2014

This is a thread for UD commenters to speak their mind. Please keep it civil. Off topic #1If I could be a ballet dancer, I’d be this man: Off topic #2It’s no secret I’m rather chummy with agnostics, atheists, free-thinkers and academics, and even some of the less reputable elements of society (professional gamblers). My love of the arts and drama often touches on realms the church sometimes frowns on. The irony is I’m a right wing conservative young earth creationist. Why is this so? First I wasn’t always a YEC. I was raised in a Roman Catholic home, my lifestyle was worldly and I found church often boring and suffocating, and this persisted to some extent even after I Read More ›

Professor Kenneth Miller, the acclaimed author of Finding Darwin’s God, was recently interviewed by Swedish magician and skeptic Samuel Varg for a three-part series on faith, science and magic. Here’s the 33-minute interview, which Varg posted on Youtube: Who is Samuel Varg? Two weeks ago, Matt Young of Panda’s Thumb put up a post about the interview, in which Varg described his background as follows: You want my background? OK. I’m a Swedish guy, and I’m 31 years old. When I was around 17, I became involved in creationism and bought that whole concept of this black-and-white worldview with evolution as a big lie. Around 20 I started to look into the actual debate and wanted to know “the enemy,” Read More ›

This weekend, the Apollo 11 Moon Landing happened forty-five years ago to day and date.  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRwKUScppvQ I remember sitting on the stone ledge of our patio after church on Sunday, July 20, 1969 sipping a drink as radio carried the story of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Then, that evening my Dad tuned to a shortwave station in the darkened living room as we heard, live, the story of the Moon Walk. The next morning, the Gleaner headline was I think two inches high in block capitals. Let us remind ourselves of this now long ago but still important event in the history of science and technology. END

Without the usual nuttery. As Ross Pomeroy tells it, Feynman was a jerk where women are concerned, except when he regarded them as colleagues. Ashutosh Jogalekar, who penned the article at Scientific American, described having a similar reaction to Feynman’s “casual sexism,” which also manifested in more than just social arenas. But, he noted, though some of his actions are “disturbing and even offensive” when viewed from the socially-evolved lens of today, “they were probably no different than the attitudes of a male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years.” Thus, Jogalekar reasoned, we should not condemn Feynman wholly as a sexist. Actually, in a lot of places, a guy who behaved that way was viewed as a jerk in Read More ›