Faith is a fascinating thing. It comes in so unbelievably many shapes, and there is a mind-boggling diversity of rituals, traditions, scriptures, values, ceremonies, beliefs… Consider the following list, for example, and how different many of these belief systems are: Christianity (with various denominations) Baha’i Confucianism Hinduism Judaism Islam Zoroastrianism Buddhism The beliefs of ancient [...]
It seems I may have frontal brain damage. Before I explain why, try the following. In the following picture, can you move a single matchstick to form a valid mathematical equation? No sticks can be discarded, an isolated slanted stick cannot be interpreted as I (one), and a V (five) symbol must always be composed [...]
… don’t visit Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas. You might end up getting caught in that 200 yard spider web.
Man, Europe sure looked different in 1000 AD…
… Earth Day. Despite the best intentions, this country still seems to be far, far away from doing anywhere near enough to protect the environment. Do you know what your ecological footprint looks like?
It’s amazing what kind of creatures evolution produces…
I love stuff like this dynamic display of global income distribution and life expectancy. Check out China’s development from the mid 70′s until now – pretty impressive… And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. The US, in the meantime, seems to stand out thanks to other metrics…
It’s a good day for math geeks- today is Pi Day. You know – 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993…. and so forth. Go figure.
Here’s a pretty neat picture of last Saturday’s rare night launch of the Discovery space shuttle.
The NY Times has an interesting article on a conference at La Jolla’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies where the debate turned into a “free-for-all on science and religion”.
Man those are some big ol’ crabs… Yum.
Innaresting…
The Atlantic Monthly Journal has an excellent article that explores the “religion-as-accident theory”. It’s a lengthy read, but definitely worthwhile. Some parts reminded me of a book I read a few months back, Fooled by Randomness (which I still highly recommend). Take this tidbit from the article: We have what the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has [...]
You don’t have to be a scientist to believe that this will not end well…
Here’s a very interesting article in the NY Times by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, authors of the fascinating Freakonomics which I read a while back. As they do in the book, the authors take a topic that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with the word “economics” and disect the, well, economics of it. [...]