What is up with fortune cookies, Part II

This is a followup to my previous article, What is up with fortune cookies these days? which I wrote after friends and I received some very strange “fortunes” in our fortune cookies.

Well, it’s happened again. Different restaurant. Three of these are just weird. One of those three is just stupid. Then the fourth one is just made of 100% pure awesome, and it was, appropriately, the one in my cookie.

The first weird one...
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What is up with fortune cookies these days?

When I was growing up, I seem to recall that fortune cookies contained things like “you will meet a tall, handsome stranger” or cute little “Confucius say…” type phrases. These days it seems like they’re…um…different?

We ordered Chinese delivered tonight and each of us got a cookie. Here is what our “fortunes” were:

“You have a sincere desire to improve”
This one actually works well with the “-in bed” suffix, so it gets my approval.

“Lucky you....
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"String Theory" of Thought

Many years ago I got to thinking… how is it that we are capable of speaking? If you break it down logically, it shouldn’t work. When I start speaking a sentence, I don’t know what the words at the end will be. I haven’t planned the whole thing out word by word. And yet I’m able to construct it in such a way that the word choices at the beginning of the sentence work with...
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On Cats and Trust

As I find myself closer and closer to the inevitable time when my cat, Ding, will die, and the possibility that I may have to have her put to sleep, I find myself repeating an inner argument about the nature of trust.

I got Ding as an 8 week old kitten in the spring of 1990, when I was 18 years old. She was a skittish and nervous kitten. Nervous to the point of being...
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Is Free Will Compatible with Determinism?

The question of whether or not individuals have free will is one that has been debated for thousands of years. One argument claims that we cannot have free will because our actions are by necessity caused by their circumstances and therefore are predetermined. That is to say, “if our brain states determine our mental states, and the external environment plus the laws determine our brain states, it seems to follow that our mental states are...
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Adam and Eve and the Argument from Evil

One of the primary arguments against the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent god¹ is the existence of evil in the world. How could such a god allow horrible things to happen to innocent people? If this god loves humanity, how can he let children die of cancer, or hundreds of thousands of people die in the wake of a tsunami?

One of the answers sometimes given to this question lies in the idea that...
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