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Physics

Cascade Point and other Stories book review

Cascade Point and other Stories by Timothy Zahn 405 pages Published by Bluejay Books (1986) ISBN 0-312-94041-6 Since I am working my way through Timothy Zahn’s back catalogue, when I saw this short story collection containing “Cascade Point”, the novella for which Zahn won the Hugo, I knew I

The Long View: The Years of Rice and Salt

This book review is the source of one of my favorite cocktail party theories: a number of seemingly well-established sciences are built upon an n of 1. In a grand sense, geology and biology fall into this category, since the big theories like plate tectonics and evolution depend on one

The Long View: Is Mathematics Constitutional?

A recent popular [well, as popular as a massive book full of equations can be] exposition of mathematical Platonism is Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. It even has practice problems in it with devoted communities of amateurs trading tips on how to solve them. Mathematical Platonism, or

The Long View 2005-03-18: Extinctions: Periodic & Deserved

As far as I know, nothing serious ever came out of Rohde and Muller's 2005 on cyclical extinctions, but I linked the image above to a copy of the original paper. I think is usually a mistake to look for alternative explanations for the Cretaceous extinction. Extinctions: Periodic

The Long View: The Obvious Proof

I think there are better arguments for classical theism than the Argument from Design, but as eminent a philosopher as Antony Flew was eventually convinced by it. Philosophical atheism is a respectable position, but many of atheism's most vocal defenders are not actually espousing that position, but rather

LinkFest 2016-12-09

Venezuela's currency value depends largely on one guy at an Alabama Home Depot Venezuela is a messed up place, and it always amazes me what ordinary people can do. Mesmerizing Commute Maps Reveal We All Live in Mega-Regions, Not Cities Most US time zones follow state lines, but

The Long View 2004-06-04: Art Imitates Death

John references C. P. Snow's famous essay The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in this post. While much has changed in the last sixty-seven years, much has also stayed the same. Most politicians in the English-speaking world continue to come from law, poli sci, and the social