I just arrived back in Brookline for a quick visit over Thanksgiving. I’ll be returning to Seattle on Sunday. U.S. newspapers and TV always make a great fuss about the fact that the day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year. These reports are inevitably accompanied by film of long lines at…
Read More Back to New England for ThanksgivingI’ve been experiencing some odd WiFi behaviour over the last week or so. The main symptom is that at random intervals my signal strength will fade away to almost nothing; in addition I’ve experienced spells when my signal looks OK but bandwidth to the Internet is lousy. At times things are so bad that I…
Read More WiFi odditiesFrom polling Report Theos, a new Christian think tank, heralded their launch by commissioning a poll from Communicate Research. They started by taking one of Richard Dawkins’ more confrontational statements and asking if people agreed with it: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate . Obviously…
Read More Be careful what you wish for….From Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Blog: Prior to 9/11, it would have been career suicide for a public figure to come right out and say God is a fairy tale. Now it’s a feature of popular culture…. I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The…
Read More Atheists: The New GaysTwo weekends, two films. Last Saturday I went to see “The Queen” up on Capitol Hill. When I told my mother about it the next day, she was incredulous: how could Helen Mirren play Liz? She looks nothing like her! Well, all I can say is that it worked. Helen Mirren was wonderful, and after…
Read More Two terribly English filmssecularsouth expresses rather nicely one of the things that amazes me about anti-evolutionist Christians: [Even though] many christians support dna evidence to prove identity in trials or to indicate kinship such as paternity, they reject the same techniques, the same types of genetic markers, the same evidence when it proves in the same way that…
Read More DissonancedI was pulling together material for a presentation I’m giving today, and found myself reviewing the WS-* loyal opposition debate. You may remember Tim’s rant: No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement,…
Read More "I came here for an argument." "No you didn't!!"Some things are worth remembering, and celebrating. This is one of them. And, pace Andrew, this was not the product of any kind of conservatism. It was the product of liberal consciousness: the kind of “liberal” whose opposite is “illiberal”. High Court Rules Bus Segregation Unconstitutional Alabama and Montgomery Laws Held in Violation of the…
Read More 50 years ago today: High Court Rules Bus Segregation UnconstitutionalI was reading the latest RSS feeds from blogs.sun.com and came across an entry by my friend Chris Gerhard that began, “I’ve been waiting for Geoff’s review of The God Delusion“. Oops. Mea culpa. Let me fix this right now…. I did mention Dawkins’ book in passing, and said that I basically agreed with it.…
Read More Dawkins and the delusions of theistsCheck out this wonderfully wacky piece at Good Math, Bad Math on Rudolph Steiner and Theosophical Math. For example: In normal projective geometry, there’s an interesting kind of duality, where you can take theorems involving lines and points and switch the lines and the points in the theorem, and the result is also a theorem.…
Read More Good Math, Bad Math,… Theosophical Math!