Monthly Archives: July, 2008
Free Thinking: Anathema to Muslims and the CCC
PZ Myers has posted a follow-up to the amazing Cracker Desecration controversy.
An organization of the Catholic leadership has now condemned my actions. This is sad news: it’s clear that at least this tier of the Catholic hierarchy is as deranged as the wackaloons flooding my mailbox.
We find the actions of University of Minnesota (Morris) Professor [...]
Mysteries of time, and the multiverse
A rather thought-provoking article in the L.A. Times:
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more [...]
No rhyme or reason
{a reply in a Volconvo forum thread on intelligent design}
If “design”, whatever you mean by that, is an absolute state (everything that exists is designed by a designer) then the designer is not exempt. The designer would be a product of a design, which implies another, previous designer, and one before him and so on. [...]
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
From Wired:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, [...]
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