Not death.

Today, I dealt with the other great certainty in life: Taxes. I was surprised; Michigan's state website offers free tax preparation. I highly recommend this route; if I'd filed my taxes myself, I'd have paid the federal government something like 85 bucks. Going through one of their services, I got a refund of $100 or so, instead. Nice.

I've been giving more thought to this Scott Adams blog. I do tend to agree with some of the theories Adams states other people have about him, especially that he doesn't really know what he's talking about. That's one of the reasons I have a little trouble clearly explaining what's wrong with his reasoning process; he uses terms like "intelligence" and "has" with what seem to be shifting definitions. They appear to mean one thing early in his blog, but mean something else later on. It can be hard to spot this sort of thing when using terms that are already pretty hard to define; even harder when (as Adams does) the writer says that our definition of "intelligence" may not be adequate, but fails to offer a solid replacement.

He proposes his own theory of himself which includes the phrases "wants... to make the world a better place" (which I can accept) and "brilliant philosopher" (which I cannot), but he dismisses that theory just as readily as he states it.

To be fair, I've often compared Mr. Adams to a first-year philosophy student, and I hold to that based on those philosophical writings of his that I've seen, but I only mean this as an insult when he starts to think he's better than that. The truth is, he's got some potential: He is vaguely familiar with logical thought processes, he likes to write, and he's curious about the sorts of ephemera that grip philosophers' minds and don't let go. He really ought to consider studying philosophy formally. I think it'd be good for him. Maybe I'll e-mail him on the subject, if I don't think he's already gotten a hundred e-mails of the same type. Eh, what's a hundred and one?