I saw a video about martial arts the other night. I’ve studied martial arts several times during my life, each time studying a different art. It started when I was young. My parents thought it would help me build discipline and anger management skills. Spoiler alert: It didn’t. Not because the martial arts don’t do […]

One of my personal heroes is Carl Sagan. I was born in 1979, and the original Cosmos series was produced in 1980. I grew up on a steady diet of PBS and ETV, and sometime during my formative years I was exposed to the series. It was embedded in my memory deep down. So when […]

There was a Presidential debate tonight in the US. No, I didn’t watch it. No, I’m not going to talk about it. Instead, I’m going to talk about something we could all use a bit more of these days: rest. I don’t mean sleep, although that helps. I mean REST. Mental and spiritual quietness.  No […]

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. Life has been… chaotic, to say the least. Alan and I both have had our attention focused elsewhere and $O$ has been put on the back burner. Both of us have had to see to our personal lives during the pandemic that we are living […]

Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors, and if I’m being honest, a big influence on my life. I’d be lying if I said his Discworld books didn’t have a huge effect on how I view the world. Although his books are ostensibly comedic, they all contain deep insights into the human condition. I’m […]

In physics, there is a field of study called thermodynamics. It studies the way heat behaves. There are three basic laws of thermodynamics. I’ll spare you the science, but what they amount to is that heat always spreads out to reach equilibrium in a system. Everything strives to be the same temperature. Because energy has […]

It’s been a hard time for us here at $O$. We had to shut down operations for a while. That was a tough decision, but a necessary one. We found ourselves, entirely by accident, operating in a space where we were one of the only providers of support to the homeless community. Small though it […]

Disclaimer: the opinions started within are the opinion of the author and do not reflect those of $O$ as an organization  Today was Fat Tuesday, and they had a special mass at the Catholic school to celebrate the start of Lent. I was thinking about that today, and about Lent in general. The idea, for […]

The Catholic church is interesting to me. I was raised Presbyterian, and while they believe in miracles, modern-day miracles are seen with… twinkly-eyed optimism. They don’t officially sanction them, but it wouldn’t be good to deny them either. They view them like the lottery. It probably won’t happen to you, but you never know! On […]

In my reading today, I ran across the concept of “natural law”, something that is familiar to me as a philosophy major. For those of you who don’t know, the idea of natural law is something similar to that of inalienable rights: that there are some things rules and rights that are just so profound […]