Walkabout podcast – But how? Part 5
Having taken a break longer than I should’ve, we now return to the “But how?” series of posts that examine how things might work if we stop using religion as a default explanation. Our topic for this evening is “life.”
It is admittedly hard to believe that such a thing could come about on its own, dictated only by the simple
How often would you get this kind of opportunity?
A year ago, I reposted a comic from Calamities of Nature, created by Tony Piro, one that achieved a certain amount of notoriety (not due to my efforts by any stretch.) This wasn’t a humorous comic, nor did it involve exaggeration, misstatement, caricaturization,
As I was writing another post and remaining, surprisingly to some I think, unconnected from the world at large, I was notified that Christopher Hitchens died last night of his esophageal cancer, at the age of 62.
Now, I clarify things a little. Despite the strong sentiments expressed in his book God Is Not Great, Hitchens was not a high priest of atheism, even when ignoring the fact that
While I take pains not to let it come through in posts, overall, I’m a fairly cranky person, and I know at least a few other skeptics are as well. It would be easy to take this and extrapolate that being skeptical makes you cranky, which some people really do believe and which is an excellent example of failing to understand correlation and causation. For my part, I know where it comes from,
This is another post inspired by Demon Haunted World, and if I find out that you haven’t read this book yet, I’m going to come to your house and smack you in the back of the head with a rolled up e-magazine…
Yet despite my promotion of this book, I’m going to highlight something that I find misleading within it. Sagan lists a quote from Ethan Allen, who said:
Those who invalidate
There have been a couple of things I’ve been working on and trying to update, and I finally have them available, so this post is simply a short list of new things available on the site.
I mentioned earlier that I would include a tutorial on removing noise, and so I
I feel obligated to let my four readers know that the blog Weird Things has rebooted. Greg Fish took a hiatus because of time demands earlier this year, with no promises of a return. But he was kind enough to send me an e-mail last night announcing his encore, and I am happy to send people his way again. Technically,
I think everybody probably knows someone like this: the person that, in their everlasting quest for shortcuts, ends up taking obscure, winding routes to “avoid traffic” or stoplights or whatever, and goes several kilometers further than necessary, often taking longer to do so as well. I’ve certainly known more than a couple. My brother-in-law once decided, when
Recently, I came across two posts on probability, both of which possessing some serious issues. This is actually a common occurrence, since probability is one of those things that confuses people and is, in many ways, counterintuitive. What’s interesting about both of them is that the answers revealed are misleading in the same manner as the intuitive solutions.
I used to think the column “The Straight Dope” was pretty good, and well researched. I was first introduced to it about twenty years ago, when it was carried in the local independent newspaper called, for some unknown reason, The Independent (this is a local publication, not the British one.) Many years later, I found it online, and made a habit of stopping by semi-regularly
