Archive for the ‘The Art of Conversation’ Category
Cheesy Dreams
Thanks to Annie at Maud Newton's blog, I got to read this fascinating report from the British Cheese Board* called "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Cheese". With a title like that, you know it's going to be good. The thesis is simply stated at the outset: The age old myth that cheese gives you nightmares […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Centuries Old Truths
A month ago I wrote a posting ("Mystery and Creationism") in which I suggested that Christian fundamentalists who feel that their religion is imcompatible with science should take the advice of the late Pope and ascribe the incomprehensibility to mystery, since mystery is theologically acceptable. In that piece, I quoted someone quoting Pope John Paul […]
In: All, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Miller's Skepticism
But science is more than the sum of its hypotheses, its observations, and its experiments. From the point of view of rationality, science is above all its method–essentially the critical method of searching for errors. It is the staunch devotion of science to this method that makes the difference. […*] It took Popper's genius to […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
What Gödel Didn't Say
What is it about Gödel's theorem that so captures the imagination? Probably that its oversimplified plain-English form–"There are true things which cannot be proved"–is naturally appealing to anyone with a remotely romantic sensibility. Call it "the curse of the slogan": Any scientific result that can be approximated by an aphorism is ripe for misappropriation. The […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Sandwich Thoughts
I used to think I was the only one who noticed and wondered about things like: why did Subway sandwich shops change the way they cut the bread on their subs? Turns out, I'm not the only one. I don't know whether this is comforting or frightening, but it's certainly enlightening. Steve, at The Sneeze […]
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
Don't Eat It!
Sometimes it irritates me when I can't remember who pointed out some blog to me that I end up wanting to point out but then, in a sort of anti-anal-retentive moment, can't point out the pointer out. There are other times when we might be better off, though. It's very, very hard, I think, to […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Let's Play Internet!
I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? In the older game of telephone, one person in a line of, say, 20 […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Not All Things Freeze
Some time ago I started reading1 Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook 2. It is a collection of very short pieces about food and cooking from a chemist's point of view, assembled from his Washington Post columns. Rather early on though, he made a small error of fact. I point this out not to […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Liberal vs. Authoritarian
Phillip Honenberger, in an essay called "John Locke and Religious Fundamentalism" (What is Liberalism? 11 July 2005), wrote about the worldwide tensions between Liberalism and what we tend these days to label as Fundamentalism, and then (correctly, I'd say) he identifies Fundamentalism as just another packaging of Authoritarianism (which also travels under the guises of […]
In: All, The Art of Conversation
Do Bisexuals Truly Exist?
Here's my punch line to this shaggy-dog tale: it's a silly question to ask in the first place. Besides, what difference does the answer make and who cares? Incredibly, bisexuality (the big, invisible sexual orientation) was in the news this week. An article in the New York Times by Benedict Carey* reports on a new […]
In: All, The Art of Conversation, Writing
Eighth-Century "Traditional" Marriage
Today I started reading a mystery novel by Peter Tremayne, Badger's Moon. This book continues his series feturing Sister Fidelma. The stories are set place in mid-eighth-century Ireland. To orient his readers who might be unfamiliar with the customs and laws of the time, Tremayne puts an "Historical Note" at the beginning of the books. […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., The Art of Conversation
Chicken Feathers
Yes, this is actually about chicken feathers. Partly, at least. During my reading this morning, I read a science brief (rather like this one: "Poultry Feathers Made Into Plastic Mulch" by Sharon Durham at Agricultural Research Service news) about some Agricultural Research Service research and engineering going on that has developed some processes that convert […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., The Art of Conversation
Polling: "Margin of Error"
This is not a particularly recent poll, although the assertion is still true. But that's not the point. The New York Times > Washington > New Poll Finds Bush Priorities Are Out of Step With Americans The poll was conducted by telephone with 1,111 adults from Thursday through Monday. It has a margin of sampling […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
gettysburg.ppt
In the fullness of time, even I will finally trip over some otherblog's pointer to a must-see corner of the Web that everyone else has known about for years.* But finally, finally I did: Lincoln's "Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", brought to us since 2000 by Peter Norvig. I won't excerpt any of it, since 1) the […]
In: All, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Traditional Atomic Theory
Reminding us that atoms were "just a theory" until the twentieth century when experiment finally established atomic reality (in some quantum mechanical sense yet to be understood fully): But as late as 1894, when Robert Cecil, the third Marquis of Salisbury, chancellor of Oxford and former Prime Minister of England, catalogued the unfinished business of […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Unrealized Moscow
For most of my adolescence, I planned to make architecture my profession. I drew plans and sketches of buildings, read books on the subject, took four years of drafting classes in high school, the whole thing. Why it was that I then went to college and majored in physics I don't really know; I can't […]
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
Hot-Headed, Zealous Atheists
I was fascinated by this chronological sequence of quotations from a piece by Don Herzog, "blast from the past (one)" (at Left2Right). Although some of the passionate distrust of atheists like myself has apparently dissipated in the last 200 years (despite the current attempts at a resurgence), hence some of the excitement, I do feel […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
Really Old Jokes
Sometime recently I posted something and called it an "old joke". Well, that was nothing. Now I've gotten a glimpse of really old jokes, thanks to John J Emerson's "700-year-old Syriac Jokes" (and his participation in the History Blog Carnival). Find out, for instance, why the rooster lifts one leg when it crows, or why […]
In: All, The Art of Conversation
Doesn't It Look Like A…?
I didn't even know these were the results we'd been waiting for (until someone — who it was escapes me now — pointed it out), but now that they're here we can all be happy. It reminds me a bit of my college art teacher to whom everything with curvey lines was "vaginal", everything with […]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., The Art of Conversation
Queer Smells
My niece sent me a link to interesting news about a new study (it's always a new study, isn't it?): WASHINGTON — Scientists trying to sniff out biological differences between gay and straight men have found new evidence – in scent. It turns out that sniffing a chemical from testosterone, the male sex hormone, causes […]
In: All, Splenetics, The Art of Conversation