If you are failing seven times out of ten, most of us would take that as nature’s way of suggesting a different career field. But for a major league baseball player, that’s a .300 batting average – millions of dollars in salary and endorsements, and a shot at the Hall of Fame. Most of us […]
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Making the Kessel Run in Under 12 Parsecs
On the OPERA neutrino experiment, the conservative war on relativity, and the operation of science (with a nod to the biggest science boo-boo in Star Wars). One can understand, if not agree with, the conservative war on the Theory of Evolution. If you believe that a specific book must be taken literally, and that book […]
Traitors and Scoundrels
What motivates this blog post is the quote from King George III above, which appeared on one of my Pinterest boards: Dobson’s Improbable Quote of the Day for June 4. It had a lot of resonance for me: while George III said it aloud, a lot of people — including me — feel that way, at least from time […]
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
“You see, I had this space suit. How it happened was this way.” Science fiction readers will instantly recognize the opening lines from Robert Heinlein’s 1958 Scribner juvenile novel, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. The narrator, small-town teenager Kip Russell, wins a used spacesuit as fourth prize in a soap jingle contest, setting off a chain […]
You’re Not Being Reasonable!
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve gotten myself into way too many online arguments about politics and religion over the years (though I have gotten better), and I’m not happy with either my own behavior or others. All the cognitive biases (see my encyclopedia in Random Jottings 6) are on display, and hardly anyone actually […]
The Three Americas
Abdul Aziz Al Saud, first monarch of Saudi Arabia, wanted his nation’s borders based not on geography, but on the migration of tribes. The British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, lost his temper and started yelling, but Ibn Saud had a good point: a nation is not necessarily the same thing as a state. A […]