Just when I think we're making progress, we go and pull the one-step-forward-ten-steps-back trick. First, a friend tells me about how her daughter was treated recently in a suburb of New York City. The daughter is 17 and African-American, although my friend is Caucasian. Her daughter was adopted from Sierre…
This is another post based on a comment by our online frenemy, Karl K. He said, "So naturalists get to have their certainty and be skeptics at the same time and never be at risk of being proven in error because their certainty is based on something that cannot be…
This first is something for all of us to contemplate when engaging each other in debate. Since logic and sensibility do not coincide, and since both have legitimate claims upon our decision, the great and recurring debate about century boundaries simply cannot be resolved. Some questions have answers because obtainable…
Stephen Strogatz is a mathematician who has studied synchrony in nature. Synchrony is the "spontaneous tendency of separate entities to act as a unit." Strogatz finds synchrony "everywhere" in nature. He stresses that you don't need to be smart to synchronize, nor do you need to have a brain or…
In this video, Bill Maher discusses Religulous with Mike Huckabee. It's all quite civil, though both sides work hard to make their points. Watching this video makes me relived that at least some people on the national stage can discuss these serious issues without undue heat (that tone is what…