You would think that after what seems like non-stop revelations of Catholic priests abusing children, parents would not let their children be alone with a priest. And yet, when the priest of a parish in Oregon told the parents of a 12-year old boy that he would like to take their son on a trip to the mountains, they not only agreed but let the boy spend the night in the priest’s house. [Read more…]
In an extraordinary raising of the stakes, the British government actually threatened to forcibly enter the Ecuadoran embassy and take Julian Assange by force. The embassy has reacted with outrage. I expect to see other South American nations enter the fray soon to try and defuse the situation. [Read more…]
I have a simple rule about news items about celebrity gossip. I tend to ignore those things that concern people that I am too much of an old fogey to be aware of, let alone care about. So I will read something if it is about a truly famous actor or someone not so famous but who is of my generation (i.e., old). But if the header of a news item refers to people like minor celebrities like Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and the like, I tend to skip over it and the story usually disappears fairly quickly. I save lot of time this way. [Read more…]
I enjoy playing the board game Scrabble, starting with my family when I was a child and playing with my own daughters when they were young. And now that they are grown and have moved away, I am still able to play with them thanks to the app Words With Friends. [Read more…]
Where does our sense of justice, fair play, and morality come from? Is it acquired as a part of our culture or are the basic instincts innate? [Read more…]
My post on infinities and the accompanying video generated some interesting discussions and illustrated the difficulties that people have the idea of ‘operational definitions’ in science and mathematics. While scientists and mathematicians, like everyone else, use everyday language to communicate with one another, they are well aware that language contains traps in the form of implicit meanings and hidden concepts that can lead to ambiguities and even paradoxes in unfamiliar situations. These arise because our intuitive concepts are developed from our experience with the everyday world and while they may work well there, problems can arise when they are extended to regions beyond our immediate experience. [Read more…]
As I have said, I am a sucker for animal recue stories.
This time we have a series of photos of a mother dog repeatedly going into a burning building to recue her 10-day old puppies one by one and carrying them to safety.
Sadly, one of the puppies did not survive the burns.
There is a problem in the current science climate which seems to reward original and exciting new research more and seems to value whether the results are true less. I have written before about the problem of journals publishing papers where the results don’t hold up under subsequent examination and how difficult it is to get them to publish articles that contradict earlier ones. [Read more…]
It appears that Ecuador has granted political asylum to Julian Assange. The British government will likely try and keep him holed up in the embassy and prevent him from going to the airport and leaving the country. [Read more…]
I finally got around to seeing the three episodes in the second season of the highly acclaimed series of the famous detective and his Boswell. I wrote about the three episodes of the first season earlier (here and here). The series is based loosely on the Conan Doyle stories, and the word ‘loosely’ is used advisedly since events are placed in contemporary London and contain only the basic plot elements of the original stories on which they are based. [Read more…]