This fellow claims to have lots of important statistics displayed on a big real-time dashboard. Assuming his data to be accurate (I don't have any reason to dispute it), it's especially interesting to hit the "Now" button to reset this "World Clock," then to watch the numbers grow from zero. …
Ralph Nader recently sent a pointed letter to President Bush. The letter concerned a annual national tragedy of 58,000 of needless workplace deaths. Here is an excerpt (from Common Dreams): Dear President Bush: I was listening to your address before the self-described Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington, D.C.…
John Paulos, well-known for his writings on mathematics (he is a professor of mathematics at Temple University), has now published a book on the topic of God. In Irreligion he asks whether there are any logical or mathematically substantiated reasons to believe in God. He concludes that the answer is a resounding no.
Irreligion is a short book (only 150 pages) and it is written cleanly, with lots of humor stirred in.
Paulos gets off to a good start when he insists that you can’t really argue whether God exists unless you define what you mean by “God.” He recognizes, for example, that some people use the term God to refer to the laws of physics or nature itself. This book, however, is addressed to those who believe in a more traditional version of God:
Most conventional monotheistic characterizations of God (Yahweh, Allah) take Him to be an entity or Being that is, if not omnipotent, at least extraordinarily powerful; if not omniscient, at least surpassingly wise; if not the Creator of the universe, at least intimately connected with its origin; if not completely and absolutely perfect, at least possessor of all manner of positive characteristics. This formulation will, on the whole, be my definition of God and the many flawed arguments for this entity’s existence will be my primary focus.
By this definition, an atheist is “someone who believes that such an entity does not exist.” An agnostic is “someone who believes that whether God exists or not …
A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album "In Rainbows" as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all. As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical…
I’ve just read a good book about genetics. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. There is much food for thought in this book. One reviewer called it “A Primer of Evolutionary Theory for Beginners”, and this is accurate. One doesn’t need to know chemistry or physics to follow his reasoning, because he teaches the most necessary pieces.
Basically, this book examines what has turned up in studying the genomes of various species over the last couple of decades, as well as tracing genes from generation to generation in the same family line. It starts with a simple introduction to what DNA is, how it works, and how we know this. Then it gradually leads one to understand how genes transform from one generation to the next, and how this leads to speciation.
Basically, ever-present radiation, random chemistry, and aggressive biology cause frequent single-letter changes in DNA. Also RNA copy-and-paste errors regularly drop or duplicate entire gene sequences. After this see Darwin for how some mutations are explicitly preserved, some are inevitably removed, and most simply languish in or become fossil genes because there is no preference one way or the other. Carroll covers all this in many examples.
Carroll presents the simple probability and large numbers theory to illustrate the surprising speed at which populations can change, and then shows functioning (or no longer functioning) genes that have in fact visibly changed populations so rapidly.
This book gives plenty …