2012

About twenty years ago the television show Dallas was in trouble. The writers had eliminated a popular character named Bobby and the show was losing popularity. The writers realized their mistake and began thinking up ways to solve the problem. They finally decided that the previous year of programming would become nothing more than a dream in the mind of another character named Pam. It was a ridiculous solution, but it was all they had. A new show would begin with Pam restlessly awakening, only to discover Bobby was not dead, but alive and well. Everything was back to normal as Bobby announced to the loyal viewers at the 2:10 mark that “It’s over—none of that happened.” Dallas needed a do-over, and it got Read More ›

You’ve heard all those evolutionary arguments about how nature’s sloppy, repetitive, inefficient and downright evil designs prove evolution. Then what about the many optimized designs in biology, such as those in this New York Times article, suggested by a friend, such as our eye’s ability to detect even a single photon:  Read more

Tired of the New Atheists, and the old atheists as well? Delighted to see the likes of Philip Kitcher taking them down in this week’s Sunday Book Review? Philosophers Kitcher and David Albert reviewed books by atheists Alex Rosenberg and Lawrence Krauss in an exercise that was more like shooting fish in a barrel than any kind of literary review. But wait a minute, what is Philip Kitcher—who once wrote that evolution illuminates “a wealth of biological details” and whose book was endorsed by arch evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould—doing tossing Molotov cocktails into the atheist camp? Isn’t evolution just atheism in disguise? Kitcher’s and Albert’s reviews are another example of what is the fundamental name-of-the-game, and most people will continue not Read More ›

It turns out the earth heats up and cools naturally with no human intervention.  Who ever thought that it didn’t?  Oh, the consensus.  

Below, is a picture of Einstein’s chalkboard at Princeton as he left it — and you should see his bookshelves and desk, too! What does this have to do with the now so commonly dismissed laws of thought, especially the law of non-contradiction? A lot. AKA, one cannot wisely saw off the branch on which s/he is sitting. What does that mean? We can start from the proverbial main tools of the great theoretical physicists of 100 years ago when quantum physics was emerging: chalk-boards, chalk, and — of course — what they had between their ears. So, they used distinct scratch marks with definite meanings, to clarify, analyse and communicate what they were thinking. (Some, proverbially, had “chalkboards in Read More ›