For a couple of months now I’ve know that Ray Comfort plans on distributing a republication of Darwin’s Origin of Species on many North American campuses. I took quite some time out to write a rebuttal to all of the fallacious arguments that he makes in his Introduction so that AAR could use it to [...]
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The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored the issue. Here, I seek to provide some links to more fundamental content. It begins [...] 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 [...] Of course, I would never think that I was the only one to have the idea of studying computer languages from a linguistics point of view. Well, I found an interesting character, by the name of Chris Barker that gave an interesting keynote at POPL in 2004. He’s mentioned in a recent LtU discussion about [...] Yesterday, I attended a structured debate between William Lane Craig and The Hitch held at Biola University. As far as anyone can win a debate where the opponents talk mostly at cross-purposes, I’d have to give the trophy to Craig. Clearly, my belief system is biased towards Hitchens, yet I feel that he did an [...] Tonight I attended a nice speech, Q+A, and Booksigning given by the President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Dan Barker. His talk was basically the same as one that can be found elsewhere online, but I took notes anyway. Most of the stuff that he talks about is contained in his book, Godless: How [...] Yesterday a very interesting speaker, Eric Hehner, gave a talk at the graduate seminar: TITLE A Probability Perspective ABSTRACT This talk could be called “probability meets programming”. It draws together four perspectives that contribute to a new understanding of probability and solving problems involving probability. The first is the Subjective Bayesian perspective that probability is [...] Today I decided to send the following email. Usually, when I do such things it doesn’t make any difference. But it still never hurts to try. We’ll see what becomes of my efforts this time. Dear PZ Myers and richarddawkins.net, I wanted the following to go personally to Richard Dawkins, but could not find his [...] This morning one of my high school friends (Thomas) told me about Clifford Stoll. So I watched his TED conference video. Boy is he animated. Inaddition to having pursued a KGB computer infiltration (an article, book, and NOVA documentary), he enjoys one-sided things, and produces his own glass klein bottles. There is just no shortage [...] Ok, so I’ve been away awhile. I visited the Maker Faire, and San Deigo Amphib Base (twice). Two days ago I read Benford’s Cosm, start to finish. And learned that the nucleus of heavier elements are ellipsoidal rather than spherical. Anyway, while I wait on preparing back-date posts of the aforementioned activities, I found out some interesting stuff today. I was reading Geodesic Discrete Global Grid Systems (Kevin Sahr, Denis White, and A. Jon Kimerling. 2003. CaGIS 30(2): 121-134). I went out to search for code that does a grid lat/lon conversion for Fuller’s Dymaxion icosahedron. Gray, R.W. actually wrote such code, for a flattened (2d) layout of the icosahedron, which might be useful in the future. These searches led me far afield, to the wikipedia article on Buckminister Fuller himself, where I leared that he was much better about recording events in his life than I am in mine. In fact, Fuller documented his life every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983, leaving 80 meters (270 feet) of journals. He called this the Dymaxion Chronofile. That is said to be the most documented human life in history. And he also had lots of fun playing with words, and argued, quite rightly, that certain words impede clear thinking: The words ‘down’ and ‘up,’ according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words ‘in’ and ‘out’ should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. ‘World-around’ is a term coined by Fuller to replace worldwide. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in the Middle Ages, so using wide is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. The terms sunsight and sunclipse are other neologisms. What an awesome dude. Finally, I should make note of some articles that I wasn’t able to find online, but that I think would be good to read later. Gray, R. W. 1995. Exact transformation equations for Fuller’s word map. Cartographica 32(3): 17-25. |
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