Category: Enlightenment Warrior

I got a fast one pulled on me the other day as I was out for a walk. I saw a car with the following sticker on its rear windshield: Hydrocarbon Powered Ecovehicle I was pretty confused looking at it. The person who had purchased the vehicle was obviously the victim of a very elaborate…

This is outrageous. I can’t believe that, with the house passing the Climate Change Bill on Friday, which will seek to curb CO2 emissions, it has just come out that the EPA crushed a dissenting report on the supposed dangers of “Global Warming.” The report, titled Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for…

The profundity of the film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has left my mind swirling with deep, philosophical, scientific, and political questions. Maybe someone could help me with them: What was the sociological explanation for incredibly-advanced extraterrestrials adopting stereotypical “gansta” lingo as their primary means of social discourse, as we saw with the twin robots…

For better or worse, it is the nature of intellectuals to be independent in thought and action. Since the Enlightenment, when coffee-fueled intellectual discussions kicked off an age of accelerating advances in science and technology, academics and geeks have slowly fragmented from being united under the big tent of rationality into tribes that are less…

Beautiful Science Credit: Bonnie*B I am thrilled by City Council’s decision to fund the expansion of the Port Discover Science Center over the next five years. This is a wise and prescient use of public funds that will benefit the local community by further beautifying downtown, contributing to Elizabeth City’s growing intellectual character, and offering…

On May 7, 1959, Charles Percy Snow delivered The Two Cultures lecture, and academia has been debating it for the half-century following. A review of references to this famous lecture would lead someone who hadn’t read it to think it was purely about the differences between the people educated in the sciences and the humanities,…

I’ve been glued to the Internet all weekend after riots broke out in Iran over the theocracy’s blatant disregard for the will of the people. The election results announced were so preposterously weighted in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s favor that one column I saw mocking it was titled Ahmadinejad Wins Stanley Cup. No modern event more clearly…

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery. – Seymour Papert I graduated from Virginia Tech with a BA in English in 1996. With that degree, I was able to qualify for a car loan, but that’s all the use I’ve…

Twenty years ago, a crowd gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang. Students had been gathering in the square off and on since April 14th. Soon one million people had gathered, but without a common cause, rather they were an emergent phenomenon. Some were free-market reformers,…

Credit: Green England On June 1, 2008, China joined countries like Bangladesh, Ireland, and Rwanda, and the city of San Francisco in instituting a ban on plastic bags. As a result, China saved 1.6 million tons of oil in the year following the ban, the amount of oil it would have taken to manufacture 40…

“When a government builds a road, it subsidizes the car industry.” – Comment seen on a Blog Wind turbines at night Credit: lukewestall A peer, who is also a Rush Limbaugh listener, was explaining to me the folly of things Obama said in his ASU Commencement Speech, where the President emphasized charitable volunteer work, shrugging…