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 many of the aircraft still flying are. A thirty year operational life isn’t really that long. It is common to upgrade avionics and keep using an airplane for decades. This is what NASA did with the Shuttle. This doesn’t mean we should keep using the Shuttle, just that saying it is thirty years old and so must be eliminated is a bad argument. Now that it is no longer flying, we need a major NASA effort (bigger and better funded than the ones I know of) to create a replacement. I’m sure we can come up with a vehicle that is safer and less expensive to operate. Unfortunately, Congress seems to be saying, “Probes, telescopes, or manned flight. Pick one. Maybe.”

The photo is from NASA’s STS-135 site.

[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 as writing:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

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 and get different results. For example, in the lab I did my thesis research in, there are two experiments that I have run multiple times, producing different results from different runs. According to the available measurements the experiments were identical. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t detect differences with better resources (eg doi:10.1038/nnano.2006.95), but as far as I can tell, they were the same.

Another common case is using computers running Windows. Trying the same thing several times when it didn’t work the first may be insanity, but it is necessary. One problem last week is a good example: I helped get a Sony VAIO laptop working with a Mustek A3 scanner. The software would seem to install properly, but the scanner would give an error message. The scanner worked first try on a ThinkPad running Windows 7, but wouldn’t run on the VAIO with XP, even after updating and cleaning the system. Before returning the computer and scanner, I decided to do one more thing: I plugged the scanner into a different USB port and ran Mustek installer then the Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard. It worked. I plugged it into the third USB port and repeated the process. It worked. I tried the first port again. The scanner still worked. Repeating the installation steps had fixed the problem. It can be convincingly argued that using an OS where performing the same steps multiple times leads to different results is insanity, but that isn’t the point of the quote.

Not that there aren’t many times when Brown’s quote is accurate. If you want examples of trying the same thing over and over expecting different results, when everyone knows what will happen, just read the newspaper.

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…

The fact is, however, that the historical conflict between science and Christianity is historical only in the sense that it is the creation of historians.

This is an important point that needs to be understood by more people. Far from being the historical Christian view, Young Earth Creationism did not gain wide popularity until after the 1961 publication of Whitcomb and Morris’ book The Genesis Flood. The spread of the ideas in Whitcomb and Morris’ book contributed to the wide acceptance of a distorted view of the early debates over natural selection. This view has become so prevalent that even many christians do not realize that the Young Earth Creationism and a war between religion and science is not the historical Christian perspective, but a recent development. Livingstone’s book is a welcome contribution to correcting this myth.

Now, to find a good book on Galileo…

BibTeX citation:

@book{Livingstone:1987,
	Author = {David N. Livingstone},
	Publisher = {William B. Eerdmans and Scottish Academic Press},
	Title = {Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between
	             Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought},
	Year = {1987}
}

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 to stop.

So stop stomping on the pedals when you drive. You’ll just make your wheels spin or lock and slide. When you spin your wheels, you are just turning the snow into an ice slick, making it harder for you and everyone after you to start or stop. So please go easy on the pedal mashing.

Suggested reading:

• Friction on Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics
• Car Talk’s Official Click and Clack Winter Driving Rules

^*Except for some cases you probably won’t encounter.