Letter to the North American Church

There is an event called “Eighth Letter” where writers are encouraged to write a letter to the church in North America. eighthletter.com/ A site listing many other contributions can be found here: rachelheldevans.com/8th-letter-synch I think it is a cool idea and I think anyone who is following my blog knows what I would say. However, […]

everything is different

everything in the world is differenteverythingyour own fingerprints on your own handsare differentevery blade of grassevery treeevery thoughtevery secondevery birth and deathevery dog is differentI learned this from my 8 year old sonwho is quite different from his brothers.

Public discourse in a nation full of boneheads

Ossification occurs when soft tissue turns into bone. Sometimes this is good, as when an infant’s soft cartilage transforms into healthy normal bone as the child grows. Sometimes this is bad, as when spots in breast tissue calcify and can indicate cancer. Malicious ossification is a perfect metaphor for the current state of our national […]

The Metric System

My 10 year old asked me my opinion about whether we should keep the English System, or go to the metric system, and I realized I didn’t really have an opinion about this. Upon reflection, I decided that I think the English system is the way to go, for these reasons. Let’s suppose that when […]

Light has no speed

This is truly a random insight. I’m sure a real physicist will tear this down in a few seconds, but it makes a lot of sense to me.=========================If you mess with the math a bit on the equation e=mc2, then space and time at the speed of light shrink to nothing, and the person’s mass […]

Richard Dawkins

I realized after my last post that I have been thinking about Richard Dawkins a lot. If you haven’t heard of him, you can read some quotes by him here. As a Christian and a convinced member of the design science camp, you would expect that I would be feeling something negative toward these views. […]

Music and the Long Now

I read a book a while back that my mind often goes back to, called The Clock of the Long Now. They are trying to build a 10,000 year clock, and the basic idea is to force us to think in terms of the impact of our work and our mistakes in a longer term […]

Science and Religion

So, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between science and religion. They seem to be very much at odds; the science-minded among us seem to think that the faith-minded among us are very naive and backward and stupid, while the religious, apart from being very frightened of the science-minded, seem to be content to ignore […]

Human progress is more than technological progress

Futurists, people who try to imagine what the future will be like, often think in terms of technology. Judging the progress of humanity by technology alone is similar to judging the progress of history by wars alone. We have come a tremendous way in providing agriculture and domesticated animals so that we no longer have […]