Epsilon Clue

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. — Edsger Dijkstra Math is no more about equations than music is about staves and sharps. — me

The Asheville, NC Citizen-Times tells the tragic story of a High School student whose religion is being persecuted: being kicked out of school for a day? Bryan Killian doesn’t think that’s a fair reaction to his decision to come to North Buncombe High School wearing an eye patch and an inflatable cutlass. … “I feel like my First Amendment […]

Remember the fall of 2006, when the cover of Newsweek featured a story about Annie Leibowitz… except in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, where the cover story was Losing Afghanistan?? See if you can tell what Time learned from that: (In case you can’t read it, the European, Asian, and South Pacific editions say “Talibanistan” and the […]

James Dobson says presidential candidate Fred Thompson isn’t a Christian: “Everyone knows he’s conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for,” Dobson said of Thompson. “[But] I don’t think he’s a Christian; at least that’s my impression,” Dobson added … In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary […]

I’ve made enough references to LiveJournal users like curvemudgeon and mcoletti enough that I got tired of copying and pasting the standard LJ HTML to link to them. So I did what any good hacker would do, and wrote a WordPress plugin to expand <lj username> tags. You can download it here.

curvemudgeon points me to an article by Steve Alderman in the apparently badly misnamed American Thinker. This is a response to an op-ed in the LA Times by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation and one of the more outspoken critics of faith.

The Mar. 16 episode of Intelligent Design the Future has this blurb: On this episode of ID The Future CSC Fellow, Dr. Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler asks, “does Darwinism devalues human life?” Some Darwinists deny that Darwinism has any ethical implications at all. In this short clip, Dr. Weikart looks at comments […]

Readers of talk.origins may remember Ray Martinez, a particularly dense and combative young-earth creationist. I’d been having fun this past week or so reading his antics at Conservapedia.

You may recall that a while back, the Secular Coalition for America ran a contest to find the highest-ranking elected atheist [1] in the U.S. Government. Now the contest has ended and the results have been announced.

This particularly hateful letter, published in the Kenai, AK Peninsula Clarion (registration required; see also here), promulgates a popular misconception: The United States is based on having freedom of religion, speech, etc., which means you can believe in God any way you want (Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, etc.), but you must believe. Let’s consider a scenario: the government […]