Okay, perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. But I found some videos on YouTube purporting to show simple homemade tricks for getting power from essentially nothing. The culprit calls himself HouseholdHacker These are very slickly directed and composed, very amateur-looking videos, full of straight-faced monologue and how-to demonstrations, illustrating nothing…
Writer John Scalzi recently visited the Creation Museum. He has written his report, assessed his impressions, and concluded...well, you should read his conclusions for yourself, here. I do not have Mr. Scalzi's flare for describing expensive nonsense in such finely satirical, subversive, and somewhat detached a manner. There is also a…
Words have great power to frame thoughts. Here's a good example reported by Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism, reporting on the recent Secular Society Conference in NY: The conference organizers next played a rare audio recording of [Carl] Sagan reading the famous passage, Reflections on a Mote of Dust, from his book…
I needed to change the battery in one of our smoke detector tonight. This reminded me of an incident that occurred in 2001. It’s an illustration of the value of smoke detectors. The story also has a nice twist at the end. Afer the incident, I wrote the following email to friends and family.
…I’m writing today because I’m alive and able to do so because of an incredibly important and inexpensive gadget: a smoke detector.
Yesterday morning, at about 5:45 am, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the Battery-powered smoke detector located in the 2nd floor hallway, outside of the bedroom. It was only after being awakened that I smelled the smoke. I blasted out of bed and scrambled to find a fire in the upstairs hallway bathroom we are renovating. The bathroom is only 10 feet down the hall. I was home alone (JuJu and Anne have been out of town while the bathroom is being renovated).
I grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the fire (the fire was the size of a roaring campfire when I hit it the first time. The flames were the only thing I could see in the bathroom—all else was thick black smoke. I ran downstairs to call 911, then grabbed a second extinguisher, which turned the fire into a small glowing area. The fire department showed up a five minutes later and helped figure out (through lots of smoke) that an old permanently-installed bathroom space heater was the problem.
Why would a scientist pull a paper that he had out there for over 50 years? Because he is embarrassed that Creationists are eagerly citing parts of it as proof that life cannot have arisen spontaneously. Here's the story. That is not because he objects to religion, he said... “Religion…