ideonexus

Category: Enlightenment Warrior

  • Deep Science Cuts in 2011 Budget, but Oil Subsidies Remain

    PEW Center on Cuts Spending cuts outlined in the Continuing Resolution (CR) bill currently top out at $74 billion, but, with the Tea Party holding Republicans to principle, it will reach $100 billion (updated cuts here). Predictably, this bill has lots of bad news for Science and Technology in America; unfortunately, it maintains the status…

  • Net Neutrality is Free Market

    While I do feel the late Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was treated a little unfairly by the webbernetting-meme-machine over his Internet as a “series of tubes” analogy, I also know that the anti-net neutrality advocate was extremely ignorant of how the Internet functions, as are almost the entirety of American politicians with their non-technical backgrounds.…

  • Science and Geekdom at the Rally to Restore Sanity 20101030

    Vicky and I sat in traffic, stood in lines, rode the metro, hopped off the metro for a desperation pee-break (for me), stood in more lines, rode more metro, shuffled forward for hours in massive crowds, and mostly missed all but bits and pieces of Jon Stewarts closing speech for the Rally to Restore Sanity,…

  • Enlightenment Tagging

    Awhile back, I was visiting Monument Park in Richmond Virginia, which requires crossing a very long suspension bridge running underneath the highway across a river. While crossing this bridge, I happened to look up and spot some graffiti on the underside of the freeway. It was an incredibly impressive place for someone to tag with…

  • Glen Beck’s Confusion Over What Constitutes “Race” on the American Census

    Types of Human Race On his radio show, Glen Beck recently objected to the term “African American being included with the terms “black” and “negro” on a census form: African-American is a bogus, PC, made-up term. I mean, that’s not a race. Your ancestry is from Africa and now you live in America. Ok so…

  • Plugging a Century of Climate Data into Eureqa

    Friday I posted some links to the Cornell’s free data analysis software Eureqa. The video tutorials take a collection of data points from a swinging pendulum over time and then have the Eureqa software determine the function that best explains its wave using an evolutionary algorithm. I played with the software a bit this weekend,…

  • Enlightenment Truths and Metaphysical Inaccuracies in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol

    Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol I strongly disagree with avid Plotz’s commentary, Dan Brown’s Washington, which argues that the real story of Washington is in the political players, not the spiritual and philosophical history which is the focus of The Lost Symbol. Dan Brown’s power as a writer is in having his characters take an…

  • Living Waters Ministries’ 150th Anniversary Edition of Origin of the Species

    Living Waters’Origin of the Species As was covered in Science Etcetera, the Living Waters Ministries has started a campaign to distribute copies of Darwin’s Origin of the Species on College Campuses, to which Ray Comfort, a critic of evolutionary theory, has added a 50 page introduction attempting to refute evolution. The link to a free…

  • Denis Diderot’s Prescience

    “There are things I can’t force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.” – Denis Diderot Denis Diderot By Louis-Michel van Loo Humanities scholars tend to dismiss the Enlightenment, the period of time in Western thought that produced the American and French Constitutions and the…

  • Doctors Support Health Care Reform

    Symbol for the Medical Sciences Health Care is a science issue. Beyond the higher-purposes of discovery and enlightenment, science provides daily improvements to our quality of life through improved agriculture, technological conveniences, and a better understanding of our place in the Cosmos. A large part of this endeavor is the enhancing and extending our quality…

  • Why It’s Called the “Dark Ages”

    Triumph of Christianity Tommaso Laureti Academics now refer to it as the “Middle Ages,” because the term “Dark Ages” is biased. It’s not considered politically correct to refer to this millennium-long period of Western Civilization as “Dark” because it suggests the culture of this period was culturally backward and characterized by ignorance. According to extreme…

  • Cap and Trade to Support the Commons

    Awhile back I wrote a column for the Science Creative Quarterly titled The Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs. It was easily the most buzzed-up thing I’ve every written, earning lots of praise from scientists who understood the reality, and lots of scorn from economists, who are easily offended by reality and prefer to…