The 10th Justice

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, was asked by Rep. King of Iowa to provide the names of the 1000 employees who work on the search engine algorithm so they could be evaluated for political bias. There is no need because the answer is clear: yes, there is bias. Thousands of pages of research have been done on this issue. The more educated you are the more likely you are to identify yourself as Democrat or to feel aligned with the principles of the Democratic party. This is not because colleges indoctrinate students as part of vast conspiracy, it is because educated people understand that the world works better when both physics and tolerance are understood and used to make the world work better. There is an argument for not educating people. There is an argument that technology has harmed us all by allowing the human population to increase and by creating machines of war and industry that kill, pollute, and confuse. Since the industrial revolution began skeptics have wondered if technolog...

Last evening my wife and I had drinks on our neighbor's newly resurfaced deck. The sky was beautiful at sunset. As we talked I watched the buddhist prayer flags attached to a bamboo pole on the corner of his deck wave in the brisk breeze. The idea of these prayer flags is that the wind will carry the prayers away across the land bringing blessing on everyone that the breeze reaches. Our neighbor lives in the eastern half of our two-dwelling townhouse. We live in the west side. Each house is the mirror image of the other and both are three stories tall. So my wife and I have an almost identical deck on our side and in the corner of our deck is my pole. Mine is made of aluminum and has a set of rods pointing up and down on the top, a configuration called a ground plane antenna. As I sat there having drinks and talking about life, religion, politics and home improvement projects I marveled at the difference between our two poles. In an earlier blog I made an off hand comment about...