From the first time I saw him perform I loved the deadpan comedy of Steven Wright. His view of life is coldly objective and sometimes skewed, but always funny. Here are a few of my favorite one-liners, some of which are relevant to the ongoing conversations here at DI. Last…
The Wall Street Journal reported today that Swiss ethicists have come to the conclusion that genetically modified rice, corn and apples have been humiliated by being altered. Read the full story here.
Yes, John McCain. We know quite well who you are, and we don't want anyone with your ego and your temper to have the power to fire American nuclear weapons. While we're on the issue of violence, are you consciously trying to get one of your enraged followers to inflict…
Discussions in the comment sections of many posts on this site chaotically tend toward the strange attractor of one generally off-topic issue: Why does Creation/Evolution seem correct to you? It is usually a discussion between Creationists who believe that the scientific conclusions are based on faith, and Naturalists who believe that the Scientific Method is best tool ever invented to extract sense from chaos.
In the beginning, Natural Philosophers (now called Scientists) in the West all believed in the Bible. Bishop Ussher gave the final word on the age of the universe according to the Bible in the early 1600’s, and the Church had all the answers. But then the idea emerged that one can actually test Aristotelian conclusions (purely rational and based on “what everybody knows”) with observations. Copernicus demonstrated with careful observation and applied math around 1600 that only the moon itself orbited the Earth, and all the other planets circled the Sun. The church accepted this, as a philosophical observation, irrelevant to the place of Man in the Universe. Then Galileo made a gadfly of himself by publishing popular books mocking the Pope for publicly continuing in the preaching of Geocentrism when it was clear, with the aid of a telescope, that not only did the planets orbit the sun, but that some of those planets had moons of their own. Many moons, placed where Man couldn’t even see them without modern technology.
Well, it just snowballed from there. Newton, a devout Christian, developed math in …
It is often hard to be a person on the planet Earth. It can be scary, overwhelming, fraught with obstacles, and most of all, inescapably lonely. We are, after all, alone in our minds, our bodies, and our selves. I think most all of the stuff we do as people…