Currently reading: Entanglement

“I’m reviewing… the situation.”

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I borrowed a science book from the Ontario Centre for Inquiry to find out more than the trickle of obsolete popular science on elementary particles and quanta that I remember from my youth. Entanglement by Amir Aczel promises to explain one of the great mysteries of physics in layman’s terms. Not to answer it, but to explain the phenomena.

Amir D. Aczel is the author of many popular books on mathematics and physics, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Ancient fertility rite or early football? Bottle-kicking

Bottle-Kicking, originally uploaded by Documentally.

I found this story on flickr in the form of a photodocumentary of an old village custom.

The full story is at “Bottle-kicking in Hallaton.”

U-Haul graphics

Nevada has an Area 51 stealth plane, Newfoundland has a giant squid, and Illinois has a Cambrian Explosion monster:

Text:

“llinois once lay near the equator on the supercontinent of Pangea and was home to unique creatures. How did the strip mining of Illinois’ coal deposits reveal the secret of the Tully Monster?”

The Tully Monster, discovered in 1958 in the Mazon Creek Lagerstaaten and named Tullimonstrum gregarium in 1966, is the state fossil of Illinois. Many have been found, but so far the Tully Monster is unique to Illinois. It dates back about 300 million years. We do not know what phylum it fits into. Its shape recalls the Anomalocaris, but that disappeared 100 million years earlier. Of course, with fossilization of soft-bodied organisms being so rare, perhaps it is a descendant of Anomalocaris!

More on historical research

A previous post discussed how unreliable is Kersey Graves’ book, “The Worlds’ Sixteen Crucified Saviors, using as reference a review by Richard Carrier, assembled from his comments on the book in 2003.

In the course of this review, Carrier points out that almost any history book written before 1950 is of dubious value, simply because methods of scholarship and new research have made so much historical study obsolete

Graves’ scholarship is obsolete, having been vastly improved upon by new methods, materials, discoveries, and textual criticism in the century since he worked. In fact, almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today.

Richard Carrier is the author of Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism.

Summer Invitation

Look what you can do with a shallow depth of field for your camera. It looks almost like an Impressionist painting.

Summer Invitation, originally uploaded by Joel Olives.

Flat, composite flowers blow in the breeze. Beyond a few inches, they’re out of focus.