If LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter sound Geek to you, you’re only partially right. According to the statistics, very few of us who are over 50 are especially enamored of the new communication channels. Sure, we may have been the pioneers of e-mail, and most of us managed to adjust to cell phones without a problem, but we (and I’m in that group) haven’t quite figured out how to make good use of “social media.

One of the songs from the 1947 musical production “Brigadoon,” by Frederick Lowe and Alan Jay Lerner, included a song entitled, “It’s Almost Like Being in Love”:

What a day this has been / What a rare mood I'm in Why, it's almost like being in love There's a smile on my face / For the whole human race Why, it's almost like being in love.

Along about Thanksgiving time, the SCS Web site moved to a new Web hosting company. We’re now on BlueHost. One of the advantages of the new hosting service is that it will facilitate online instruction through a course management system called Moodle.

You may have noticed that the blogging software (GeekLog) has been updated as well. See especially the new poll, and let me know about the issues you want me to address, and I will keep those topics in mind. Meanwhile...

Happy Halloween!

What do you wish for? My grandmother used to say, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” What she evidently failed to notice is that an occasional beggar would end up owning—and riding—a horse. Or perhaps even several horses. While I grew up believing in the need to work hard to achieve goals, the Abraham-Hicks materials and a variety of other publications, including Write It Down, Make It Happen, by Henriette Anne Klauser, has persuaded me that there’s a better way.

Back in the ‘60s (and rumor has it that, if you can remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there), we use to say that something was “a trip.” The phrase was a carryover from the sense of “tripping” (or “tripping out”) on hallucinogenic drugs, such as marijuana, LSD, and “sacred” mushrooms. The users’ minds would go on a trip while their bodies remained in place. There were “good trips,” in which the imagery was all sweetness and light, and “bad trips,” full of dark and disturbing images. Much of the imagery from that time can still be seen on tee shirts.

You are probably familiar with the folk tale about a shepherd boy who was bored and decided to entertain himself by crying “wolf.” The villagers came running. The boy thought it was a good joke and played it again in a few days. The villagers came again, only to discover that they had been fooled again. When the wolf finally came for real, the villagers refused to believe that the boy was telling the truth.

William Blake said, “The altering eye, alters all.” There’s nothing like an altered eye to persuade one of the truth of that perspective.

About a year ago, my optometrist discovered the beginning of a cataract in my right eye. Over time, my vision increasingly became fuzzy and dim. Because the change was gradual, however, I adjusted on a daily basis without being aware of what—and how much—I was missing. By the time I was checked by the ophthalmologist (Dr. John Trittschuh of Eye Care Physicians in Kalamazoo, Michigan), I had a fairly large cataract in my right eye and a smaller one in my left. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, cataract surgery is among the most common surgical procedures in the U.S., so I had to get in line and wait for my turn.

Einstein said, “All the intelligent people I ever met were avid readers of the SCS Blog.”

OK. He really didn’t say that. Einstein had, in fact, died before we started the SCS Blog. Einstein also didn’t say many of the other things attributed to him, but the phrase, “Einstein said,” seems to add the authority of genius to whatever follows. This illustrates one of the so-called advanced language patterns of NLP called “Quotes.” The speaker’s personal responsibility for quoted material is diminished, while the focus shifts to the person or other source quoted.

There’s no deception I know. Everything about it is appealing.... The reason self-deception is so appealing is that it is based on cherished beliefs. In a previous blog [“You Believe What?” (22 March 2009)], I asked the question, “What if you knew that everything you believed is false?” In The Brain that Fixes Itself, Norman Doidge says “[H]uman beings are notoriously susceptible to self-deception, whether scientists or not” (p.179).

If, in your effort to be a good citizen in a democracy, you’ve been watching the news to develop an understanding of the current political process, you may be both confused and dismayed. While this blog entry focuses on U.S. politics, my guess is that things are much the same (or worse) everywhere. In “In Memoriam A.H.H.” Tennyson said that Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” The same seems to be true for politics. That may be because politics are part of the natural system of organizing cooperative living.