Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
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"
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 …
Continue reading "Passing Up Making Lemonade on Civil Marriage"
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 …
Continue reading "The Party's Over, Once Again: Another Election, Another Reflection"
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 …
Continue reading "Do We Really Want to Go the Way of Argentina?"
When they're a)Mormon and b)in American politics: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a response to Mitt Romney’s claim that he will “reach across the aisle” to work with Democrats in Congress, if he becomes president: Don’t bet on it. “Mitt Romney’s fantasy that Senate Democrats will work with him to pass his 'severely conservative' …
Continue reading "Harry Reid and Mitt Romney: When the Aspiring Gods Fall Out"
And Vladimir, too: Recently journalists from The Guardian newspaper reported an important change during stays in Pyongyang: two large portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin - long a prominent feature of Pyongyang's central Kim Il-sung square - were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the images have been replaced by a more dominating portrait of …
Continue reading "North Korea Calls It Quits on Karl and Fred"
Positive Infinity 