Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
The confirmation (against a lot of pushback) that the Carthaginians really, truly did sacrifice their children bring to mind this memorable passage from G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man: There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city that bore the name of the New Town. It was already much older, more …
Continue reading "Chesterton on the Carthaginian Sacrifice of Children"
He confidently states that "extremist religions" are at the bottom of conflict these days: Referring to wars and violent confrontations from Syria to Nigeria and the Philippines, Blair, writing in the Observer, argues that "there is one thing self-evidently in common: the acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. …
Two summers ago I posted a piece on my favourite pastor, my first parish priest. Protestants in general and Pentecostals in particular like their pastor to be a great pulpiteer to boot. With the advent of Christian (well, part of the time) television, people have an opportunity to follow preachers other than their own pastor …
Continue reading "My Favourite Preacher: Jaques-Benigne Bossuet"
To prevent fiascos like this, which took place earlier today at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga: Due to a scheduling error by a staff member in one of our emergency response offices, the test of our system occurred at 12:12 a.m. instead of 12:12 p.m. This was a case of simple human error. We …
Continue reading "Why All Americans Need to Use the 24-Hour Clock"
This from Rusty Signor, current President of the Pile Driving Contractors Association and President of TX Pile, LLC, in the current issue of Pile Driver: In my last message, I ended with a different, more positive view on the news in our current world situation. This time, I am going to do another first: a …
It's been a long time since many computers ran DOS or even Windows 3.1. Given the changes in hardware, it would be difficult to get most any recent PC to run one or both. Yet every time we have a major software upgrade, we lose some of the capabilities we had in the past. It's …
Continue reading "Partying Like It’s 1987: Running WEAP87 and SPILE (and other programs) on DOSBox"
Anyone who blogs has persistent commenters. Last year my "top" commenter was one David Lloyd-Jones, a Canadian who took exception to a great deal of what I wrote (although not everything he read). Lloyd-Jones found me via my series of my business dealings in China in the early 1980's. He himself has had an interesting …
An academic paper with a rather unusual history is that of the Israeli mathematician Ami Harten's “High Resolution Schemes for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws.” First published in the Journal of Computation Physics in 1983, it was republished in 1997 in the same journal, and is often cited with the later date. At the time of republishing …
Continue reading "Proof of Harten's Lemma re the Convergence of TVNI Finite-Difference Schemes"
And it's about to kill him: America's best-known public-opinion guru hasn't suddenly gone vegan. Luntz—the tubby, rumpled guy who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America—has always been a …
In this case, the legalisation of marijuana, according to Rod Dreher: Opponents of marijuana among the elites are those who have maintained enough contact with Middle America — David “Bobos in Paradise” Brooks has this all over his résumé! — to realize that the experiences of élite urban Americans can’t be extended to all America …
Continue reading "What Works at the Top Doesn't Always Work at the Bottom"
Positive Infinity 