Explaining strange occurrences

After you look over chapter one of our course text "How to Think About Weird Things," you'll notice a number of examples towards the second half of the chapter of what the authors consider to be "weird".  To quote their own sense of this term, weird is "all the unusual, awesome, wonderful, bizarre, and antic happenings, real or alleged, that bubble up out of science, pseudoscience, the occult, the paranormal, the mystic, and the miraculous"(2).

To supplement those accounts, here is another weird account - in the sense of "unusual" - as found in a segment of the show Radiolab: "The Day My Mother's Head Exploded," by Hannah Palin.

Consider your present (and future) relationship to information

Where News Is Power, Aides Fight to Be Well-Armed

Drew Angerer/The New York Times

Bobby Maldonado walked through downtown Washington on his way to work around 5:30 a.m.

If you look at any newspaper for very long, you'll find any number of stories detailing how we relate to the myriad of sources we encounter in any given morning, not to mention in an entire day. So, if you read a bit about the job of these Washington staffers, ask yourself:

Upon what basis would you decide how to "scan, summarize, synthesize and spin" the information that many people may end up relying on to make their own decisions?