Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Up in Richmond, they're aghast at this latest oracle from the Tidewater: Televangelist Pat Robertson challenged the idea that Earth is 6,000 years old this week, saying the man who many credit with conceiving the idea, former Archbishop of Ireland James Ussher, “wasn’t inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 …
Continue reading "Pat Robertson not a Creationist? That Depends Upon How You Define the Word"
I think the Canon has really stepped into it on this one. In his editorial re the defeat of women bishops at the recent Church of England synod, he tells the following tale: There was this lad at school who got bullied all the time. When he wasn't being bullied he was being ignored. He …
Continue reading "Reply to Giles Fraser: The Effects of Bullying Cut Both Ways"
Nothing to it, really: It's a message no one wants to hear: To slow down global warming, we'll either have to put the brakes on economic growth or transform the way the world's economies work. That's the implication of an innovative University of Michigan study examining the evolution of atmospheric CO₂, the most likely cause …
Continue reading "How to Lower Carbon Emissions: Tank the Economy!"
My regular readers are probably aware that, among my other activities, I'm pursing a PhD in Computational Engineering at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It's been an experience for several reasons. Starting such a degree in my superannuated condition wasn't an easy thing to do for that reason alone. Being both on the faculty …
He fields the usual trick question: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio declined to firmly answer a question of existential importance in an interview released Monday. An interviewer for GQ magazine asked the Republican, a Catholic and potential 2016 presidential candidate, how old planet Earth is. Rubio didn’t give a direct answer, but suggested children should be …
Continue reading "Rubio's Not a Scientist, but They're Not Either"
Through this year, I have posted from time to time about my journey forty years ago from the Episcopal Church to the Roman Catholic Church. Today is the fortieth anniversary of that transition. On a very nice South Florida November afternoon, I took my baby blue Pinto on the very short drive to St. Thomas …
Continue reading "Forty Years Ago, I Left. Today, the Diocese of South Carolina Leaves."
And not whine about it when people point out the obvious: So he (Mitt Romney) casts about, looking for some other explanation, and he lands on one: “gifts” that, to sway voters, the Obama Administration handed out to the President’s key demographic groups—“especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people.” “With regards to …
Continue reading "A Patronage Driven Political System Should be Called for What It Is"
For all the hoopla these days about being "scientific", the history of science still gets the short shrift. We are happier discussing the philosophical advances engendered by the Enlightenment and not the people on the STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) end who actually made those advances a reality. We're also happier lionising those who …
Continue reading "The Men Who Saved the Computer From the Hippie Radicals"
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"
