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Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The Flat Earth Theory

The reason we believe the Earth is round is that everybody we know says that it is.  If we lived in the days when everybody said the Earth was flat, we would likely believe that.  If we met somebody like Galileo, we would probably judge him to be a heretic at first but, if we had the patience to listen to his round Earth theory and think about it for awhile, we might become convinced that he was right. Then we would have had to decide whether or not to support him publically or to keep our mouths shut about it if we knew what was good for us.  Lucky for us that we live in a more enlightened age when they no longer burn people at the stake for saying something unpopular.  The downside is that everybody else can say what they want, whether or not they know what they are talking about, and we have to judge the validity of their statements for ourselves.  All things considered, I would rather be alive now than then.

Sometime after I graduated from high school, I started preferring to print in all caps rather than to write cursive.  I don't remember why, maybe it was because of all the forms I had to fill out for the army and various prospective employers afterwards.  I considered buying a typewriter when I started putting some of my stories together after the paper mill closed down, but I never got around to it.  My daughter gave me her old laptop in 2000, suggesting that I could write my stories on that, which I did.  When it came time to print them up, I couldn't find a printer that was compatible with that old laptop, so I bought a new desktop and a printer to match.  I'm still only a two finger typist, but I can't think much faster than that anyway.

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