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.

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Graves’ scholarship is obsolete, having been vastly improved upon by new methods, materials, discoveries, and textual criticism in the century since he worked. In fact, almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today.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

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

This looks like an interesting book: The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Stephan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr..

From the publisher:

However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience’s development into a global regime.

From Wesleyan University Press, 2008

Happy birthday, dear William!

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday!

Is that you, William?

Religious intolerance in the Bible

The Brick Testament has published several new Bible stories from the Chronicles of the kings. The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith says:

Does extreme religious intolerance stir your soul? Does rampant destruction of cultural artifacts move you deep within? Does the slaughter of innocent civilians en masse inspire your heart and mind? If so, the seven newly illustrated Bible stories that bring the King Solomon section of The Brick Testament to a close are certain to leave you feeling just a little closer to God:

While the southern kingdom of Judah struggles to find just the right mix of death and destruction to appease Yahweh into granting them peace, the northern kingdom of Israel suffers much bloodshed due to a system of political succession in which anyone who murders the king in cold blood is immediately granted the kingship. Though for thousands of years this was indeed how many nations appointed their leaders, fortunately here in the United States we learned our lesson and swiftly amended the Constitution after the brief but turbulent Oswald and Ruby administrations of the 1960s.

• “Asa the Intolerant“

• “One Million Africans Killed“

• “Executing Unbelievers Brings Peace“

• “Jeroboam’s Family Slaughtered“

• “Baasha’s Family Slaughtered“

• “King for a Week“

• “Asa’s Foot Disease“