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TST: New Content, FAQs, Read-Aloud

Latest 5

The 5 latest stories.

One-minute tidbits.

1.

A Philosophy FAQ.

Subject: Eastern Spirituality.

What is Eastern “chee,” or qi?.

You’ve likely heard people talk about your “chee” from time to time, usually around meditation, yoga, tai chi, acupuncture, or martial arts. The word is spelled qi and pronounced “chee.” It has deep roots in Eastern philosophy, and the idea is similar to a general life-force concept. It is not identical to Aristotle’s entelechy or Spinoza’s conatus, but all three circle the same mystery: what makes life move, strive, and unfold?

In Chinese philosophy, qi means something like vapor or vital energy. It is the subtle energy believed to animate the body and permeate the universe. In early Daoist thought, qi was connected to breath, bodily fluids, vitality, longevity, and the flow of nature. In that sense, qi is not merely “energy” in the modern physics sense. It is more like the felt life of the world: breath becoming motion, matter becoming vitality.

Today, qi is used in many ways tied to health, balance, and the body’s internal flow. In tai chi and qigong, it is cultivated through breath, movement, and attention. In everyday spiritual language, it often means your inner energy, your vitality, or your centeredness.

A similar idea appears in Aristotle’s entelechy from ancient Greece around the same era. Entelechy is the idea that a thing realizes its built-in potential: the acorn becoming the oak, the eye fulfilling itself by seeing. Both try to explain why life is not just dead matter.

Spinoza’s conatus is another Western cousin idea. It has a similar intuition: every existing thing strives to continue in its being. Qi is life as flowing vitality. Entelechy is life as unfolding purpose. Conatus is life as persistent striving. Put together, they show something beautiful: across cultures, life is not passive. Life pushes, unfolds, and persists.

 


That Philosophy FAQ, 

was first published on TST 3 days ago.
2.

A Philosophy FAQ.

Subject: Philosophy of Math.

Why can’t we divide by zero?.

You cannot divide by zero because you cannot divide by zero in nature. It just doesn’t map to anything meaningful in reality.

Imagine a pie divided between two people. Each person gets half a pie. If they put their two halves together, they have one pie again. That makes sense. But when you have a whole pie and divide it by nothing, well, that is not doing anything. You are not dividing.

This is where the idea of division becomes philosophical. Math is a rational framework we use to describe patterns, quantities, and relationships in reality. But not every arrangement of words and symbols maps to a valid idea. Some expressions point to something real. Others expose the limits of the system, and dividing by zero is one of those limits.

To divide something, you have to divide it into something. So when you say, “divide a pie into zero groups,” you have to stop and ask: how do I do that? 

And the answer is: you can’t.

In math, dividing by zero is not just undefined. It collapses the question. It is like asking how many unicorns it takes to make a sandwich.

Math reflects patterns in the world. When you divide 8 by 2, you get 4 because 4 fits into 8 exactly two times. That works because division and multiplication mirror each other. If 8 ÷ 2 = 4, then 4 × 2 = 8. That back-and-forth symmetry is one of the rules that makes arithmetic work. It is part of the meaning of division.

But zero breaks that symmetry. There is no number that multiplies by zero to give you anything other than zero. No number of zeroes ever adds up to one. Or eight. Or anything else.

 

 


That Philosophy FAQ, 

was first published on TST 4 days ago.
3.

A Science FAQ.

Subject: Wave-Particle Duality.

Can you explain superposition simply?.

Superposition is the idea in physics that matter can seem to be in two places at once. Strange stuff, yes, but real. More precisely, superposition is the idea that quantum matter can hold multiple possible states at once until an interaction, measurement, or observation produces one outcome, or until the wave collapses, which is what a physicist might say.

It is one of the remaining mysteries in physics. We observe its effects, and the math works beautifully, but it still feels impossible and definitely needs more and better explanation. We can calculate matter as existing in multiple potential positions until we measure it. Almost as if reality is holding several doors open at once—and when we look, only one opens.

The traditional explanation says a quantum object—like an electron—exists in multiple states at once. To me, that sounds magical, and as an empirical pragmatist, I don’t love that explanation. Until we have a better description, I like to think of superposition as potential. Imagine flipping a coin, but only seeing heads or tails when you look. Before that, it is both—or could be. When you actually flip it and look, it can be either heads or tails, but not both. Luckily for me, some theoretical physicists also view superposition this way. The problem is that it seems to be more than just ordinary potential.

The wave-particle duality of physical matter is still part of this mystery too. In the double-slit experiment, a single particle behaves like a wave of possibilities, as if its potential passes through both slits at once. But when measured, it shows up as a particle in one place. That’s what we see. The problem? We still don’t have a satisfying explanation for why.

 


That Science FAQ, 

was first published on TST 5 days ago.
4.

A Philosophy FAQ.

Subject: Epistemic Responsibility.

When does religious belief become harmful?.

Personal spiritual beliefs are often speculative, and are often pragmatic for that person. And that is okay, so long as it does not harm others or corrupt public truth. When individuals say their personal spiritual beliefs are meaningful or identity-forming, that is personal meaning, not public truth.

In the broader sense, religions do much good too. They provide community, belonging, and family, and that is easily verified as true. However, religious claim need guardrails. The first step is to classify it. A claim about the physical world must answer to the physical world. A theological argument based on empirical claims must answer to evidence too.

Religion becomes harmful when it dismisses evidence, shields itself from criticism, controls public life, or traps people in fear, guilt, shame, or obedience. It becomes harmful when it teaches people not to question. It becomes harmful when it denies medicine, distorts education, excuses abuse, suppresses identity, or uses eternity as a threat. At those points, religion is no longer merely helping people carry life. It is using belief as a cage.

This is where John Stuart Mill’s harm principle comes to mind. People should have wide freedom to believe, worship, and live by conscience. But that freedom changes when one person’s belief begins to harm another person. My own less-harm view points in the same direction: the goal is not to crush religion or force atheism. The goal is to reduce harm while preserving agency.

The answer is calibrated confidence. Private belief should be held with humility. Public claims require public evidence. No belief, religious or not, should be allowed to ignore reality when other people are affected. And finally, this is the big one: no one should force their beliefs about the currently unknown or unknowable onto others.

 


That Philosophy FAQ, 

was first published on TST 6 days ago.
5.

A Science FAQ.

Subject: Evolution.

Did we evolve from single cells into plants and animals then chimps to human?.

All life on Earth is carbon-based. From bacteria to trees to whales to you, the chemistry of life is built around carbon’s flexible bonding power. But that simple fact can hide a more interesting story. Life did not begin as plants and animals. It began as single-celled organisms, and much of life stayed single-celled because the strategy works.

The mistake is thinking evolution is a ladder: first single-celled life, then multicellular life, then plants and animals, with each step replacing the last. That is not how evolution works. Evolution is a branching tree. Some ancient single-celled lineages eventually led to multicellular plants, animals, and fungi. But many other branches remained single-celled, diversified, and are still evolving today. Bacteria, archaea, protists, algae, amoebas, yeasts, and diatoms are not evolutionary leftovers. They are successful living branches.

This also helps clarify the idea of a last common ancestor, or LCA. When we say humans and chimpanzees share a last common ancestor, we do not mean one modern animal evolved directly from the other. We mean both lines branched from an earlier population. The same is true deeper in life’s story. Animals did not simply “replace” earlier life. They branched from older forms while many other branches kept going in their own direction.

One of the great later turning points was multicellularity. Some cells began living together, communicating, specializing, and forming larger bodies. From there, animal evolution eventually developed bilateral bodies: left and right sides, front and back, direction, motion, sensing, and eventually agency. Bilateral structure did not create agency by itself, but it gave life a geometry that agency could build on. A creature with direction can begin moving through the world in a more organized way.

But single-celled life never stopped being powerful. Diatoms are a beautiful example. Each diatom is one cell, yet many form chains or colonies and help shape entire ecosystems. They are photosynthetic algae wrapped in glass-like silica shells called frustules. They are carbon-based life using silica as armor and architecture. In them, life almost seems to flirt with a science-fiction idea: carbon writes the living chemistry, while silica helps build the house.

So no, life did not simply evolve from single cells into plants and animals as if the old world vanished. Life branched. Some branches became forests, fungi, insects, birds, and humans. Other branches remained microscopic and still run much of the planet. Diatoms bring the story full circle: single-celled carbon life wearing silica glass, sometimes organized with shape, direction, and movement. Not full agency, but perhaps a modest glimpse of proto-agency — life responding to the world through form.

 


That Science FAQ, 

was first published on TST 1 week ago.

The end.

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