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Kevin Pezzi, MD

I developed technology to instantly
stop school shooters and other criminals,
such as rapists, robbers, home invaders,
and shoplifters. I also created ways to block
airborne germ transmission. Read more >

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life.

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

Overcoming the 420-character limit for Facebook status updates

If you attempt to post a Facebook status update with more than 420 characters, you will receive an error message like this:

Most people then condense their update and try to post it again, but since Facebook is too busy dreaming up ways to compromise our privacy, they never found enough time to include a character counter. Result? You may get the same error message repeatedly as you guess whether your message is below that needlessly arbitrary threshold. After a few such error messages, you may feel like pulling your hair out!

Facebook user frustrated by the 420-character limit for status updates

There is an easy way to bypass this 420-character limit. Facebook won't tell you about it, but I will. Before posting your text, click the link (red arrow) to share a photo.

post an image to bypass the 420-character limit for Facebook status updates

After that, you are not limited to 420 characters, so you can smile!

post more than 420 characters in Facebook status update

As a computer programmer, I know there is no logical reason why you should be forced to post a photo or other image to bypass the 420-character limit. However, as a doctor, I suspect that Facebook programmers have cobwebs in their minds that catch flies with some really strange ideas.

What if you don't feel like searching for a photo to post? Or what if you don't want an image to appear? Trick Facebook by uploading this magic dummy photo (below), which is just a 20-pixel square white image in the GIF format.

Save that image onto your hard drive by RIGHT-clicking it, and selecting Save Image As (in Firefox) or Save Picture As (in Internet Explorer).

Why not post your message as a Facebook note?

As Facebook suggests, you can post longer messages as notes, which gives you the ability to share them. However, true to form, Facebook uses a very annoying process for note creation. If you aren't annoyed, your readers may be! I've seen countless notes littered with visible markup, such as <span></span>. Filtering out such clutter is easy with PHP, the scripting language used to program Facebook, but they didn't do it. Nor did Facebook permit users to import many standard HTML elements. I could write a long article on what's wrong with Facebook note creation, but suffice it to say that if you use notes to bypass the 420-character limit, you may solve one problem and gain a dozen others.

After posting a few dozen Facebook notes, I grew weary of their amateurish site and now post articles on my blog, which gives me and my readers the ability to do many things not possible on Facebook. Here are three of them:

If you mouse over a sesquipedalian word with a dotted line beneath it, you can see its definition in context.
Readers can subscribe to be notified whenever I post new articles. Facebook lacks a subscription feature. If you try to follow friends by viewing your News Feed, you may miss 95% or more of what they post, as I explained in an article on understanding how Facebook determines what goes in News Feeds.
Readers who post a comment can optionally choose to include their MySpamSponge handle (contact code), which gives them a way to permit others to contact them without anyone revealing their e-mail addresses, so there is no risk of spam. Alternatively, you can comment via another site I created (track-this.info), which gives you even more power. Besides using that site to subscribe to my blog, you can use it to contact me, post a comment, and even network with others following this blog who chose the group communication option.

Mouse over the left and right sides of the orange TTI bar at the bottom of this page to see some of the things it permits you to do. By the way, you can use TTI so people can follow you or other topics you create. To see more of what Track-this.info can do, explore its home page, more info, applications, and FAQ pages.

Please note that TTI permits people to track (or follow) information; it doesn't track its users or what they do—unlike Facebook!

Trivia

Stephen Colbert awarded a “Medal of Fear” to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “because he values his privacy much more than he values yours.”

The views expressed on this page may or may not reflect my current opinions, nor do they necessarily represent my past ones. After reading a slice of what I wrote in my various websites and books, you may conclude that I am a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Wrong; there is a better alternative. Just as the primary benefit from debate classes results when students present and defend opinions contrary to their own, I use a similar strategy as a creative writing tool to expand my brainpower—and yours. Mystified? Stay tuned for an explanation. PS: The wheels in your head are already turning a bit faster, aren't they?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”

Comments (1)

Like

Love your post. Sharing with our team of writers on Facebook. Thank you. Also, like your edginess.

;-) Shawn