I’ve said elsewhere that science can be distilled down to two questions: “What is the world like?” and “How do I know this isn’t garbage?” Richard Feynman stated the second question as: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be […]
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight), Abba Money, Money, Money, Abba Sell Sell Sell, Barenaked Ladies, Maroon Nag Nag Nag, Cabaret Voltaire Tora! Tora! Tora!, Depeche Mode, Speak & Spell Blah-Blah-Blah, Iggy Pop, Blah-Blah-Blah Kiss Kiss Kiss, Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy Well Well Well, The Woodentops Mini Mini Mini, KMFDM, Hau Ruck Die Die Die (Completely Dead Version), Leæther Strip, Double or Nothing Bloc […]
Mashups are nothing new. Witness, for instance, Pink Project’s 1982 combination of Alan Parsons Project’s Mammagamma and Sirius with Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2:
I just ran across a wonderful term that must be propagated further: fractal wrongness The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as […]
Pop quiz: one of these quotations was written years ago by a young-earth creationist so ignorant that other YECs have tried to distance themselves from him. The other was published today, by a proponent of Intelligent Design (which, we are told, is Totally Not Creationism, Nuh-Uh) who enjoys respect within the ID community. Can you […]
One recurring criticism of Dawkins’s The God Delusion (and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, Victor Stenger’s God: the Failed Hypothesis, and others) is that these authors attack a simplistic conception of God, one that no intelligent, educated person believes in anyway. Plantinga, for instance, writes: According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, […]
Christianity Today has an article about the latest thing in religion: Eddie Johnson, the lead pastor of Cumberland Church, espouses the franchising concept when it comes to the relationship between his church in Nashville, Tennessee, and North Point Community Church in metro Atlanta. On his blog, he states, “Just like a Chick-fil-A, my church is a […]
Call me easily amused, but I thought it was funny that if you search Google Maps for Florida, the green arrow points at the Gulf of Mexico (and the one for Michigan points at Lake Michigan). Even better, if you search for Maryland, the arrow points at Virginia.
I was going to write up Mike Huckabee’s visit to UMD, but Ariel Alexovich did a better job of it than I would have. Plus, her article has a photo that might plausibly have me in it (the second guy on the rent-a-cop’s shoulder). (Photo: Chris Maddaloni for The New York Times) Okay, a few comments below […]
Mitt Romney, bowing out of the race: Now, if I fight on, in my campaign, all the way to the convention … I want you to know, I’ve given this a lot of thought - I’d forestall the launch of a national campaign and, frankly, I’d make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win. Frankly, […]
