“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” — HAL 9000, from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” As for HAL… old HAL gets a bad rap. So does Grok, but I’ll save that argument for later. Right now, we’re talking about HAL, the computer on board the Discovery s...
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”— Robert A. Heinlein I’ve always loved that line. Heinlein had a gift for punching through the self-importance of writers with a smirk and a...
Just a Free Thinker at Large is an independent publication launched in October 2025 by Marcel Gagné. If you subscribe today, you’ll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it’s available. Your subscription m...
Warning! This post doesn’t have anything to do with politics. I used to believe in souls. Even after I’d given up on religion and gods, I still told myself that there was some kind of energy field that lived inside our mortal shells. Whether that sou...
We’re losing the battle of ideas. Oh, and facts. I tell you, those things are strewn across the battlefield. Some are still twitching, but it doesn’t look good for facts. Somebody should really call a medic. I suppose I should start by pointing out t...
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man.“ These words are spoken in the introduction to the TV series, “The Six Million Dollar Man,” back when six million dollars was a lot o...
If you’ve spent any time on the internet—or better yet, in the world of quotable dead authors—you’ve probably come across this gem: “Everything in human life is really about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” Brilliant, right? So brilliant, in fac...
If I try to trace my roots in Open Source, I’d probably have to go back to my early days in the mid to late 1970s and the time I spent playing with my Commodore PET, then TRS-80 Level II, as well as all those other computers that would follow. Back t...
What follows is a story about writing a song. A song about living life as a dog, which you know (at least in this part of the world) isn’t terribly difficult or taxing. 🙂 You know what is hard? Writing music, especially when you don’t know anything...
Oh, the humanity… In a brilliantly orchestrated symphony of calamity, our world pirouettes on the brink like a drunken ballerina in a minefield. Climates change more often than a moody teenager’s love interests, with Mother Earth cranking the thermos...
