and the Olympics. How the U.S. Does it
Tom Kando
Friday, July 19, 2024
Different Differences
Tom Kando
Monday, July 15, 2024
A New Americanism
Friday, July 12, 2024
A Tale of Survival
Sunday, July 7, 2024
Ancient Rome lasted nearly Twenty-one Centuries
Tom Kando
Thursday, July 4, 2024
Kamala Harris for President
Sunday, June 23, 2024
Should we Fear Death?
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Beautiful Kauai
Of the many places I've traveled to in my long life, Kauai remains my favorite. I've had a decades-long love affair with this beautiful island. The moment the plane lands on this tiny speck of land in the vast Pacific Ocean, I feel at home. Every night, the soothing surf lulls me to sleep, and during the day, the trade winds caress my skin like a silken glove. The lush green of Kauai’s mountains and valleys contrasts perfectly with the red ochre of its soil. As the oldest of five sisters, Kauai, in my opinion, is also the most beautiful.
Monday, June 10, 2024
Gambler's Fallacy vs. Law of Large Numbers
Here is a baffling mathematical problem which I have pondered for years:
The "Gambler’s Fallacy” and the “Law of Large Numbers" seem to contradict each other:
Consider two statements: (1) “Previous outcomes do not affect the probabilities of the next (similar) event.” Take coin tosses for example, each having a fifty-fifty probability of head or tail, right?
(2) The larger the number of coin tosses, the more likely you are to approach a fifty-fifty distribution of heads and tails, right?
Statement number #2 implies that if you have just tossed a coin twelve times, and ALL twelve of those have resulted in heads (a probability of 1 in 4,096) as you proceed to toss the coin for the thirteenth time, you expect it to come out a tail, and you bet accordingly, as some gamblers sometimes do.
But actually, the smart gambler might be better off betting on head because, given the outcome of the first twelve tosses, there is a chance that the coin was tampered with and is loaded towards “head.”
Statisticians try to explain the irreconcilability of the two statements above by quoting the “law of large numbers.”
In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a mathematical theorem which states that the average of the results obtained from a large number of independent and identical random samples converges to the true value, if it exists.
More formally, the LLN states that given a sample of independent and identically distributed values, the sample mean converges to the true mean (Wikipedia).
Read more...
Friday, May 17, 2024
Who to Vote for President?
Tom Kando
The presidential election is coming up. We will have four more years of the same president we had before - either a good and decent octogenarian who is doing his best, who is a normal human being, who is overseeing a country that is doing quite well despite turbulence overseas and a general domestic malaise, Or an unpredictable weirdo who is likely to steer the country deeper into right-wing chaos and extremism.
The president of the US matters. So I Googled this topic once again. Who were our good and successful presidents, and the bad ones? One Wikipedia website offers this in the form of metadata:
Twenty-one separate rankings
obtained throughout the second half of the 20th century and the
first decades of the 21st.
I summarize the combined results below:
Read more...Thursday, May 9, 2024
Israel's Mistake
Tom Kando
I have always been a strong supporter of Israel. Of its right to exist. Of Jews’ right to have a homeland. Of this homeland existing peacefully side-by-side next to an independent Palestinian homeland. Does this make me a Zionist? I also happen to be Jewish, in the sense that my family on my mother’s side was Jewish. In the last year of World War Two (1945), my grandparents and other relatives were evicted from their homes in Budapest, forced to wear a yellow star, and incarcerated in the city’s Jewish holding centers awaiting shipment to Auschwitz.Sunday, May 5, 2024
Eric Hoffer's view on Israel *
Thursday, April 25, 2024
The King’s New Hair
Many years ago there was a King of a mighty country who was so enamored of his hair, that his big palace was chock full of mirrors. He loved walking down the long, golden-studded hallways, looking left and right to admire his reflection. Sometimes he ended up with cramps in his neck, but a good night’s sleep in his huge canopy bed with the mirror on the ceiling took care of that.
This King did not care about reviewing his army or attending important meetings. All his servants, cooks, and numerous gardeners were told to carry a mirror around and whenever they crossed the King’s path, they kneeled and held up the mirror, so his highness could admire his ever-so-beloved hair.
Unfortunately, since hair is no great friend of aging, our beloved ruler found to his horror that his hair was starting to grow dangerously thin.
He spent most of his time experimenting on which side of his head his increasingly sparse hair should be combed. His Advisor in Chief had once commented on how regal he looked when his sparse hair was combed to the left, so from that moment on, everyone in his royal presence had to wear their hair to the left.
Many strangers came to curry favors of the great King. Russian Kings, Chinese Ambassadors, and North Korean Diplomats were seen entering the Palace, carrying large mirrors.
One day, among these many guests, came a barber from a faraway land. He let it be known that he could create the most magnificent hairdos. Not only were his scissors and combs uncommonly fine, but also once he had created a hairstyle, he said, the masterpiece would be invisible to anyone who was unusually stupid or not fit for office.
‘Wouldn’t that be incredible?’ the King thought, ‘This barber can make my hair abundant, flowing gorgeously in the wind, just like my mother liked it. I will be the envy of all and I will immediately know who is unfit for their job, in other words, who did not agree with me!’
The next morning, the barber (his name was Figaro), was summoned to the royal bedchamber and got ready to perform his incredible craft. ‘Your majesty’ he said humbly, ‘I must warn you. I have to shave your head before I can create a new beautiful hairstyle. This is the secret ingredient of my oh-so-incredible craft.’Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Our Trip to the Solar Eclipse
We left Boston early Sunday morning, the day before the 2024 Solar Eclipse. We have friends who live close to the Canadian border, who invited us to watch it from their house. The path of the eclipse crosses their property, as it travels from Mexico to Maine, so we did not hesitate to accept their invitation.
After countless visits to ‘Bear Rock’, the place where our friends live, we have developed a routine. The small town of Plymouth, New Hampshire has become our pit stop on this five-hour journey. We stop for coffee and muffins before we enter the White Mountains. In the hazy distance, we see the mighty snow-covered Mount Washington, branded as one of the deadliest mountains in the world. It is not particularly tall at 6,000 feet, but has some of the most extreme weather, with the highest surface wind speed ever observed by man – 231 miles per hour.
We drive through Franconia Notch, a major mountain pass, which was home to the Old Man of the Mountain, a rock formation in the shape of a face. But in 2003 the Old Man first lost his nose and then completely collapsed. Still, the notch is impressive with or without it.
Our friends are a breed apart. Almost half a century ago, they bought a piece of land for a smitten in this forgotten nook of New Hampshire. They are city transplants, and living in an area where everyone has known each other since they were born, they will always be the couple from ‘somewhere else’. They live a solitary life, with their two horses on 300 acres. But they love it.
As we drive up to their house, we see Marc on the porch looking up at the sky, testing his eclipse glasses. He fiddles with the glasses, looks up, and fiddles some more. He doesn’t see us. I call him, but he is hard of hearing and doesn’t hear me. Finally, he comes over in his slippers through the snow. We hug and go inside where we find Helen in front of the stove, preparing one of her delicious meals. Read more...
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
About Mozart
By Tom Kando
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
An Air Travel Nightmare
Flying is like signing away your rights as a human being. Not only is your life put on hold, but you never know which side of providence your fate will fall.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Project 2025: A Blueprint for Authoritarianism
During Biden’s State of the Union address, the President referenced a speech given by President Franklin Roosevelt almost a century ago. Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that his were no ordinary times. ‘Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world’.
Biden continued: ‘Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. Freedom and democracy are under attack again, both at home and overseas’.
These words are no longer alarmist rhetoric. While France becomes the first country to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution, the United States is barreling its way in the opposite direction. The Far Right is now ready ‘to battle anti-American “woke” forces’ and enshrine white Christian patriarchal values in our government.
In case of a Republican victory in the 2024, the far right is planning to implement an authoritarian takeover of the America Government. They call it ‘Project 2025’. Published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a clear threat to our democracy, and we must treat it as such.
It wants the President to have direct control of all the departments in the Executive branch, so it can gut them at will (including the DOJ and the FBI) and reform others, such as the Department of Education, by funneling tax money into religious charter schools, instead of public schools. It calls the DOE a “one-stop shop for the 'woke' education cartel” and plans to close it down altogether and return all responsibility for education to the states.
An illegal instrument called "Schedule F" would allow the President to fire and replace thousands of civil servants who are now shielded from political manipulation. The entire Executive branch will become politicized.
The lengthy document covers all departments in great detail. It wants to give a President (Trump is their favorite candidate) complete control over Education, Health Care, Defense, the Press and even Finances.
It is frighteningly candid in its goals for the future of the country.
What Comes After the American Century?
By Thomas Kando
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
2024 Global Elections and Voting
The year 2024 will be the year of elections: four billion people will cast a vote in over 60 countries, which is about half of the world’s population. 900 million in India, 200 million in Indonesia, 160 million in the US and so on.
But the election that the entire world is most anxious about is the US Presidential election. If we elect a leader that encourages Russia to attack those NATO nations that fall short on defence-spending and admires dictators, many countries will think twice about their allegiance to America.
Thursday, February 22, 2024
Is Math a Discovery or an Invention?
Thomas Kando
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
The Story of a Decal Sticker
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Weird Electorates
Tom Kando
Monday, January 15, 2024
The Importance of Voting Systems
Depending on where you live in the world, voting systems vary greatly. In some countries, people don’t vote at all. They live in dictatorships. In some other countries, voting is restricted to certain parts of the population (usually men). Universal suffrage is shockingly recent. Before World War II, women couldn’t vote in 155 of the 195 countries in the world. Whether you lived in beautiful France, Switzerland, or sunny Spain, women had no voice. Saudi Arabia allowed women to vote only 8 years ago!
There are two predominant electoral systems in the world: Plurality voting and Proportional Representation.
The whole point of a voting system is to allow citizens to decide who will govern them. The word democracy was first used in ancient Athens. It is a combination of two Greek words: demos (a citizen of a city-state) and kratos (meaning ‘power’ or ‘rule’). It means ‘the rule by the people’.