Recently in Blog Ideas Category

Which trait is worse: pride or greed?  Explain your position.

Imagine you found the proverbial genie in a lamp.  You rub the lamp and are told that you could have choice of a lifelong love or all the money you'll ever need.  You're told that if you choose love, that you'll never be rich, no matter how hard you try.  If you choose money, you'll never find love in your lifetime.  Which would you choose, or would you put the genie back in the lamp?

In the Babylon 5 sci-fi television series, a genocidal alien scientist was captured.  Under interrogation, she demonstrated a drug that would strengthen a person's immune system to the point that they would no longer need to worry about aging or disease.  The down-side to her formula was that in order to make a dose of the drug for one person, you needed something you could only get by killing another person.  Could you kill someone else to get your dose of the drug?  If such a drug existed, would it be used for capital punishment (i.e., those on death row are executed to create a serum for someone elsed)?  What other implications might there be?

What would you do if you were in a situation where you had to kill someone to save a million people?  For example, imagine you learned that a person standing in front of you had the trigger mechanism for a nuclear bomb located in a large city like New York, London, or Los Angeles.  You know that if you do nothing, this person will eventually press the trigger button to set off the nuclear bomb, and it will kill at least a million people.  The bomber is at a distance that you can't reach them without triggering the bomb, but you are carrying a gun and could kill the bomber without setting off the bomb.  Would you be able to do it, knowing that by killing the bomber you'll save the lives of a million or more people?  If not, how do you justify not killing the bomber and letting a million people in another city die?

Certainly, money CAN be the root of evil.  People kill one another for money, rob one another, commit any number of other crimes for money.  But is money the root of all the evil in the world?  Is there evil that money doesn't cause?  Does money always have to cause evil, or can it do good (like buy a homeless person  a house or a meal)?

In the summer of 1983, I attended a special program for high school juniors at a university.  It was a lot of fun, and I met some really great people.  Unfortunately, I've not seen or heard from the majority of them since then.  One day, out of curiosity, I decided to see if I could find a guy I knew from that era named Jeff who lived in Cincinnati.  (I'm not sharing his last name or other facts here out of concern for his privacy and respect for our friendship.)  So I decided to see if the Internet could find him for me.  It took lots of different searches on Google, but eventually I found an old newsgroup post where he talked about going to a sporting event.  That gave me what might have been his email address.  I dug a little more. Eventually I found the web site for the company he works for and some contact information.  I contacted him and, to my surprise, he remembered me.  We emailed a few times but haven't stayed in touch.  I even managed to find his ex-girlfriend from the time, who now works for a college in another state.  It was interesting and kind of fun.

If there's someone you remember from your past, even someone you disliked, can you find out where they are today and what they might be doing now?  How much can you find out?  Without revealing too much about that person's identity in your blog, describe the process you followed to look them up and whether you were successful.  You might be surprised.

Television weather forecasters use some very strange vocabulary. One day they tell us it will be "party sunny" and another day it's "partly cloudy".  How would you know the difference, since in theory there should sunlight and clouds in either case?  These days, they also don't talk about "rain" or "snow" but "rain events" and "snow events".  Why do we need the "event" word?  Is it really making things clearer?  If I look out the window and tell you it's raining, is that more or less clear than saying "there's a rain event"?  And why is the top weather person always referred to as "chief meteorologist"?  Are they organized in some sort of tribal fashion, observing ancient rituals and dancing around campfires when they're not in the air? 

So there are several ideas here for your blog.  You could choose to answer some of my questions above, draw up what an off-air "chief meteorologist" and their tribe might look like, think of another industry with strange language like "rain events", or share your thoughts on weather reporting.  Something I've always wanted to do, but never committed to, was to watch a particular meteorologist's forecasts each day and take notes of what they were. Then, see if how well those forecasts mesh.  For instance, if you looked at 100 days declared to have a "30% chance of rain" would you find that about 30% of those days it actually did rain, or would you find it to be more like 40% or 80%?

Most of us have some kind of idea of some things we'd like to do, places we would like to go, people we would like to meet, or things we'd like to learn about.  What are some of yours?  How might you go about achieving those goals?

There's an intriguing notion that you could develop seriously or humorously.

Elsewhere on the web I was reading through a list of silly (often just stupid) questions that asked "What do Greeks say when they don't understand something?"  In other words, they can't say "It's all Greek to me" because if they did, that would mean they understand it since they ARE Greek?  That got me to thinking about all the different little sayings we have like that.

For example: "That's like the pot calling the kettle black."  What difference does that make?  Maybe it's a silver pot and a black kettle?  But even if they're both black, would that make the pot wrong?  It's kind of a silly thing to say on the surface.

Take a look at some cliche'd statement you've seen or heard recently?  Does the statement stand up to scrutiny?  (There's an example right there... Would just looking at something make it fall over?)  If it doesn't make sense, why do people say it?