Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Yesterday I received the following in my inbox from Twitter: As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency. …
Continue reading "My Response to Twitter’s Paranoia About the Russians"
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"
Buried in all the other excitement this week was the announcement that Chelsea Manning, the transgendered Wikileaker, is running for the Senate in Maryland as a Democrat. This announcement has gotten a great deal of adverse press from the right, but I think we need to stop and look at this in more detail. First, …
There are many ways of expressing the idea that you should be content where you're at, but my favourite is this one, from Kevin Ayers' 1970 album Shooting at the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOMS4Zs6PtM The lyrics are as follows: An oyster was a'travelling Along the ocean road He'd been some time preparing And now he'd left the …
It's almost like the Illinois Family Association overlooked the most important detail in their lament over the course of at least one Evangelical Covenant Church: There’s something rotten in the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC). It’s rotting from the inside due to the presence of wolves in sheep’s clothing like Peter Hawkinson, pastor of Winnetka Covenant …
Continue reading "Drift, Like Real Estate, Is All About Location"
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 …
The left is getting nostalgic: The American empire is crumbling. What President Trump is destroying is a product of the postwar years. In the years after the Second World War, America constructed what amounted to a globe-spanning empire, with the active assistance of Western Europe. The immediate justification was to build a military coalition capable …
It's another year and another opportunity to start it with a "monumental post." Unfortunately, as the Anglican Curmudgeon points out, there aren't many good things to report these days. Our political system has gone dangerously stupid, completely in thrall to those who judge the merits of any proposal on who proposed it. The Anglican Communion …
Even the Mexicans know the truth, if they won't admit it: We bring tamales by the bagful to holidays gatherings, trading them like baseball cards with friends and cousins—I’ll give you some of my TÃa Meme’s pineapple tamales if you hook me up with the potato ones from your Guatemalan sister-in-law. And, once we’ve put …
Continue reading "The Wrong Side of the Border for Good Tamales"
Positive Infinity 