In a comment to the earlier post on Einstein’s view of god, reader M. Nieuweboer pointed out that as Einstein got older, he seemed to dissociate himself more and more from religion and the idea of a god, and became more explicit in rejecting attempts to make him seem religious.
This comment piqued my interest and I began to wonder if there was a correlation between the age of scientists and their levels of disbelief. As a personal aside, I myself [Read more…]
I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead before her more celebrated work Atlas Shrugged that supposedly provides the clearest articulation of her philosophy of objectivism. After a promising start, The Fountainhead degenerated into a dreary polemic, with two-dimensional stereotypical characters behaving in utterly predictable ways, the whole thing written in melodramatic style. Although I completed it, it was such a bad novel that I simply could not bear the thought of reading another 1000 pages by the same writer and so never read Atlas Shrugged.
It is not that I am averse [Read more…]
You don’t often see the word ‘coulombs’ in the newspaper, let alone in the sports section. So when it does, people sit up and take notice.
In a National Hockey League game between the hosts the LA Kings and the visiting Columbus Blue Jackets with the score tied at 2-2, replays showed that the clock stopped [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald carefully documents how the ramping up of hysteria and warmongering over Iran is following the same script as that which led up to the attack on Iraq, and asks “Aren’t war advocates going to have to find at least a few superficial plot changes to maintain dramatic interest?”
Many of you would have heard about the uproar generated by the Susan G. Komen abruptly terminating its funding for Planned Parenthood. Suspicions are that they did it as part of right-wing attack on that organization. Because of the massive backlash, they have none gone into serious damage control mode.
Tbogg takes down the Komen organization [Read more…]
Ayn Rand devotees will be delighted to hear that part two of the film made from their icon’s hit book will be released before the elections so that they can all – well actually I am not sure what the film is supposed to tell them to do, other than perhaps prepare them to go Galt if the Kenyan-Muslim-Communist-Alinskyite is re-elected in November.
The producers seem undeterred by the fact that [Read more…]
Guess who wrote this:
“The U.S. government should become the protector of the Palestinian people’s right to have a decent amount of land. The desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land should be blocked by Washington even if that requires employing financial or other leverage to compel the Israeli government to behave reasonably on the issue of settlements. It is vital to our credibility in the entire Middle East that we insist on an end to Israeli expansionism. It is vital to our humanitarian duty to the Palestinian people that we protect the weaker party from the stronger power. It is vital that the world sees that our total support for Israeli security is not matched by a one-sided support for more extreme Israeli territorial demands.”
Noam Chomsky? No. Tony Judt? No. Norman Finkelstein? No. Give up? It was [Read more…]
Scientists sometimes use god as a metaphor, Albert Einstein being one of the more notorious practitioners of this habit. This can cause religious people to think that the scientist believes in god and get all excited, since any scientist who is also religious is seen as evidence for [Read more…]
In October of last year, the ACLU filed a FOIA request to have the Obama administration release the legal and factual information relating to the killing of three American citizens: Anwar al Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, all killed by drone attacks. The administration not only refused to release any information, it would not even admit the existence of a targeted killing program. So yesterday the ACLU sued the government for the release of documents containing the “factual and legal basis” for these actions. As the lawsuit says [Read more…]
I came across a study that reports:
We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p=0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p=8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p=0.027), or substance abuse problems (p=1.9×10−6).
Since my older daughter majored in engineering and the younger in humanities, that must mean that our family has a good chance of developing a fairly good set of neuropsychiatric disorders, no?