I learned about The Great Cracker Controversy, or Crackerclysm, after it already faded, but since this stuff is ongoing in religious and public life, I don’t mind coming a little late to the party. A bit of background first: It seems some hapless fellow (Webster Cook) at the University of Central Florida was witnessed absconding [...]
Archive for July, 2008
The Hubble telescope has helped cosmologists to establish that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which goes against the theory of cyclical expansion and contraction of the universe leading to multiple big bangs. (The cyclical universe theory had nearly grown to be dogma among those of us of a certain age.) Popular science magazines [...]
Or more simply, new lingo. The rapidity of creation of new words, language, terminology, jargon, lexicon, patois, nomenclature, argot, idiom, slang, coin, what-have-you never ceases to amaze me. It was reported recently that the English language is nearing 1 million words — a big round milestone with no real meaning or value. As with the [...]
The article at this link presents a point of view explaining why we don’t need to worry about global warming right away. If I understand the premise correctly, the author believes that the direction trends are leading are no cause for alarm because, even if the worst case scenario is granted, we (or more accurately, [...]
This passage from E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience piqued my interest: Without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates. The rational mind does not float about the irrational; it cannot free itself to engage in pure reason. There are pure theorems in mathematics but no pure thoughts that discover them. In the [...]
