“What’s love got to do, got to do with it? What’s love, but a sweet old-fashioned notion?” -Tina Turner

I’ve previously spent a lot of digital ink exploring the nature of love. And I’m fairly confident that most of what I wrote holds together and offers a nucleus of wisdom or ethical knowledge, with a platinum and golden rule at the core. But humanity has been discussing the nature of love for millennia; the real task seems, to me, not just to establish a firm and credible and inspiring sense of what love is, but also to establish some firm theoretical connection between this wisdom and the realm of hard science and analysis and math. (more…)

“While we scoff at them, what we don’t realize is that these shamans, in speaking of ’spirit,’ are using ’spirit’ to describe a highly complex and technical reality, much the same way that physicists use the term ‘quark.’ ” -Terence McKenna, reconstructed from memory. (more…)

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” -Jesus “Not Quintana” Christ (more…)

“Irrationality is the square root of all evil.” -Douglas Hofstadter. (more…)

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” -E. B. White (more…)

“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.” Gustave Flaubert

Is fiction false? I’ve heard it asked (or asserted) in various forms hundreds of times in my life. But the question’s too simple.

(more…)

In the Beginning was the Word, (more…)