This post is part of a series beginning with The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay about the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement. As a reminder, they don’t usually call themselves sovereign citizens, but I will use that label because it is the one generally accepted among outsiders like myself. In the previous post in this…
Author: Kenneth
Cat owner, educator, learner
Why we should be nice to (some) AI
While modern “chat bots” (large language models or LLMs) like ChatGPT are far from sentient, they are amazing in their capability and their development has prompted greater public discussion around the future of AI and humanity’s relationship with AI. Some, even some experts in the field, are fearful of making rapid progress without first resolving…
Possibility, necessity, and imagination
In philosophy, specifically in metaphysics, we often speak of what is “possible” or “contingent” and what is “necessary”. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot possibly be false. An example of necessary truth might be mathematical theorems. If something is contingent, then it’s true but possibly could have been false. We often talk about…
One man’s 25-year opus (3rd in a series on sovereign citizens)
Prologue In first my post on sovereign citizens, The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay, my goal was to illustrate what the sovereign citizen movement is and highlight the particularly strange language they use, which often stands out immediately. Having limited myself to that, I next set out to write a second post covering several…
And sometimes i
Most English speakers know the vowels as “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y”. The reason for y’s ambivalent status is because it is often used as a consonant, as in “yes”, “you”, “kayak”, and “player”. It can also be used as a vowel, as in “sky”, “psychology”, “byte”, and “city”. Less often considered…
What does “include” mean? (2nd in a series on sovereign citizens)
They say nothing is certain but death and taxes, but some people think they can avoid at least one of these. This post is about the people who call themselves sovereignty advocates, state nationals, private men and women, etc., and whom others may call sovereign citizens, tax protestors, tax scammers, etc. In my post The…
The barber shop pole illusion explained with math
This is a well known optical illusion in which rotation appears to be vertical motion. There are several aspects of the barber pole design which make the illusion more effective, including having multiple stripes, making the stripes different colors, and using rotation. We will strip these things away in order to see what is happening…
Which side of the quotation mark does it go on?
I’m not a prescriptivist, I swear. As someone who is math-oriented (and maybe has some neurodivergent features), I like formal rules. I enjoy treating English grammar like a math problem; and, due to the circumstances of my upbringing, I am highly proficient at “standard” English. When I was younger I understood this to be a…
The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay
So-called “sovereign citizens” make up a collection of people with vaguely similar beliefs about government and the law. I say so-called not to deride people for calling themselves that, but rather because they often do not call themselves that. Instead, it has become a label that people in the mainstream use to describe individuals with…
Sympathy for the scammer
Recently, I’ve been watching YouTube videos on channels like Scammer Payback and Scambaiter. The idea is that a person pretends to fall for a scam, then uses the opportunity to hack into the scammer’s computer or even just make the scammer angry and waste their time. Refund scams One common type of scam goes like…
thoughts on mind 