I spent the last days of innocence before Trump and Brexit heavily pregnant. Like many first-time mums, I read a lot of pregnancy books, but the one I liked most was… 1,620 more words The tyranny of a Covid amnesty — UnHerd One thing that would come from this amnesty would be "forgiveness." I'm not sure …
The Challenge from Aquinas That Changed Mathematics
A few years back, in my post If You Really Want to Get Into Trouble, Read the Mediaevals, I quoted Carl Boyer's A History of Mathematics as follows: The son Georg (Cantor) took a strong interest in the finespun arguments of medieval theologians concerning continuity and the infinite, and this militated against his pursuing a mundane …
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Should My Students Be Here?
Last year, before the Fall semester started, I posted Teaching Secular Blasphemy, where I attacked the whole "perfect life" concept that pervades our culture, inflates our expectations and makes us depressed and angry when they don't work out. I didn't attack this idea because of their psychological or sociological damage (which are evident) but because …
Maybe a few Soviet Books Would Change Their Mind
The Democratic Socialists of America are on a roll in Los Angeles, and the school system continues to decline: Minority students are disproportionately hurt by Los Angeles’s subpar public school systems. The DSA’s refusal to challenge underperforming schools in minority neighborhoods is a testament to its role as a mouthpiece for failed public-sector unions such …
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You Think They’ll Ever Bother to Ask Christian Scientists About How To Approach Science?
This book, for the most part, does the opposite: The goal of the book is to examine the “reception of the natural sciences among Protestant theologians in the modern era” (1). The editors picked ten influential theologians from various Protestant denominations over the past two centuries in Europe and America to analyze the way they …
Christians Believing in Evolution: My Response to Larry Arnhart
I've gotten to the point where I find debating anything in an American context inherently discouraging, but Larry Arnhart's piece Nature's God: Why Christians Should Accept the Theory of Evolution caught my attention as an interesting presentation of a point of view. It is not my intent to produce a blow-by-blow refutation or commentary of …
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Learning Nothing from Beating the Scots-Irish to a Pulp
We're not prepared to support a sustained war in the Ukraine: Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development …
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Condensing Gas Furnaces: the Vulcanaire Supertherm of HVAC — vulcanhammer.info
Our government moves to mandate them: The new proposed rule, announced by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday, would require that gas-burning residential furnaces achieve 95 percent energy efficiency by 2029. The stated goal is to lower consumers’ energy bills in the long run and limit harmful emissions… The DOE press release says that […]Condensing …
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Our Obsession with Credentials
Growing up with an obsessively patriotic father, one of the advantages he gave of our society over the one we separated ourselves form (and I mean the United Kingdom) was that, while the UK elevated people based on their credentials, ours did so based on what they actually accomplished. Whether his characterisation of the UK …
The Real Reason Space Colonization Will Fail
Werner Herzog has his idea: It is a utopia, and you do not need to be a scientist or expert researcher [to understand what will pass]. You just sit back, twiddle your thumbs, enjoy your beer, and wait until it fails. [Space colonization] will fail. My explanation is a little more mundane in explanation, if …
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Positive Infinity 