Science: belief in the ignorance of experts
July 5, 1978. Mike Thornhill, Andrea Dakoski and I packed our personal gear and the day’s group gear into Boy Scout Yucca packs, including two aluminum-rung etriers given me by famed climber Woody Stover after his return from Annapurna, a drill kit, a rack of pitons, and one hundred feet of purple, actually a tiny […]
Galileo, Order, and the Persistence of Reasoning through Aesthetics Sunflowers follow the sun across the sky, and the moon controls the tides. Move a magnet over iron filings and the iron responds. You’ve already accepted action at a distance and celestial influence. Why dismiss planetary influence on human disposition outright? In 1610 Galileo published Sidereus […]
The viral footage shared under headlines like “Bungee Jumping Horror: Terrifying Safety Lapse Caught On Camera In Brazil” by WION is real, not AI-generated. The incident was verified by law enforcement. The tragedy involved a 21-year-old woman named Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas. It occurred at the Ponte Esquelética in São Paulo, Brazil. Legal and […]
Engineering meets art history The Discobolus of Myron is one of the most famous sculptures in the world, despite the fact that it no longer exists. What you see here are two Roman marble copies of an original Greek bronze, made perhaps four hundred years earlier. As I stand in Palazzo Massimo, looking at the […]
The “World War Eleven” incident is now famous on Fox News, invisible on the New York Times. Evidence of astonishing stupidity? Or a harmless verbal stumble inflated by fascists. Beyond the matter of Ilhan Omar’s aptitude, it raises a structural issue. What competencies should a representative have just to function as a representative? In a […]
“Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.” – Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott Walter Miller wrote the cyclical-apocalypse science fiction, A Canticle for Liebowitz, in 1959. Whoa. The novel’s structured in three major chunks spanning thousands of years. Despite the passage of time, each section […]
Everything changed right around the time of Johannes Kepler. Comets, against millennia of prior belief, were then discovered to be farther away than the moon. Aristotelian spheres had been shattered. Kepler’s Astronomia Nova announced his first two laws of planetary motion. 1: Planets moved in elliptical orbits. 2: Lines from the sun to each planet […]
The aim of protest is to misrepresent the proportion of people holding a given opinion by being more conspicuous than those not holding that view. You might argue, in response, that protest is less about measuring opinion than “signaling intensity.” Ten thousand mildly supportive people and five hundred highly motivated people are not equivalent in […]
Paul’s silences on the historical Jesus are striking. So is the scholarly tendency to not notice, or to wave them away without comment. For years I participated in The Jesus Mysteries forum. Yahoo shut the platform down in 2020. No comprehensive archive of a decade of amazing scholarship exists. Among its key discussion topics was […]
This is Nero, the infamous emperor who fiddled while Rome burned – or so the story goes – the story being a modern amplification of disreputable ancient sources. This striking marble bust (Museo Capitolino inventory MC 0427) in the Capitoline Museums’ Hall of Emperors is one of the most photographed portraits of him. It’s certainly […]