Monosodium glutamate or MSG has seen a surge in popularity in recent years. MSG is a naturally occurring salt used as a food enhancer, adding umami or “savory” flavor. Americans have a strong association of MSG with Chinese food and Chinese restaurant syndrome (CRS), which includes MSG headaches and other symptoms. Now MSG is widely…
Author: Kenneth
Cat owner, educator, learner
More evidence against flat earth: star trails
This is a follow-up to my post How we can know the earth is a ball without relying on modern science or traveling long distances?. It is well-known and easily observable by the naked eye (even by a single individual if they use modern travel) that the stars appear to rotate counterclockwise in the Northern…
What I love about Morrowind
I recently beat Morrowind again. It’s one of those games that I come back to every couple years or so, and in fact Morrowind might be my favorite game of all time. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is an open world RPG developed by Bethesda and released in 2002, when I was 10 years old….
Livestreaming as a form of mass improv
Over the past decade or so, livestreaming on sites like Twitch and YouTube has become a major form of entertainment. There are many different kinds of streamers, but many of them incorporate humor and viewer interaction. Many of the funniest jokes and memes come from the chat. This is a form of improv comedy in…
Metric space
We take for granted that we can measure distances. Most people take for granted that we can represent physical space mathematically and calculate distances between pairs of points. We generally think of ourselves as living in R3, or 3D Euclidean space. Since this is how we represent physical space, it’s generally the most useful (though…
The natural-artificial and natural-supernatural dichotomies
Humans often see ourselves as being separate from nature, but we’re not. Since humans are animals, anything humans do to the environment is a natural process. Skyscrapers and beaver dams differ fundamentally in their scale, material, and function, but not in their nature. Things that are artificial are still natural. The true dichotomy, then, is…
A response to Faithroots apologetics
Faithroots is a blog about theology and apologetics that posted “God in the dock: objections to his greatness and goodness (part 2)”. The post covers several arguments for and against the existence of God. It’s interesting to me for a couple reasons. For one, it appears to be a good faith effort to present the…
Medium-strength atheism
Atheism is sometimes divided into weak and strong forms. Weak atheism can be described as an absence of belief in any god, while strong atheism positively affirms a belief that there is no god. This is related to the distinction between agnostic and gnostic atheism, where agnostic atheism claims no knowledge about the existence of…
Why do sunsets look like that?
During the day, the sky is blue and the sun appears a bright yellow. As the sun sets, it dims and reddens while the sky turns pink and orange. What causes that? You may have heard before that the sky’s blue color is due to something called Rayleigh scattering. As it turns out, the way…
Stories of math notation (part 2): The worst notation in mathematics
Sometimes notation is confusing. One way this can happen is when the same notation is used for multiple different concepts. Usually, if the same notation is used for different things, they occur in different contexts which allows them to be distinguished. In at least one case, the same notation is used for different things in…
thoughts on mind 