Digital Sextant

An essay I wrote as part of this year’s “Critical Encounters” series here at Columbia, published today in the Columbia Chronicle. The theme this year is Fact and Faith. How we believe what we believe by Brendan Riley, Assistant Professor of English When fact and faith come into conflict, how do we move forward? Alas, [… Read More]

ThunderfOOt: You’re in denialism.  You can know nothing, you don’t even know that you’re here having this conversation. Ray Comfort: Well, you can know the Truth.  It’s all in the scripture. ThunderfOOt: Well, yeah, but you don’t even know whether you exist, let alone whether the scripture… Ray Comfort: Oh, I know I exist. Takes [… Read More]

By Joe Haldeman I read The Forever War a while ago, and enjoyed it immensely. One way to articulate that book’s project, though, is as follows: A man joins the army and, because of successively longer relativistic jumps, experiences the slow evolution of the human race and society over hundreds or thousands of years. Interesting [… Read More]

I realized when I was doing my music write up on Friday that I never posted about one of my favorite bands from Jamendo, Intercontinental Music Lab. I’ve only listened to two of their albums (but I’ve now discovered a third that’s being downloaded as I write this. ICL brings together musicians from around the [… Read More]

by Neal Stephenson; narrated byWilliam Dufris One might suggest that Stephenson’s last work, the aptly titled “Baroque Saga” went too far into the eriudite and too far from its narrative. The same complaint might be made of Anathem, with its extended conversations about different philosophical ideas and understanding of the relationship between space, physics, and [… Read More]

by Jerry Coyne As y’all know, I follow the evolution / ID culture war pretty closely, but it occurred to me a while back that I had very little actual understanding of the science behind evolution. After reading Coyne’s book, I realize that I had more than I knew I did, but that I was [… Read More]

Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul by Kenneth Miller. With some of my birthday money, I picked up this book by Ken Miller, a Brown University biologist whose textbook was so “Darwinist” that it prompted the Dover board of education to try and weasel ID into the curriculum as a counterpoint.  [… Read More]

Julie Sinn Cassidy sent me a note about this Space Chimps doc:  Told through archival photos and footage, space historians, testimony from the chimps trainers, and through the people who fought for the space chimps peaceful retirement, One Small Step, The Story of the Space Chimps explores the compelling journey of the brave United States [… Read More]

By Greg Bear More and more, in the last few years, I’ve come to enjoy good hard SF books by folks like Robert Sawyer. I’m going to have to add Greg Bear to my regular reading list. Darwin’s Radio is excellent. The book supposes that the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution is actually correct, and [… Read More]