clair073

I just got back from my second trip to the Katy Jazz festival, run by a school district just West of Houston. It was time for a jazz fix. You see, I am a jazz fan, and though not compulsive, I do need to dash occasionally to New Orleans or go to a festival like the one in Katy. How does one become a jazz fan, particularly somebody like me who doesn't know much about music and who can't stand 200-year-old church music or the new mind-numbing songs in so many "contemporary" services. For Texas students who live in enlightened districts like Katy ISD, jazz appreciation starts as early as middle school in the larger schools that spin off jazz training from their marching and concert bands. My fanhood began in the summer when I turned 19. After finishing my freshman year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a fraternity brother talked me into spending the summer in Hollywood, where his family had moved. He steered me around all the clubs and concert venues, and I s...

In my last article, I promised to explain five gimmicks that memory athletes use. These can be accomplished even by memory wimps, though perhaps not at the competition level. Most people don't want to be memory athletes, but they would like to remember things more easily and reliably. These techniques can accomplish that. Besides, they are fun. Several thousand years ago, ancient Greek orators were noted for their ability to give hours-long speeches from memory. How did they pull off such astonishing feats? They invented a visual imaging technique where thoughts were mentally captured as images in the mind’s eye and they would recall what was to be said by recalling the images. Images are much easier to remember than words. One common imaging technique is known as a method of location (MoL). This technique is also called "Memory Palace." That is, mental images are attached to certain locations in the three-dimensional space imagined in the mind’s eye. The idea is to use o...

Scientific and philosophical fashion these days is to claim that humans have no free will. That is, we are basically biological robots, driven to our thoughts, beliefs, and actions by unconscious forces in our brain. Our genes and our experiential programming control everything we do. Free will is an illusion. So goes the assertions of a clutch of activist scientists, such as Richard, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Wegner, who have probably gotten rich off their best-seller books arguing the case against free will. Religion is also nailed to the cross, so to speak. Ideas of moral responsibility originate in views of right and wrong, and every religion expects that followers have the capacity to make the correct choices. Their free-will capacity makes them morally responsible. I think it is no accident that most of the illusory free-will activists I have read are also activists for atheism. Otherwise, their position would be cognitively dissonant. Legal issues arise, as stated by the l...