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Personal Freedom

I’ve been dissatisfied with Ron Paul’s loss of the Republican Party ticket. I was hoping that this election cycle would finally be determined by the enthusiastic minority of libertarians. I was hoping that it would be the nomination which proved the internet is stronger than the mass media. Alas, I shall have to wait some […]

Presenting Science

Today I stumbled across a somewhat recent post by Luskin of the infamous Discovery Institute. Luskin observes some comments made by Eugenie Scott, in regard to how scientists should portray their results, so as not to be pounced upon by the creationists. He accuses Scott of instructing scientists to “spin it [changes in science] positively […]

Weakening of the Teleological Argument

Wikipedia defines the Teleological Argument as “an argument for the existence of god based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design, or direction — or some combination of these — in nature.” I’ve always found it a really tough one to battle. William Lane Craig used it in a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens. He […]

Speech on Chaos Theory and Ecological Stability

I wrote this speech on the way to an Academic Decathlon competition in high school. I still like it, but see now that I really should have been speaking of path lines in attractor fields. Other than that very important mistake, and the fact that you have to have a good idea of what I’m […]

Bachelor Chow

Like many other things in life, a comedy show had things absolutely spot on. In this case Futurama has in it a fictitious product called Bachelor Chow, which functions as a pet food, but for humans; specifically middle-aged men that don’t cook. I’m a college grad student, and I don’t cook. What I want is […]

The Assembly Programmer From Hell

Today I was reading chapter 3 (Revenge of the Nerds) in Steven Pinker’s book How the Mind Works. It talks about evolution and Darwin and Dawkins, and got me thinking about how replicators are all coded with DNA, and how this coding interacts with the processes of evolution; specifically, mutation and inheritance. It already widely […]

The Cambrian Explosion

Today I watched the Evolution section of a Discovery program about the 100 Greatest Discoveries. In it Bill Nye talked about the Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess shale. I remember that back in High School I had an argument with a Creationist friend about the sudden explosion of life in that era, and though I […]

Self Replicating Robots

I had a nice discussion with Elvee today about robots. One of the problems with robots is that of self-replication. In order to create an electronic life-form, we need to gift robots with the ability to reproduce on their own. When biological organisms reproduce the chemistry basically takes care of itself. But in the case […]