I use hardback, spiral-bound notebooks to jot down ideas and so on but mostly as a to-do and a to-post list. I was rifling through an old one when I found the following entry: “God 215-917-XXXX” (don’t want to just give out God’s phone number). I should probably call him/her sometime.
Site Note: I added about 3-4 postings from Thursday to Saturday that I’ve back-dated. So if you’ve missed some, they’re probably there.
Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com had a nice quote in an October podcast on the God of the Gaps argument used by Anne Coulter.
“Finding evolutionary biology to be invalid as a science because some examples of one foundation of its evidence are buried under millions of years of rock and can’t reasonably be expected to ever be found, despite the fact that other foundations of its evidence such as genetics, resistant bacteria, and observation are perfectly intact, is a logical fallacy, and someone as smart as Ann Coulter should know that. The crime lab doesn’t throw out all the DNA evidence, blood stains, and the murder weapon just because many of the fingerprints were wiped clean.” –Skeptoid show notes
It’s a swell podcast and is usually brief but dense in content. I’ve gone through about 50 episodes in the last 3 days. There’s an infinitude of linking options on his page so I won’t bother.
I’ve been familiar with the notion of countable and uncountable infinity for a long time and the odd tricks you can do prove trivial stuff like that the number of even numbers is equal to the number of counting numbers (1, 2, 3 …). An article in Sciencenews.org‘s Math Trek column discusses an alternate proof of new sizes of infinity. The article mentions Cantor‘s diagonal proof using decimals, I think it’s easier to think about with a binary system.
Over the summer Andy Clarke, OSR’s MI-5 liaison mentioned that the term ‘brainstorm ‘ wasn’t used in the UK as proper term was ‘thought shower’ as to not offend epileptics. Anyway, in 2005 a survey of charities and mental health workers found that the vast majority (93%) found the term inoffensive, once again showing the legendary senses of humor of epileptics. Thinking that the offensiveness of brainstorm had been manufactured I was delighted to find the following foot note in Oliver Sacks new book Musicophilia:
“Victorian physicians used the vivid term ‘brainstorms’ to apply not only to epilepsies but to migraines, hallucinations, tics, nightmares, manias, and excitements of all kinds.” (Sacks, 74)