BillDo in his
1998 annual report:
March 25
Comedy Central’s “South Park” continued its notorious Christian-bashing, with an episode that linked Christians to Nazis as oppressors of homosexuals. In a segment describing homosexuality throughout history, the character “Big Gay Al” interrupted his commentary to say, “Uh-oh, look out, it’s the oppressors—Christians and Nazis and Republicans.” The scene showed [...]
I keep hearing that atheists attack a strawman version of religion,
that sophisticated theologians don’t make the sorts of simplistic
arguments we attribute to theists, and the like.
On Wednesday, the Pope gave a
speech about the environment,
in which he said:
Experiencing the shared responsibility for creation (Cf. 51), the Church is not only committed to the promotion of the [...]
Specter Calls for Hearings on End-of-… – FOXNews
Report: Obama Administration Missing … – FOXNews
Mercury Marine union in Wis. rejects … – The Associated Press
Poll: Harry Reid faces formidable foe… – The Associated Press
Victims of Giant Wave Are Identified – New York Times
States cut employee work days to save… – CNN
Los Angeles has sharply cut water [...]
As you’ve no doubt heard,
Ted Kennedy has passed away.
My earliest memory of him is from my college days, when he and Bob
Dole had a five-minute debate program on WTOP that I enjoyed listening
to on my way to school.
He was also the guy who, every year, introduced a bill to raise the
minimum wage. Every time, it [...]
For those who don’t know, when Google News creates an entry for a
story in one of its RSS feeds, it picks an article from one of the
newspapers that reported the story, and generates a title for the RSS
entry by taking that paper’s headline, followed by its name.
But to prevent overflows or something, the headline is [...]
Huh. Looks like Bill Dembski got
a paper
published in
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, Volume 39 Issue 5, Sept. 2009.
I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but here’s the abstract:
Abstract—Conservation of information theorems
indicate that any search algorithm performs, on average, as well as
random search without replacement unless it [...]
For a friend who’s flying off to a vacation in the Caribbean today:
Viva! Sea-Tac, Robyn Hitchcock
Music for Airports, Brian Eno
Aéroplanes, Serge Gainsbourg
The Night Flight from Houston, Laurie Anderson
Jetstream, New Order
Learning to Fly, Pink Floyd
Fly Like An Eagle, Steve Miller Band
Listen Over the Ocean, The Violet Eves
The Beach, New Order
Caribbean Blue, Enya
Puerto Pollo, Michael Land
Vacation, Freezepop
In all the recent talk about US health care reform, one comparison
that hasn’t been made enough, IMO, is with public schools.
Yes, US public schools have their share of problems (don’t get me
started on students who can’t find the US on a map), but they do serve
two important functions: they’re a backstop and a floor.
Backstop: if, [...]
It’s widely acknowledged that it isn’t possible to prove absolutely
that no gods exist, any more than it’s impossible to prove absolutely
that no invisible unicorns exist. Every atheist I know freely
acknowledges that. But at the same time, one can easily argue that
gods (or invisible unicorns) are very unlikely to exist.
A lot of these arguments are meta-arguments, [...]
Here are the
notes
(also
in org format)
for the Secular Bible Study presentation I’m going to be giving in an hour or so, about the book of Ecclesiastes.