Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Originally written and posted March 2005. Since that time, Bernie Maddoff has made one of the clubs featured in this piece famous (if impecunious,) so I've rewritten it a bit. The following year I got to play golf at the Ridgeway Country Club, a formerly "Jewish country club" in Memphis, TN, which opened its membership …
Continue reading "Join the Club. Maybe Not! A Strange Tale of Two Worlds in Palm Beach"
In describing a "camp for atheists" (that's not an entirely accurate generalisation, but it's close) Ruth Gledhill notes the following: At Camp Quest, children will be led to believe that science, which forms the main substance of their instruction, is incompatible with religion and religious beliefs, not because a scientific education makes this fact self-evident …
Continue reading "Atheism Isn’t Self-Evident From a Scientific Education"
She is, to use the old military expression, keeping her powder dry: Hillary Clinton says running for office isn't on her "radar," but she still has an eight-person political team and sports two overflowing campaign war chests. Her team transformed the former Democratic White House contender's massive campaign debts into a $3 million mountain of …
Continue reading "Hillary Clinton: Still Running for Office"
People who grow up in what used to be called the "Gold Coast" (Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties) take for granted their natural surroundings. From the standpoint of most of the rest of the country, South Florida is an exotic paradise. Growing up in that "paradise" has been a defining event for me: it's …
Continue reading "Around South Florida at the Turn of the Unix Era"
Sarah Hey lays the law down: Everyone who has been commenting any length of time here is well aware that we don't allow comments exhorting people to leave TEC or stay in TEC, nor do we allow comments castigating either decision... But for ourselves, we are so determined to have a blog with a larger …
This had to happen sooner or later, and it did in Sam Harris' op-ed piece for the New York Times: One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health. After all, understanding human well-being at the level of the brain might very well offer some “answers to …
Continue reading "Making Science Into a Religion, and the Nomination of Francis Collins to the NIH"
It's generally true that "champagne tastes and caviar dreams" involve a yacht somewhere. Today most of them are fibreglass creations, but as soon as he could see his way clear, my father got us into the era of "iron men and wooden ships." Well, at least the wooden ships... Before we got there: the course …
Shortly after my family moved to Palm Beach, my mother visited the Embassy Travel Bureau to make some arrangements to go to Europe. The Bureau was owned by Nigel and Yvelyne "Deedy" Marix (Deedy was later Mayor of Palm Beach.) Nigel, a very proper Englishman, asked my mother, "Have you ever been abroad?" "All my …
It is an enduring mystery why US pundits should see a difference between the philosophy of Democrats (who stand for spending more than you raise) and the Republicans (who stand for raising less than you spend). ROFL, it it weren't true. From this analysis of California's debacle.
My father always maintained that, when buying yachts, you could never go smaller when purchasing a new one; you always had to go larger. That's the way he bought our boats; first it was a 36', then the 51' (the one we hit the reef with.) Our less than stellar navigation notwithstanding, that boat was …
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