I know I just did a comic, but this one was in progress beforehand. Regardless, I think Randall Munroe at xkcd understands:
I’m not much of a fan of philosophy, for several reasons, not the least of which that it can devote considerable time and effort into suppositions or posits that have little bearing on anything at all.
Plato’s Cave refers to a philosophical concept of how nature
Up until this point, this blog has been largely a singular effort, all posts but one guest book review being written by yours truly (what the hell does that even mean? I can barely call myself “mine truly.”) But now it appears this may be changing, because I’ve invited a few
I’m sorry, I’ve been doing a string of religious posts recently, and it’s because every time I turn around something else stirs some thoughts that I want to pass along. I’m trying to space them out with items of other interest, but because I know not everyone here necessarily wants to see me pick on religion all the time, I will break the post up between the teaser and the
Scenes From A Multiverse shows how parallelism works:
Of course, the deity in an alternate universe like Aetherea IV might actually have a history of answering prayer, in which case such advice might be worth something. But in this one, even if anyone really believes in their deity, are they fulfilling their requirements for good works by chanting? I’m just wondering.
Yeah, I’m sure
Two quick notes here. The first: I added a new standing page at top, “Ask An Atheist,” dedicated to fielding any questions anyone wants to throw specifically at an atheist. Credit to Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist for the idea. I’m game to just about anything – fire away!
Second, I noticed that my spam filter had improperly tagged a comment, and I’m not sure how often
While I mentioned this before, people might still be surprised to know how often I turn the autofocus off when shooting pics. There are a couple of reasons for that. Mostly, it’s when I’m trying something like catching birds in midair, where they represent too small a target for the autofocus area within the camera to obtain enough contrast, so the focus winds the entire
In the latest issue of Skeptic magazine (Vol 16 No 2), there’s an article by Benjamin Grant Purzycki and Kyle Gibson regarding religious violence, which raises the question: does religion cause violence, or are we mistaking correlation for causation? This is an exceptionally intriguing question. Confusing correlation for causation is one of the fallacies with which
I’m quick to tell anyone who wants to listen that the key to decent photography is composition. Technical proficiency certainly helps, but no one ever looks at a photo and says, “Wow, what a great use of exposure!” It’s what is in the photo that counts, and this can actually excuse some technical faults.
But when the question is finding good nature and wildlife subjects
Did I excite the wrong kind of people with that title? Ah, well, too bad. Courtesy yet again of Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True comes this live hummingbird webcam, and she has zeh babbies right now! That makes a nice subject for me to kick off National Wildlife Week.
You can get more of the details at the host website right here, including
All right, let me throw a couple of questions at you – don’t worry, I grade leniently. This is just an exercise.
The US, like most countries with significant vehicle ownership, has speed limits on virtually all of its roads, and while I’m trying to go metric myself, I’d confuse people by switching the examples – 65 miles per hour on many interstate highways, 30 mph in