Public Thoughts

 Thanksgiving break is a time of the year that many college (and high school) students look forward to for weeks. It seems to come at the darkest time of the year when students are swamped with midterms, projects, and homework. While Thanksgiving break may seem like a saving grace, a light at the end of the tunnel, it is actually a sinister, false hope. Whether it lasts just few days, or the whole week does not matter. It gives students a small taste of freedom and relaxation, just to rip it away and plunge them into an even harder end of semester.  It becomes impossible to concentrate during the all-important final weeks of the semester, when the majority of the points for each class are coming due. All that is on anyone's mind is how glorious that break was, and how in just a few weeks they will be returning to that state of mindless bliss. I am not saying that we should get rid of Thanksgiving break, on the contrary I believe that we should get rid of the weeks between Than...

 I had to cut this from my business article because it didn't fit very well with the voice of the article, but I really liked the ideas I brought up. The trolley problem is one of the most well-known examples of an ethical dilemma and has thousands of variations. If you’ve ever seen the TV show The Good Place, you’ll know that it is easy to say what you think you would do, but it is a lot harder to actual do what you think you would do. A major lesson of the trolley problem is that there is no right answer. There is no consensus on which decision is correct. Consider the following variation on the trolley problem. You are driving your car in the afternoon down a two-way street in the big city. As you enter an intersection a car traveling the opposite direction tries to make a left turn in front of you! You have to make a quick decision, do you swerve to avoid a head on collision, or do you keep going and crash? What if there is an old lady carrying her groceries across the street r...

There are three restaurants that every tourist to the southeast needs to visit. They are Cook Out, Bojangles, and Waffle House.  Cook Out is my all-time favorite restaurant because it is delicious, inexpensive, and fast. Cook Out is a traditional burger joint that serves burgers, bbq, hot dogs, shakes, and other southern foods. For $5.99 you can get an entree, two sides, and a drink or milkshake. The price per pound of food at Cook Out rivals that of Costco or Sam's Club. There are three things that Bojangles does better than anyone else. The first is their Cajun Chicken Filet Biscuit. This breakfast food is just a chicken patty, battered with cajun seasoning and fried to a crisp, then placed on a fresh buttered biscuit. The second is the BoBerry Biscuit. More than just a blueberry biscuit, the BoBerry biscuit is crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and drizzled with a delicious glaze. The third thing that Bojangles does best is their cajun fries. When I go to Bojangles, I or...

 When is it appropriate to start listening to Christmas music? Ten years ago, it seemed like the consensus was that the Christmas season started in December. There was Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and then Christmas and New Years. The last two months of the year are packed with events and holidays, but they each had their own time and space. Gradually over the last few years the well defined boundaries between holidays have become blurred. Christmas started seeping into Black Friday, and then Black Friday suddenly changed from being a single day to being a three day event, to a whole week and now it is a month long event that starts right after Halloween. It has completely eclipsed Thanksgiving. There remains a small but sturdy percentage of the population that believes each of these holidays should be celebrated. For them, Christmas music should be illegal before Thanksgiving. My personal opinion is that good music should be listened to year-round. If a Christmas song ha...

What makes a sport great? From an entertainment media perspective, what makes a sport great is having lots of action and frequent breaks to play advertisements. Football hits one of those two criteria. There are many frequent breaks in the game that seem to last for a lifetime. It is an advertisers paradise. But football fails to hit the first criteria of a great sport, which is to have lots of action. Viewers get bored watching football because the ratio of action to advertisement is so low. Hockey meets both criteria for a great sport. There are frequent stops in play for icing, penalties, and other stoppages. There is just enough time to fit in three or four 30 second advertisements at each break. It is also a fast-paced, action-packed game. There are always people moving on the ice and scoring opportunities every few seconds. The action-to-ad ratio is much higher than that of football and possibly of any other sport. So BYU should replace their football program with a hockey progra...

How do we perceive reality? John Locke asserts that reality is perceived from the physical world to our minds at two levels. Primary attributes are inherent in the object that we perceive and can be measured absolutely. Secondary attributes are subject to our judgement and perception. For example, a water bottle can be tall or short. The primary attribute to describe height would be inches or centimeters. One question that arises from Locke's proposed method of perceiving reality is how ideas can exist in our mind, independent of any physical connections. How can I think about human rights when there is no distinct material object that reflects the attributes of human rights? Locke answers this question through a process called abstraction. His claim is that attributes can be separated from the object. As this process continues, you can abstract an abstracted idea. Consider the following example. An apple is a fruit. What is a fruit? A fruit is a collection of sugars and fiber arra...