The character of Abraham in the Bible is clearly a dangerous psychopath and why three major religions would proudly claim him as their common patriarch is a real mystery. Surely they would want to disown a man who was so insane that he was willing to kill his own child because [Read more…]
Apparently smaller bonuses this year are causing all kinds of angst for the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street.
Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said [Read more…]
Scholarly articles tend to follow pretty much a four-step formula.
In order to make the case that their research is important, [Read more…]
2012 being a leap year, today is the extra day. Some of us are aware of the rule that says that we add a leap day for years that are divisible by 4 but not if it is divisible by 100 unless that year is also divisible by 400.
The reason for these complicated leap day rules is [Read more…]
He died today.
Here is the group singing one of my favorite songs I’m a Believer. He’s the one with the tambourine.
Incidentally Neil Diamond wrote this song, which had a resurgence when Smash Mouth did a cover (also very good) that was played in the hit film Shrek.
To no one’s surprise, women greatly helped provide Romney with the victory in Michigan. While Romney had only a 1% edge among men in that state, he won the women’s vote by 6%. And this is just among Republican women. [Read more…]
Most scientists know how to fight for acceptance of their ideas within the community of scientists. The rules of the game are fairly well understood. But when it comes to politically charged issues, they tend to be at a loss because they work as individuals and hence do not know how to respond to massive organized attacks, of the kind that they have been under from climate change deniers. The attacks have ranged from explicit and [Read more…]
If there is one thing that people can agree on as a universal good in education, it is that we should seek to increase the critical thinking abilities in people. Actually, that is not quite true. During the days when the debate over intelligent design was raging in Ohio in 2003, one letter to the editor by an ID advocate dismissed [Read more…]
With the exploratory glamor being hogged by the space program, it is good to remind ourselves of the vast unexplored regions of the Earth.
Here is a nice graphic that shows what happens as we go down deep into the ocean. Of course, we don’t really know for sure since going deep is a formidable challenge. The deep ocean is largely an unexplored frontier. [Read more…]