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The Perfection of Bay Area Dogphysics

Last night, as I was flying in to San Francisco, Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history. Now, a casual observer might think these events were unrelated, but to ancient alien theorists, the connection between them could not be more obvious. Thus, you should come to Kepler's Books in Menlo Park this evening at 7pm, to see what amazing events will happen next. Well, OK, the most that will probably happen is that I might read a bit from the How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in a silly voice. But you don't know that I won't use my awesome ancient alien magic to transmute lead…

Links for 2012-04-14

Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It's time for it to die. - Slate Magazine Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone's archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It's time to give up on Word. It took years for me to get to this point. I came of age with Word. It's the program I used to write my college papers, overcoming old-fashioned page…

I don't believe it

Everyone has been sending me this story about how a researcher has deduced from the crazy talk in the bible that Moses was high on drugs. I don't believe it. Sure, it's possible, but the information is insufficient, and the hypothesis is unnecessary. Look at Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Robert Tilton, Billy Graham, Kathryn Kuhlman, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Ted Haggard, Kent Hovind, Oral Roberts, Aimee Semple McPherson, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, Fulton Sheen, Charles Coughlin, and every single little podunk charismatic and fundamentalist preacher you can find in any town in…

Hello Dear Spammer

I really like the spam letters I get with the subject line "Hello Dear". Sometimes the spammer is even named Hello Dear. Here's the latest example. Hello dear how are you today i hope that every things is OK with you as is my pleasure to contact you after viewing your profile which really interest me in having communication with you if you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what happened in future. i will be very happy if you can write me back for easiest communication and to know more about each other.i will send you my picture when i receive…

Swedish Gaming Legend Blogs

The Swedish language has produced three truly great fantasists. Two are internationally reknowned: Astrid Lindgren (with Pippi Longstocking) and Tove Jansson (with Moomin). The third, Erik Granström, is almost exclusively known among Swedish gaming nerds like myself. From 1987 to 1994 he published a series of wildly innovative adventure and background books for the Swedish role-playing game Drakar och Demoner. Granström's material soared miles above the fare us ex-kobolds were used to, particularly the 1988 travelogue/novella that introduced us to the islands of Trakoria. I game-mastered…

Only Population Size Really Matters for the Environment

Here's a grim thought about the environment. There is no way of life for humans on Earth that is ecologically sustainable for a global population of more than a billion. Our per capita environmental footprint doesn't really matter at this stage. If we retain our current population and return to a Palaeolithic lifestyle, we're still fucked in the not-too-long run. If we quit having so many children and get back down to a global population in the hundreds of millions, it won't matter any more how each of us splurges and consumes. You don't need to recycle milk cartons. What you really need to…

Chatbot Conversation

I was contacted on Yahoo Messenger today by a chatbot named Alexandra Buford. She greeted me in a foreign language, so I thought it polite to reply likewise. Alexandra: yhneb martinrund Martin: yhneb Alexandra: Hi martinrund. it's Alexandra. Martin: yhneb Alexandra: u dont know me Kelly -- gave me your info, :) Martin: yhneb Alexandra: I just moved here from outta town cuz my boyfriend just dumped me (loser!) Martin: yhneb Alexandra: I'm lookin to have some fun this weekend, wanna join me? ;);) Martin: yhneb Alexandra: I have a new profile up tell me what u think Martin: YHNEB Alexandra: So…

Sättuna Fieldwork Summary

We finished digging today. Tomorrow I'll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned. A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand: Scattered lithics, knapped and then abraded by wave action on a beach. Mainly quartz, some hälleflinta/leptite, a little flint, one chip off a ground greenstone axe. Also a complete greenstone adze that permits us to date the assemblage to the Middle Neolithic about 3000 cal BC, but more likely the…

Google as an Emergent AI

Here's a cool update on the old Programmer Mel story, a tech-nerdy short story by George Dyson on Google as an emergent AI. It's sort of a fantasy-fulfillment tale for the boomers who seem to make up the bulk of the Edge crowd. This time Mel is named Ed, probably in honour of Ed Nather who wrote the Mel story. "By the time Ed turned 65, fifteen billion transistors per second were being produced. Now 68, he had been lured out of retirement when the bidding wars for young engineers (and between them for houses) prompted Google to begin looking for old-timers who already had seven-figure mid-…

Socialist flat-earthers must wake up to reality

Matthew Parris in the Times; an opinion piece. However, the headline is incidental (and rather odd, since the article is mostly directed at Conservatives), what I wanted was the text, irritatingly pay-walled: This vaguely chimes with recent discussions, especially about the wording of [[Climate change denial]] (and the fun over WUWT). It turns out that OxfordDictionaries.com offers a prominent denier of global warming as an example of its definition of denier, as someone who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by…

The funding entities, regardless of their affiliation, have no influence on the research

Or so says Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And yet we discover that Soon's research was (partially) funded by Southern Company Services, with whom Soon had and agreement, signed by Smithsonian’s William J. Ford, contract and grant specialist; and Bryan Baldwin, Southern’s manager of environmental assessment.: As further consideration to SCS [Southern Company Services], Smithsonian shall provide SCS an advance written copy of proposed publications regarding the deliverables for comment and input, if any, from SCS The assertion of no…

Help help I'm being repressed

So there I was happily making cow pies in a muddy field when some Arthur King comes along and I'm reminded once again of the violence inherent in the system. [Update: and part 2, 2015/02.] Which I think is about how seriously you should take Watt's attempt to Godwin himself with the assistance of Ball. VVatts has a go, though. I'm with Sou re Betts etc. Meanwhile, Bob Tisdale is a sock. He does assert directly its his real name; but I don't trust him1. The cartoon - with its implications of false balance - isn't really appropriate; but I liked it anyway. 1 - I still don't trust him, but his…

Tol goes emeritus

Richard Tol and the 97% consensus – again! Need I say more? OTOH, he isn't a bozo. [Update: still sane, still a bit of a twat; heading downhill.] Refs * Richard Tol is being oppressed! * Big City Lib on the GWPF (P3) and BCL himself * The necessity of TOBS - Moyhu * Flurry Of Scientists, Recent Peer-Reviewed Papers, Warning Of Approaching Little Ice Age - NTZ * Tol creates new IPCC wiki – anyone can take part * Richard Tol Stakes Himself on a Hill, Ethon Takes a Nibble - Eli, of course. * Richard Tol Versus Richard Tol On The 97% Scientific Consensus - at Real Sceptic. * “Gremlins” caused…

Sally Kern: Vics fish has eaten your fish

As you all heard from PZ, WHOOOO!!! Oklahoma governor Brad Henry vetoed Kerns 'Crazy Christian Bill of the Week' (I told you he is a nice guy). As Vic Hutchison, head of Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education noted in his newsletter to OKers, Gov. Henry could have let this bill just die. But he didnt. He vetoed it. This is a major victory for supporters of separation of church and state and of quality in public education. LARGE numbers of individuals sent messages to legislators and the Governor in opposition to this bill as it worked its way through the process. To those, and to…

Two horrible new diseases

Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum, has an article on two disease we should worry about, VHSv and EAS. Personally, I think VHSv is the worst. It's a virus that causes hemorrhagic septicemia in fish; just from the name you know it's bad, involving blood and sepsis. My most horrible experience raising zebrafish was the time hemorrhagic septicemia swept through my colony and I had to euthanize every animal and bleach every last bit of plumbing to eradicate it. This disease has been detected in waters of Wisconsin, and it's definitely not good. EAS may not be as dramatically gory and…

Experts, "plebs" and hope.

A very good video on the gulf that exists between the climate science experts and the general population in terms of awareness and alarm regarding anthropogenic climate change: (from a comment on a P3 thread) The essence of this impending calamity is, more than anything else, a story of betrayal: betrayal of a naively trusting population by its political leaders and even more by its news media.   When the denial of this crisis is finally seen to be as implausible and ludicrous as it already is, it may be too late.  It may be too late already to avoid truly terrible consequences, but we must…

Objectivity

Via MT at Planet3, we have a nice quote from FAIR: This is what I like to describe as the difference between objectivity and "objectivity." Objectivity is the belief that there is a real world out there that's more or less knowable; the "objectivity" that journalists practice holds that it's impossible to know what's real, so all you can do is report the claims made by various (powerful) people. The topic at hand is of course electoral politics and political reporting in general, but it has very clear relevance to climate science reporting and science reporting in general.  While we are…

Rowe on Hartsock and Devvy Kidd

More evidence that Jon Rowe and I were separated at birth: he wrote an essay on the very same fake Jefferson quote, mentioning both Christian Hartsock and Devvy Kidd's use of it, this morning. Someone else had sent me a link to it and I wrote about it too, but without any knowledge that the other person was doing so. He goes further to hammer Kidd for several other ridiculous claims and use of at least 3 other fake quotes. The punchline is that Devvy Kidd, while presenting the fake quote from Jefferson, actually provides a link to the text of the letter in which the quote she uses does NOT…

Follow Up on the Newsweek Story

As a follow up on the story about Newsweek and In the Agora, Radley Balko of The Agitator has publicly distanced himself from the equation of Agora with Powerline as well. He writes: But it's not quite accurate. The column notes the Schiavo memo controversy, and says I've called for Powerline and In the Agora to "eat crow." Almost. While I do think Josh Claybourn may have been wearing ideological blinders, and been a little too eager to find comfirmation for his hunch that the Schiavo memo was written by Democrats, I also think he handled himself very well when he discovered he was mistaken…

Prince Charles Getting Married

So I'm flipping channels and I come across a report that Prince Charles is going to marry Camilla Parker Bowles. This report came complete with its own poll, wherein 44% of viewers who responded said he should marry her, 52% said he should not, and 4% said they don't know. And it left me with one obvious question - who fucking cares? Seriously, if you're not the happy couple or a member of their family, what possible justification could you have for having an opinion about it at all? And what kind of person actually calls up a TV station to express an opinion about whether two people they don…

More Cobb County Appreciation

Yesterday I thanked Timothy Sandefur for his hard work on the brief filed by a collection of state science organizations, which was cited by the judge twice in yesterday's ruling striking down the Cobb County disclaimer. I should also have included Reed Cartwright in that. Reed was the one, along with Sarah Pallas, who really got the ball rolling with that brief and did most of the first draft of it. Timothy then put it into a legal brief format and edited it into final form with input from all of us. The brief, as I recall, was originally going to be written on behalf of just the Georgia…

Comet Catalina to pass by Earth for the final time (Synopsis)

"I have worn myself thin trying to find out about this comet, and I know very little now in the matter." -Maria Mitchell Originating from the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, comets are generally thought of as periodic objects, with their initial trajectories having been perturbed by either Neptune, another distant object or a passing star or rogue planet. Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM. But most comets aren't periodic; they're transient instead, where a trip into the inner Solar System gives them additional gravitational perturbations, causing them to either fly into the Sun or gain…

Ask Ethan #106: How, exactly, did Newton fail? (Synopsis)

“To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.” -Isaac Newton If Newton truly meant that sentiment, perhaps he would have been happy to find out that his theory of gravitation -- which stood unchallenged for over 200 years -- was superseded a century ago by Einstein's general relativity. Not only did Einstein's theory reproduce all the successful predictions of Newtonian gravity, but where the predictions differed, Einstein's agreed with observations where Newton's did not. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user…

Mostly Mute Monday: A Pulsing Cosmic Echo (Synopsis)

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” -Victor Hugo When stars are born of a certain mass -- between about 10 and 40 times the mass of the Sun -- they can evolve into yellow supergiants when they burn through the hydrogen in their cores. As the outer layers expand, cool, contract, heat up, and pulse in this fashion, they can occasionally be blown off to form a gaseous cloud surrounding the star. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & ESO. These Cepheid variable stars have been known and studied for over a hundred years, and vary tremendously in…

Gravity’s Oldest Puzzles (Synopsis)

Every time you follow the motion of a spacecraft, moon, planet or other object through the Solar System, you're putting the theory of gravity to the test. On one hand, there's a robust set of predictions for what the behavioral motion of these bodies ought to be, while on the other there's what we actually observe. Sometimes, a mismatch indicates the need for something new, like a new planet or a new law of gravity. Image credit: Sky & Telescope. But other times, there are mundane explanations that account for these "apparent" discrepancies, such as radioactive decay, heating from the…

Ask Ethan #101: Did The Universe Need To Be Born “Lumpy”? (Synopsis)

“First, you should check out my house. It’s, like, kinda lame, but way less lame than, like, your house.” -Lumpy Space Princess, Adventure Time When you visualize our Universe today, you probably think about the great clumps of matter -- planets, stars, galaxies and clusters -- separated by huge distances. But on the largest of all scales, tens of billions of light years in diameter, any given region of the Universe is virtually indistinguishable from any other. Image credit: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/HerMEs, of the Lockman Hole. But this structured Universe only came about because our Universe…

Einstein, Edison and an Aptitude for Genius (Synopsis)

When it comes to the definition of "genius," everything is relative, right? When a particularly bright young person performs an amazing feat of intellect or scores incredibly well on a standardized test like an IQ exam or the SAT, we often herald them with excessive praise, calling them "the next Einstein" or even "smarter than Einstein," as though scoring well on a test were justification for such treatment. Image credit: Screenshot from Latinoshealth.com. Yet not only did Einstein never take an IQ test, he loathed standardized testing, having very public feuds with Thomas Edison and Carl…

A Quantum of Parody (Synopsis)

Although physicists are well-known for their quirky personalities, the in-joke among ourselves is our extremely nerdy sense of humor, telling jokes about our field, our equations, and of course, the legends in our field. These range from the subtle (Schrodinger walks into a bar, and also he doesn't), to the mischievous (Heisenberg gets pulled over by a police car. "Do you know how fast you were going?" "I have no idea, officer, but I know exactly where I am!"), and beyond. Image credit: Courtesy of peterdsmith.com. But one of the field's most iconic personas -- Niels Bohr -- inspired a…

Weekend Diversion: The Logic That Stumped Brooklyn Nine Nine (Synopsis)

“I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found.” -John Forbes Nash, Jr. Yet logic and reason -- when applied correctly -- can get us incredibly far. Have a listen to Supertramp singing their unique hit, The Logical Song, while you consider the islander problem from TV's Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Image credit: E. Siegel. “There are 12 men on an island. 11 weigh exactly the same amount, but one of them is slightly lighter or heavier. You must figure out which. The…

Earth Day in the Universe (Synopsis)

“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” -Bill Anders, Apollo 8, 1968 We've come an incredible distance in exploring the Universe. In the span of just a single human lifetime, we've gone from speculations about what other worlds in our Solar System might be like, the possibility of planets around other stars and wondering how many galaxies might be in our observable Universe to actual answers about all three of these profound questions. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. But as far as we've come, Earth is still the only planet…

Throwback Thursday: Is the Universe fine-tuned for us? (Synopsis)

“There is a voice inside of you That whispers all day long, ‘I feel this is right for me, I know that this is wrong.’” -Shel Silverstein It's pretty obvious that the Universe exists in such a way that it admits the possibility of intelligent life arising. After all, we're here, we're intelligent life, and we're in this Universe. So at minimum, the Universe must exist in such a way that it's physically possible for us to have arisen. Image credit: Chris Cook of http://www.abmedia.com/astro/. But are there physically interesting things we can learn about the Universe from this line of…

Ask Ethan #81: Could you crawl out of a black hole? (Synopsis)

“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” -Alfred A. Montapert You might not think of falling into a black hole as a choice, but in the case of this week's Ask Ethan, someone is choosing to explore exactly that! Image credit: original unknown, retrieved from http://mondolithic.com/. Imagine, if you will, taking a solid object that's completely outside of an event horizon, of choosing a very massive black hole with minuscule tidal forces at that location in space, and then just barely pushing a tiny piece of that object over to the other side of the horizon.…

Ask Ethan #80: Can space expand faster than the speed of light? (Synopsis)

“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” -Mario Andretti One of the toughest things to wrap your mind around in the natural world is the idea of special relativity: the faster you move, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to increase your speed at all. While you might approach the speed of light arbitrarily and asymptotically, you'll never reach it. Image credit: user Fx-1988 of deviantART. And yet, we have the Universe, expanding all the time, where the expansion rate itself is even speeding up. You might wonder, then, if these…

Ask Ethan #77: Humans in the vacuum of space (Synopsis)

“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.” -Tennessee Williams The depiction of dying in space -- by exposure to its terrifying vacuum -- is incredibly varied, from freezing to swelling and bulging to simply exploding. Image credit: Mike Tyson Mysteries / Adult Swim. Uh oh, looks like I killed another astronaut! For this week's Ask Ethan, we take on the question of Kerrie Pinkney, who wants to know: [W]ill you explode if exposed to the vacuum of space? I’ve gone down the “water boils in a vacuum then freezes” road, others have gone down the “…

Don't trust your theoretical "proof" (Synopsis)

“What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.” -Theodore Roethke In math, if you prove a theorem, that theorem is as good as gold. But in physics, a theorem may or may not be 100% valid. Image credit: Steven Weinberg for Cern Courier, via http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/32522. It depends, for example, on whether your "proof" describes all the relevant phenomena at play in your system. For example, Goldstone's theorem predicts that any broken symmetry will lead to the creation of massless particles. Yet when we actually break, say, the electroweak symmetry, the…

Throwback Thursday: Reaching Pluto (Synopsis)

“Even in hindsight, I would not change one whit of the Voyager experience. Dreams and sweat carried it off. But most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars.” -Charley Kohlhase It's a taxing enough task to launch something off the surface of the Earth, escaping our planet's gravity and finding our way into interplanetary space. Image credit: Delta II rocket launch, public domain, via http://www.gps.gov/. But to reach the outer Solar System? To go beyond the gas giants and even escape from our Sun's pull completely? We need a little help to do that. Thankfully, the…

Impending Doom (Synopsis)

“From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.” -Nikola Tesla Stability: it's the hallmark of the Solar System. The motions of all the planetary bodies are regular and periodic. The paths of the various objects never cross, and everything that has continued for billions of years should continue, undisturbed, for billions more. Image credit: Mark Garlick / Science Photo Library. Unless, of course, something came along to mess that up! In our Solar System, the comets…

Throwback Thursday: A New Universe-Year (Synopsis)

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” -Rainer Maria Rilke Yes, it's true, with 2015 upon us, the new year holds a number of wonderful new things. Not only for us, but for the Universe as well! Image credit: Stuart Rickard of After Ice, viahttp://blog.after-ice.com/stuart-rickard/. Consider all the time that's passed, leading up to today. Consider how far we've come, from the Big Bang until right now, as "one Universe year," and now imagine, looking forward, what the next Universe year (or years) will hold. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (University of…

Does the Scientific Method need Revision? (Synopsis)

We all have our own interpretation of what "the scientific method" is, but there's always at least one thing that they all have in common: the ultimate arbiter of whether a theory or idea is valid depends on the evidence that comes back from physically observable phenomena. Image credit: abstruse goose, via http://abstrusegoose.com/275 But not everyone necessarily agrees with this in the way we commonly understand it. Sabine Hossenfelder has some fantastic thoughts analyzing and synthesizing a variety of viewpoints, laying the hammer down with a sweeping statement: You can thus never…

Ask Ethan #65: Magnetism From Afar (Synopsis)

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” -Michael Faraday And yet, it's often incredibly difficult to use those laws of nature -- even if they're as simple as can be -- to actually measure and quantitatively understand the Universe around us. Perhaps one of the most glaring examples is magnetism. Image credit: Alexander Wilmer Duff, 1916. Sure, it's easy to visualize a magnetic field if you've got a set of iron filings and a laboratory to experiment in, but what about the distant stars? What of entire galaxies? They're thought to have magnetic…

Weekend Diversion: Norway vs. Kenya (Synopsis)

“I didn’t know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That’s what I did.” -Lupita Nyong’o There's nothing that gets me excited quite like... completely fabricated, unnecessary bickering on the internet between two countries. I don't know why that is, but there's something both charming and addicting about the classic internet video where Kenya shoots jabs at Norway for no reason at all. But did you know there's been a Norwegian response to it? In particular, a response…

Throwback Thursday: Most Planets in the Universe are Homeless (Synopsis)

“You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.” -Wayne Dyer We like to think of our Solar System as typical: a central star with a number of planets -- some gas giants and some rocky worlds -- in orbit around it. Yes, there's some variety, with binary or trinary star systems and huge variance in the masses of the central star being common ones, but from a planetary point of view, our Solar System is a rarity. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. Because even though there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy for planets to orbit, there are most likely around a…

Ghostly Physics (Synopsis)

You've no doubt heard of quantum entanglement before: the idea that if you create a mixed quantum state that consists of two particles, you can then know the properties of one by measuring the properties of the other. The odd -- and counterintuitive -- thing about this is that once these particles are entangled, you can move them an arbitrary distance apart from one another, measure the properties of one, and instantly know about the properties of the other! Image credit: John Jost / Jason Amini. Does this violate the law of special relativity, which says the speed limit of everything in…

The E-cat: cold fusion or scientific fraud? (Synopsis)

“There’s a mark born every minute, and one to trim ‘em and one to knock ‘em.” -David W. Maurer, The Big Con (1940) But how could you tell? There's lots of amazing science going on out there, and none of us can be experts in it all. Moreover, even when we think we know how things ought to behave, nature has a way of surprising us, and that's usually via experiment, which is our first indication that our theories are incomplete. Image credit: CERN, via http://home.web.cern.ch/students-educators/updates/2013/04/find-higgs-b…. So what do we do when a new experimental result comes out,…

Weekend Diversion: Your city in fantasy (Synopsis)

“Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end.” -George R.R. Martin But fantasy not only wakes us up to the lavish things in life, it also gives us a connection to our history, to the land and to the thousands of generations that have come before us. Have a listen to Tan Dun and Yo-Yo Ma’s legendary collaboration from Crouching…

Throwback Thursday: How Big is Our Observable Universe? (Synopsis)

“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes But it isn't just your mind that expands as time goes on and you increase your knowledge, but the entire Universe as well. General Relativity, as it turns out, doesn't leave us with much of a choice. If you start with a Universe full of matter and radiation, it's got to expand, otherwise it will collapse in on itself! Image credit: James N. Imamura of U. of Oregon. But this expansion has consequences of its own, including the surprising fact that there's not only a finite…

The Strangest Theory We Know Is True (Synopsis)

When it comes to physics, there sure are some strange theories -- and even stranger phenomena -- out there. The notion that particles don't have fixed, intrinsic properties that are simultaneously measurable can only be described as weird, and the fact that you can add as much energy as you want to a particle but it will never accelerate to beyond a particular speed is certainly counterintuitive. Yet one theory has them all beat. Image credit: John D. Norton, via http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Special_relati…. For ninety-nine years, now, General Relativity has…

Filling the gaps in my argument

Perhaps I was a little too surprised at the utterly bizarre criticisms Michael Egnor made of my talk at the Minnesota Atheists this weekend — he wasn't there, he didn't know what I said, but he went ahead and tried to rebut what he thought I would have said anyway — that I was more interested in spelling out what I did say than in wrestling with his absurd arguments for a magic invisible ghost that lives inside his cranium. Fortunately, a few other people found Egnor's flailings sufficiently entertaining that they took a few shots at addressing them: you'll find more discussion on dualism at…

Self-Righteous in New Castle, PA

From a recent Dear Abby column that I happened to come across in a small town newspaper with, quite literally, nothing else to read: I live in a family-oriented neighborhood. My problem is my next-door neighbor flies his gay pride flag in his front yard. Because we have a lot of families with young children who do not need to be subjected to that kind of thing, I have asked him numerous times to remove it. His response is it's a free country and he does not subject anybody to his lifestyle. I strongly feel that in a neighborhood devoted to children's morals and the way life should be, he…

Worldnutdaily and "Real History"

In their usual breathless marketing style, the Worldnutdaily is offering a new version of Bishop James Ussher's classic Annals of the World. The front page of WND declares: Real history, untampered with by 'them' And yes, the emphasis and the scare quotes are in the original. They further declare: Considered not only a literary classic, but also an accurate reference, "The Annals of the World" was so highly regarded for its preciseness that the timeline from it was included in the margins of many King James Version Bibles throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. There's just one tiny…