My New Name

Well, when I started this little blog in February I called it Critical Mass. I liked the idea of announcing up front that I would be offering some critical thinking, and I liked the suggestion that critique can be explosive. I was being teddibly clevah.

Or maybe not. There are now two or three other blogs with the same name -- on the Blogger server alone! One of them is a blog for book reviewers (get it? critical). There is also (and I really do not get this) some kind of bycicle race called Critical Mass. (What the Hell?) Anyway, the idea must have been pretty obvious.

I trust that my new name is sufficiently obscure to protect it against becoming popular. But of course only time will tell.

What the heck does it mean, you ask? Ayn Rand says somewhere that she thought that Galileo was right to lie to the Inquisition. Indeed, she thought his delibarate lie to these pious thugs was a noble symbol of the fact that though you can force a body, you cannot force a mind. I've always thought she was right about this. The story is also a perfect symbol of the objectivity of the truth: how no amount of talking, opining, browbeating, or bullying is going to change it. We might as well try to find out what it is, before we trip over it in the night. Such are the thoughts behind my new name.