Category Archives: Superstition

You Know the Rules

Years ago my sister had both a cat and a dog. Although she was always kind with the animals, when the dog farted she would put the cat outside as well. As she did, she would say, “You know the … Continue reading

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Why People Believe in Gods: Coincidence and the Workings of Chance

When I was driving east with my friend this summer, we began to have car problems. Such problems, as you know if you have experienced them, nearly always occur late in the evening and on a Saturday evening. As if … Continue reading

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Halfway Across the Country

I have driven across Canada over fifty times, although that measurement is contested by my friend. Everyone gets cranky when they are overtired or have had a bad day, or just when someone is annoying, but when some of my … 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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Tolerance, Ethics and Conjoined Twins

On CBC radio’s The Current this morning, Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed a doctor who was responsible for the multiple surgeries that separated conjoined twins at MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston. The story was mostly concerned with the ethical implications … 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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Partridge in the Fall

When I was in my teens and traveling on the school bus in the mornings, I would often sit across from my friend Bruce. We were both farm children and thus had lots of chores to finish every night, but … 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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