Category Archives: Supernatural

Mud People

He once told the children about a people made from mud who lived upside down from the surface. They live just like we do, except their floor is our floor, and every step we make is a step for them. … Continue reading

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The Dunning–Kruger Effect

He didn’t mean to laugh, but he was easily overcome by the mangled sentences coming out of the man’s mouth. It was a kind of disorder, that he couldn’t control himself once someone was mangling their words so much as … Continue reading

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The Cryptic Nature of Ghosts

Although sceptics around the world reject the existence of ghosts, there are also many millions of people for whom ghosts are either an uncomfortable and constant presence or a remote and threatening possibility. Those who claim to have seen a … Continue reading

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The Flat Earth Experience

In his The Time Machine Weena tries to throw herself in the fire because she has never seen flames before. She doesn’t know that it will burn her and that she should exercise care. She is a figure of profound … Continue reading

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A Use of Old Cannonballs

Galileo was alone on the top of the tower. He’d asked his friends to stay away from his experiment. He’d experienced enough failure in the past to worry that his latest venture might prove to be embarrassing and he was … Continue reading

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Checking Your Delusions

The method for checking our many delusions—that the Harry Potter letter is going to arrive for us any moment, that god is carefully listening to my prayers about the cancer He gave my mother, that the earth is flat, the … Continue reading

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Ancient Science at the Planetarium

Whenever we think about our ancestors we are inclined to imagine them as moronic, backward troglodytes, dragging their knuckles through lives as brutal and stunted as themselves. In our rather short-sighted and ungrateful vision, they do not hope to compare … Continue reading

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The Bible is Perfect. No Wait, It’s Not

Many Christians trouble themselves over whether the bible, the book they rely on for so much of their understanding of both the physical and spiritual the world, is perfect and the writing of god, or whether it is flawed and … Continue reading

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The Locked Room at the Top of the Stairs

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody … Continue reading

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The Vast Edifice of Culture

The vast edifice that is culture is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. It is as beautiful and as tenuous. Over the many centuries of struggle since we first began to bang rocks together we have tried to build something … Continue reading

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