Musings, ponderings, and other nonsense

The moral side of murder

Oct 082010

The video below features Michael Sandel of Harvard University teaching a course on Justice.

In the first part of this video, we are presented with four moral dilemmas:

First Moral Dilemma: You are the driver of a trolley car.

You are the driver of a trolley car traveling 60mph towards a group of five workers working on the track. You try to stop only to learn the breaks are out. You know for sure that if you crash into the five workers they will all die. You notice a side track on which a single worker is working. Your steering wheel works and it is possible for you to divert the trolley onto the side track and miss the five workers but if you do that then you are sure you will kill the one worker. So you have the choice: Do you kill the five or the one?

Sandel asks the audience what they would do. The overwhelming majority say they would kill the one person to save the five. Continue reading »

Why Kids do Drugs

Musings 1 Response »

Sep 062009

This article was originally published in April 2008, anonymously on a friend’s website. It generated hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of visitors (mostly from reddit). The website it was published on is now defunct, so I thought I’d re-post the article here on my blog.

Enjoy…

When I was in elementary school, during the “Just Say No” days, I remember hearing about drugs and being utterly confounded by the message. If drugs are so bad, I thought, why the heck (I didn’t say hell – it was a bad word) did so many people risk their lives just to get high? Something didn’t make sense. Continue reading »

Ada in the Cloud

Musings 1 Response »

Sep 052009

If you haven’t already heard, it’s a girl. Learning the sex of our baby-to-be has, I think, really caused the news to sink-in for a lot of people. Whereas most were congratulatory but otherwise quiet about the big news, once they found out the sex they suddenly got excited. As the news spreads, the amount of advice increases. That’s fine, of course. I like advice.

Speaking of advice, here is an email and video which my mom sent to me last week: Continue reading »

Ideas to die for

Musings No Responses »

Jul 082007

Dan Dennett talks about toxic memes and their virus-like ability to wipe out entire cultures. Dennett’s assertion that memes are, in some cases (communism, capitalism, Islam, Catholicism, and many more), essentially deadly parasites is an interesting perspective. Continue reading »