Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
One of the significant changes that has come to this blog in the year fast ending is the incorporation of proper WordPress statistics for the webmaster to contemplate. This gives me a better idea of where my readers are coming from and what interests them (better than Google Analytics, I might add). This blog (and …
Continue reading "Veni, Venite, or Coming to Terms with Proper Latin Pronunciation at Christmas"
He's not widely known outside of the fields he specialised in, but Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant (1797-1886, usually known in the Anglophone world as simply Saint-Venant) was one of the premier scientists, engineers and mathematicians of the nineteenth century. His accomplishments were many and include the following: Successful derivation of the Navier-Stokes Equations …
Continue reading "Taking the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal"
In Israel, of all places: Hundreds of Israeli evangelical couples have traveled out of the country in order to get married because the Jewish government does not officially recognize their faith. Church leaders are escalating efforts to change that. The Council of Evangelical Churches in Israel (CECI), which includes 51 churches and organizations such as …
Continue reading "Passing Up Making Lemonade on Civil Marriage"
Well, we're here again. Four years ago after the 2008 debacle I wrote my piece The Party’s Over: A Post-Election Reflection, and that's as good of a point as any to start from. It’s fair to say that the Republican Party is history as a national party in the U.S. Oh, it’s true that it …
Continue reading "The Party's Over, Once Again: Another Election, Another Reflection"
For students of Latin American history, the serious question: President Obama’s response to the Great Recession and then a pallid recovery has been guided more by “fairness,” a thinly veiled code for redistribution, than by free-market principles. As it stands now, the top 1 percent of Americans generate 16 percent of the nation’s income but …
Continue reading "Do We Really Want to Go the Way of Argentina?"
When they're a)Mormon and b)in American politics: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a response to Mitt Romney’s claim that he will “reach across the aisle” to work with Democrats in Congress, if he becomes president: Don’t bet on it. “Mitt Romney’s fantasy that Senate Democrats will work with him to pass his 'severely conservative' …
Continue reading "Harry Reid and Mitt Romney: When the Aspiring Gods Fall Out"
And Vladimir, too: Recently journalists from The Guardian newspaper reported an important change during stays in Pyongyang: two large portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin - long a prominent feature of Pyongyang's central Kim Il-sung square - were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the images have been replaced by a more dominating portrait of …
Continue reading "North Korea Calls It Quits on Karl and Fred"
That's what they're learning in the wake of Hurricane Sandy: A casket floated out of the grave in a cemetery in Crisfield, Md. after the effects of superstorm Sandy Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012. This phenomenon--the effects of a high water table and not of demonic activity--was one of the first rude awakenings the early French …
Continue reading "One City's Halloween Horror is Another's Way of Life"
Under the guise of "democracy", we're setting ourselves up for trouble: Americans have fought at home and on many a distant shore with resolve in truths that they hold to be self-evident, "that all men are created equal". Under the Barack Obama administration, America appears to have abandoned this principle through its recent engagement policy …
Political correctness makes life more complicated on campus, this time at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill has removed the word “freshman” from official university documents, citing as their reason an attempt to adopt more “gender inclusive language.” We are “committed to providing an inclusive and …
Positive Infinity 