Matthew's Blog
Creating Joy Bubbles
During CoVid, I'm doing my best to create “joy bubbles.” (Here I am not talking about Deep Joy. That's the purpose of life stuff. I don't think you create that type of joy—a joy which is more of a way of living every day, nearly a discipline.) I am talking about the...
My Best Post in March
At the end of each month, I enjoy reviewing my last month’s blog posts to see if there was at least one rough diamond, one insightful idea. (This falls under the principle that even a broken clock is right twice a day, or if you shoot enough arrows you are bound to...
In Twitter Veritas?
We are all familiar with the saying in vino veritas: In wine, there is truth. Ignorant people become more ignorant after a glass of wine.Means-spirited people become more mean-spirited after a glass of wine.Kind people become kinder after a glass of wine. Does...
Kintsugi, Kintsukuroi, and Our Soul
Most people are familiar with the Japanese term kintsugi ( "golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi ( "golden repair"). At the top level, it’s considered a form of repair of a broken object which results in the object subsequently...
Why I Love the OED: Diachronicity
In the post “Merriam-Webster and OED add new words: Lorem ipsum, TL;DR, and more” from the Columbia Journalism Review, Merrill Perlman (@meperl) succinctly differentiates between the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): Merriam-Webster...
Emotional Coherence And A Wedge of Ambivalence
I love the paper The Cognitive Science of COVID-19: Acceptance, Denial, Belief Change, written by Paul Thagard. Although a simplified view of this paper is it's an amplified restatement of Hume’s "reason is a slave to the passions” to me the idea of emotional...
Curation for Photography (and Writing)
One of the upsides/downsides of moving from film photography to digital photography is the significantly increased volume of generated content, resulting in the need to “up my curation game”. For example, I quickly rejected the photo above of the rail car wheel; it...
Occam’s Simplicity vs. Dirac’s Beauty
Most everyone is familiar with Occam’s Razor, which is usually stated as “The simplest explanation is usually the right one.” or “Do not multiply entities without necessity!” (This idea also makes its appearance in medical school with this classic saying: “when you...
Why Should Writer’s Write Poetry?
Why should a woods-person sharpen their axe? Because an axe is the tool of their trade, and it chops better when sharpened. Why should a writer write poetry? Because language is the tool of their trade, and its use improves when sharpened. Time for some...