Much ado about ‘nothing’

Some of you may have heard about the acrimonious exchange that occurred last year between David Albert and Lawrence Krauss. I did not write about it at that time but now there is an even more unfortunate sequel to that story. What follows is a brief summary of what happened earlier so that you can understand the recent development that I address at the end. [Read more…]

Funny dice and the transitive property

The transitive property says that if A beats B and B beats C, then one would expect A to beat C. This seems quite obviously true and we use it in some form all the time. It is true for the real numbers where we think of ‘beats’ as ‘is greater than’ but is this transitive property true for all meanings of ‘beats’? Via Cory Doctorow, I came across this video of something called ‘Grime Dice’ that not only violate the transitive property (which is surprising in itself) but do so in very interesting ways. [Read more…]

How to deal with the ‘Craig Con’: Part 2

In yesterday’s Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote about how in debating sophisticated religious people, atheists have the disadvantage in that science impacts religion in many ways and that atheists, even if they are scientists, cannot know about all developments everywhere and so can be blindsided by arguments based on science that they have little knowledge about. I have labeled this the ‘Craig Con’, in contrast to the older and cruder ‘Gish Gallop’, because some theologians are now more sophisticated than the ones who came before and use information from cutting-edge science to give the same old and tired arguments for god a patina of freshness and credibility. William Lane Craig is the smoothest practitioner of this debating tactic, though by no means the only one. [Read more…]

The manned voyage to Mars

I was both intrigued and disturbed by the recent report of a plan called Inspiration Mars to send a human couple on a flyby of Mars in the year 2018, approaching the planet within 100 miles. The venture will be an entirely private one backed by a group known as the Inspiration Mars Foundation whose chair is Dennis Tito, who in 2001 became the first private person to go into space. They will of course draw on the vast expertise of NASA. Interestingly the only permission one needs to get is from the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates all spacecraft launches and returns. [Read more…]

The 3D printing phenomenon

3D printing is the hot new thing. I have not used one myself but a colleague of mine says that the cost of such things is dropping rapidly (you can now get one for less than $1000) and he has several in his lab because the cost of repairing the older, more expensive ones is now often greater than the cost of buying a newer and better one. He says that they come in extremely useful for creating customized items for his research. [Read more…]

The intriguing world of visual special effects

I have not seen the film Life of Pi and am probably not going to. I read Yann Martel’s book some years ago and what I liked most about it were the opening chapters of the boy Pi simultaneously following the religions of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, unbeknownst to his parents or to the clerics of the three religions, each of whom thought he was a devout follower of only their faith. Once the boy started on his ill-fated journey across the ocean, I lost interest while the film seems to have that as its main focus. [Read more…]

The mystery of Stonehenge

StonehengeThe Stonehenge site in England is a popular tourist attraction, especially at the time of the summer solstice when mystical rites are conducted by druids. The collection of massive stones was arranged in a circle some time between 3,000 BCE – 2,000 BCE but the origins and purpose are unknown and have spawned many theories as to what was the point of it all. After all, it must been incredibly hard to make it and so required a strong motive. [Read more…]