Travels of an Intellectual Vagabond

Imaginary Time at the Sandwich Shop (A Lesson in Cosmology)

I’ve been re-reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, the revised and updated edition from 1998. Oh, I know that a lot of advances have been made in theoretical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and high energy particle physics over the past ten years, but I still think that much of what Hawking wrote applies. [...]

Fly Me to a Flying Suborbital Space Platform…

Today, Virgin Galactic unveiled their new spacecraft: the WhiteKnightTwo, christened “Eve” in honor of company founder Sir Richard Branson’s mother. Eve is the ferry craft that will deliver SpaceShipTwo and its passengers and payloads into space. Or at least to very high altitudes.
Naturally, I think this is damn cool. I doubt that I’ll ever get [...]

Plants with Eyes

Inspired by our recent trip to Safari West (where we got to play “Keeper for a Day”, which is why I got to hand feed a giraffe) and by watching The Mist, I’ve been amusing myself lately speculating about future directions of life on the surface of the Earth. Mostly I’ve been thinking about how [...]

Bees and other stingers

I’ve been following, off and on, the issue with the vanishing bees.  Colony Collapse Disorder is a pretty scary thing; while we don’t rely on bees exclusively for our crop pollination needs, they’re still crucial, and if the bees all go away, then things will be mighty tough.  I don’t believe we’ll face major famine [...]

Let’s Break Your Brain

Via David Brin’s blog (have you not read anything by David Brin? No? What the hell’s wrong with you?) I found this article regarding another idea about the ultimate fate of our universe; rather than the ultimate heat death as has been occasionally predicted, or the Big Crunch as has alternately predicted, this new model [...]

Urban Legends: Subversion vs. Radical Conservatism

I attended a panel once about urban legends, where the famous story of Dihydrogen Monoxide was brought up. You probably know the story: a kid gets a bunch of people to sign a petition calling for a ban on “dihydrogen monoxide”, listing all kinds of horrific side effects and dangers of the chemical. Later on [...]

Ruminations on a Zeppo

The cold I picked up in Ireland appears to have mutated into some sort of annoying permanent viral respiratory infection which has knocked me on my ass for the past couple of weeks. I’m extremely fortunate in that I can work from home while sick, which means I can stay close to my nebulizer [...]

The Not-a-schmuck report, #1

On the other hand, not everyone in the world is a schmuck.
Dean Kamen is not a schmuck. If the man who gave us the insulin pump and the Segway (commercially a flop but technologically brilliant) wants to turn his brilliant mind to the problem of delivering power and clean water to the underdeveloped populations [...]

Snips and Dribbles

In which I expound on cynicism, politics, science, and other random topics. Because I’m bored and unfocused.

Supraluminal

I just think that the word “supraluminal” — which means “faster than light” — is cool. Isn’t it? It’s actually a really pretty word. Something you’d name your daughter, right?
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, more or less. Nothing in our universe can travel faster than that, not if they want to [...]

Premature thoughts for 2006

New Scientist magazine on 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense.  This is a fascinating article compiling a list of thirteen apparent anomalies in our understanding of physics, chemistry, and cosmology.  The author does a good job, I think, of reporting the anomalies without much editorializing, and certainly with no fanciful forays into non-scientific speculation.  [...]

Guns, Germs, and Steel

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, historian Jared Diamond attempts to answer the question of why some societies succeed over others. More specifically, he sets out to discover why the European civilization apparently managed to spread out over most of the globe, conquering along its way, while the societies and civilizations on other continents — the [...]

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)
Flying Spaghetti Monsters aside, this article from Live Science presents a list of the top ten creation myths of all time, from the Norse pantheon to the Judeo/Christian/Moslem ex nihilo myth.
Y’know, as a Christian, I do believe in “intelligent design” (insofar as a human defined quality like “intelligence” [...]

Urban Legends: A Quick Thought

While at Dragon*Con a couple of weeks ago, I attended a panel on urban legends. It was pretty interesting, though in some cases I think I knew a bit more than the panelists about specific urban legends and their provenance.

One of the urban legends discussed was the “dihydrogen monoxide” story. Yes, it is based [...]

Just a little bit…

I’ve taken to hanging out in the talk.origins newsgroup (you can find the website here). It’s a lively place, full of debate between Creationism and evolution. Personally, I have no trouble reconciling my religious beliefs with evolution, but there are a lot of people out there who do. And furthermore, some of the most ardent [...]