Random Thoughts

The world doesn't always make sense. Witness Mike's blog post on some convoluted language in a news story. I understand that people make mistakes - I do all the time. My personal philosophy is…

By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up…

The Evocative Power Of LanguageMost philosophical studies of how language functions have focused on semantics - how language conveys meaning.  In ordinary speech, language is not confined to the…

When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people, you realize how vulnerable they really are. - Physicist I.I. Rabi, quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic…

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it. - Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17

The Bookworm And The Encyclopedias - The Solution Last Monday I posed a simple math puzzle: A set of 10 encyclopedias is sitting on a bookshelf in left-to-right numerical order. Each single volume…

If you happen to be in the San Francisco metropolitan area the week of August 16th, 2009 and can't get enough science, I'll be emcee'ing a symposium on communicating science to the public at the 90th…

No one disturbs his fellow men with a new view unpunished. - Ernest Mach, "A New Sense", quoted in Edmund Bolles, Galileo's Commandment, p. 27

Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant…

Light is the principal means by which we are able to transmit and receive information from objects around us and throughout the universe.  - Raymond Serway, Physics for Scientists and Engineers…