Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
I've taken flak for saying this in other contexts, but this comment on a frustrated history PhD's failure to land a tenure-track position hits the nail on the head: my own experience has been very similar although now i’m glad that i left the humanities and i believe that the humanities themselves should be completely …
Continue reading "The Core Problem With Liberal Arts Curricula/Degrees"
NPR wants a new one, but... NPR, which to its credit at least attempts to cover science and health, is looking for a new Science Editor. Unfortunately, actually being trained in science is not required for the job. Under the qualifications section, the ad says, "Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience." Amazingly, not only …
YouTube is doing some strange things these days, and this is yet another: YouTube announced Friday it will start flagging videos published by organizations that receive government funding. Viewers will be able to see labels on videos from government-funded outlets above the video's title on the page. “News is an important and growing vertical for us …
Continue reading "I Guess YouTube Will Flag the Boring Video, Too"
I think it's fair to say that most Boomers (and some who came afterwards) were taught that one reason Columbus sailed west to determine whether the earth was flat. But this won't wash, as BizzareVictoria notes: Everyone knows that in the medieval era, everyone thought the world was flat, and Columbus discovered the Americas in …
Continue reading "No, Columbus Wasn’t Worried About Falling Off the Edge of a Flat Earth"
Evident in the obituary for a Texas A&M classmate (we both were engineering majors) of mine: Thomas Craig Kohutek, 63, was called home to be with the Lord January 1, 2018...A faithful servant of the Lord, Tom was an active member of St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church as well as the Knights of Columbus. …
Continue reading "Catholic and Christian, the Sweet Combination"
And it's not the detour we're told happens, either. Consider this example from J.E. Gordon's Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, during a discussion of Robert Hooke and the development of the theory of elasticity: In fact, throughout the eighteenth century, remarkably little real progress was made in the study of elasticity. The reasons …
Check out this interesting thread at Stack Exchange, one of the premier sites for programmers of all kinds.  There are at least 2,400 other questions on Tolkien topics, and you can check them out, too.
It may seem that posts on this blog are slowing down, but elsewhere it's another story. There are actually four sites to this "family" and one of them, vulcanhammer.info, is being moved to WordPress hosting. (The other two, vulcanhammer.net and Chet Aero Marine, were moved around the first of the year.) Moving a site that …
It seems that it, too, is the residual of a sunken continent: In a paper published in the Geological Society of America’s Journal GSA Today in February, researchers made the case that it should be considered a new continent. They said it was a distinct geological entity that met all the criteria applied to Earth’s …
Continue reading "Another Good Reason Why They Filmed Lord of the Rings in New Zealand"
We're starting a new series on the companion site vulcanhammer.net about the STADYN wave equation program. This may be a little arcane for most readers of this blog, so it will be over there. The first installment, however, concerns using a very old language (FORTRAN 77) to generate HTML code, which of course appears on …
Continue reading "New Series on vulcanhammer.net: STADYN Wave Equation Program"
