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 …
Rubio's Not a Scientist, but They're Not Either
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 …
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Forty Years Ago, I Left. Today, the Diocese of South Carolina Leaves.
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 …
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A Patronage Driven Political System Should be Called for What It Is
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 …
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The Men Who Saved the Computer From the Hippie Radicals
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 …
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Veni, Venite, or Coming to Terms with Proper Latin Pronunciation at Christmas
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 …
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Taking the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
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 …
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Passing Up Making Lemonade on Civil Marriage
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 …
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The Party's Over, Once Again: Another Election, Another Reflection
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 …
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Do We Really Want to Go the Way of Argentina?
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 …
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Positive Infinity 