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Category Archives: science

Shuttle

Well, the United States has indefinitely given up on independently flying to space. It’s time to hurry up and start seriously working on a new NASA vehicle to launch humans into space. For those who say that not using the Shuttle anymore is no big deal because it is so old, look at how old [...]

Quotes about the New Atheists

[The New Atheist's] embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning … that raises the wild non-sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, as quoted by Ian H. Hutchinson in the article Engaging Today’s Militant Atheist Arguments. The same article quotes Terry Eagleton [...]

Insanity and trying again

I’ve seen this quote a number of times recently: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is typically misattributed to Albert Einstein, but is probably from Rita Mae Brown. The quote is often true, but is misleading. Sometimes you do the same thing several times [...]

Natural fission

This is intriguing, and I’d never heard if it before. Apparently, two billion years ago, for around one million years, there was an area in Gabon where uranium 235 concentrations and other factors coincided to create several natural fission reactors. Cool. Err, well, I guess it was actually hot… Curtin University via APOD. See also: [...]

Darwin Day

Since today is Darwin Day, I’d like to take the opportunity to recommend Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders by David N. Livingstone. This short book is a good history of the early scientific debate over natural selection. Unlike the incessant popular portrayal of a war between religion and science, Livingstone shows that the debate was actually over [...]

Physics and you

Now that we’ve had the first dusting of snow for the season, it’s time for a friendly reminder of one reason everyone needs to understand some physics. Static friction is greater than kinetic friction.* In other words, if you aren’t sliding, it is easy to stay not sliding. Once you start sliding, it is hard [...]