More follow up to the earlier post on intelligent design: The New York Times published this article today discussing the substantive arguments made by the proponents of intelligent design. Also, the fundamental idea isn’t new. Various forms of the so-called “anthropic principle” have been around for many years. The principle tries to answer the question of why so many fundamental physical constants in our universe are precisely what they have […]
Give somebody a post, and all of a sudden they want everything their own way. My friend the Grumpy Moderate is feeling too big for his breeches and has decided he needs his own damned Blog. Well OK then. His political/current events comments will migrate to a new blog, The Grumpy Moderate. My less serious, more eclectic posts will remain here on SSSBlog. He was already getting on my nerves, […]
Inspired, no doubt, but the Grumpy Moderate’s views on “intelligent design,” the New York Times published today this article about the funding origins of the movement. Kudos to the professor at my old school, the University of Iowa, quoted in the article, who while apparently believing in “intelligent design,” makes the same point as the Grumpy Moderate in his post yesterday: “They’re interested in the same things I’m interested in […]
I introduce my readers today to a new character: The Grumpy Moderate. The Grumpy Moderate is a guy (apologies to my female readers, but he’s a guy) who views the news through a pane of skepticism. He’s pretty bright, but thinks that intelligence is overrated. The Grumpy Moderate loves science, though. He likes to parse through the b.s., dislikes dogma and extremism, loathes pretense, likes pragmatism, and is highly suspicious […]
From IOL. (Local Sonoma County angle: Bullfrogs are one of the preditors of the California tiger salamander, an endangered species whose habitat is the Santa Rosa Plain. Perhaps someday we can form a local bullfrog militia.) Le Haillan, France – Picture this: French hunters stealing out at night in pairs, one with a torch to light up the eyes of their prey, the other armed with a .22 calibre rifle […]
My French friend Laurence loaned me some contemporary French music from her library, and I’ve been listening to it in the car this past week. I finally decided to go on line to see if I could find lyrics, only some of which (very little, in truth) I could make out. I found a few lyric sites, and to get an overview of the gist of them, I ran them […]
I’m so proud … the SSSBlog is now in the Yahoo and Alta Vista search databases. So if you were to do a search for anything, SSSBlog would also be searched. Thus a search for “Molsberry’s” (the local market in Larkfield) and “cheese” would turn up an entry comparing cheese prices and selection in Paris and Santa Rosa. But my favorite search engine, Google, is lagging behind. It has not […]
One of the best features of any blog, including the SSSBlog, is the comment function. Anyone can leave a comment on any post by clicking on the title. The idea is to engage the bloggor and the reader-bloggees in an on-line conversation. Now I grant that many of my recent posts didn’t perhaps lend themselves to comments (Dear SSSBlog: It would take only 275 cans of Diet Pepsi to kill […]
Cindy Sheehan, as you likely know, is the mother of a child killed in the Iraq war, who has set up a campsite outside of George Bush’s Texas ranch in order to get a meeting with him. This is a serious post mostly, but I have to begin by saying that whenever I read anything about this subject, I never see “Cindy Sheehan,” I always see “Cindy Crawford.” No doubt […]
During lunch today my co-workers were making critical comments about one of my few remaining vices, Diet Pepsi. Other than the cost, I don’t see that Diet Pepsi can do much harm (even though some scary web sites, including the very subtilely named aspartamekills.com, talk about brain tumors, vision problems, birth defects, hairy palms [no, I just made that up], and the fact that “Michael J. Fox, who was spokesperson […]