You’ll be safest in the middle

I could not resist the urge.
It was a golden opportunity.
I went for it.

This was the result:

@sciam A big bag of beans? ;)
— sriram khe (@congoboy) August 20, 2014

I tell ya, it really doesn't take much to amuse me!

Of course, it is not always about groaners and fart jokes.  And, of course, I don't follow the Scientific American on Twitter for the fun of it, particularly jokes of that kind.  I go there for the real McCoy, like this one on statistics, which notes that "most of us are regularly fooled by the survivor bias."

That is in the monthly column, the title of which will easily explain why I am always drawn to it and its author, Michael Shermer: Skeptic.  It is a no-brainer that I should be a fan of that column, given that I am always questioning anything that my thinking skills allow me to.  (Yes, that skeptical approach lands me in trouble too!)

Back during my California years, a friend, who was openly atheistic in a highly politically and socially conservative setting, gave me as a gift one of Michael Shermer's books: How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science.  Another friend in that same group, who even attended the annual meeting of the Skeptics Society, had a couple of wonderful jokes about religion, like this one:

What is the difference between a religion and a cult?
One hundred years!

Ah, I digress, as I always do.

If only we had more skeptics around, and if only education--especially higher education--helped students think on their own and live productive and fun-filled lives as skeptics!

Perhaps we are a less thinking species than we "think" we are, and have more in common with the sheep, whose behavior we often point to as an example of lack of independent thought.  Or, perhaps, as this critic of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep notes in recalling his father's comment, our thought is that:

in medio tutissimus ibis