How Not to Starve Posts

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Skydivers Know Why Birds Sing (because they can fly)

My friend Rick has published his second book, so I get to write about it. It’s about skydiving. It is not a how-to. It tells you just enough, or maybe almost enough, about the mechanics and technology of the sport so that a person unfamiliar with it can follow the...

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Climate Change and Kant

It is November 2022, and the world population has just reached 8 billion people, according to news reports. I don’t know how many people the planet can sustain, but I suspect that with improvements in technology and behavior, it is a lot more than 8 billion. We are experiencing extreme...

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Black Licorice

It is 2022, heading into Thanksgiving. I haven’t eaten any Halloween candy, but seeing the little boxes of Dots gumdrops somehow awakened in me a craving for black licorice. I realize not everyone likes black licorice. It’s one of those tastes that are just popular enough for the market to...

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Happy Halloween

As a kid growing up in Fort Lauderdale in the 1960s, I loved Halloween. My costumes were usually not much, and one time an older kid broke an egg on head, and I ran home crying to my mother. I did not love that part. In those days, kids as...

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The Power of Negative Thinking

Engineers tend to focus on what’s wrong or could be improved. In contrast, creative writers need to be able to turn off their internal fault-finder, to get a full draft done before paralyzing themselves with analyzing the flaws. I’m definitely the engineer type. I have always tended to think negatively,...

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Porch Pirates, a fantasy

Lee gets a break, for once. Cruising through the Compass Rose subdivision, looking for packages to snag, and here comes a Package Express vehicle from the other direction. It passes, and Lee sees in the rear-view mirror where it stops. No hurry, proceed to the end of the block and...

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How Not to Spam My Blog, part 2

Beyond the spam I discuss in How Not to Spam My Blog, I also receive frequent emails that are computer generated and sent using the Contact Dan’l page. So far, they all seem to come from the same source, using a variety of email addresses that I suspect are invented...

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I’m Younger Than That Now

In three years of high school, Chatsworth High class of 1974, I took five Advanced Placement classes and did well in all of them. But I only took three of the AP tests. Passing the test could be worth college credits. I didn’t want too many of those, because I...

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The Illusion of Destiny

At one level of description, everything that happens is extremely unlikely. So many other things could have happened, but didn’t. At another level, because it happened, everything seems to have been inevitable. I have seen several versions of a line of reasoning that goes something like this: the conditions required...