(5/5/05) Creationism in Biology
Political pushes to either include creationism or downplay the importance of evolutionary theory seem to go through boom/bust cycles about every decade or so. Recently, "Intelligent Design" advocates have been working to get disclaimers inserted into biology textbooks that downplay evolution as merely a "theory" (which, of course, is far better than an unsupported hypothesis, but I digress...). So, rather than throw up yet another long-winded debate, let's just assume they succeed and try to visualize how this might translate into the classroom. To this end, I've begun rewriting biology exam questions to accomodate this desire to include "intelligent design" as a plausible alternative explanation for biological observations.
(6/1/05) Logical errors in creating arguments
Speaking of meshing religion and science, Carl Sagan said it all best in his essay on "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection". This is one of my favorites.
(8/22/05) The Nigerian Scam Letter
It amazes me that this email scam actually works - apparently pretty well - especially when I get so many every week. Isn't it a big red flag when so many emails come in with essentially the same proposal? Believe it or not, this type of scam actually dates back to the 1600's. In the old days, if only 0.001% of people you approached fell for your scam, you might as well give it up or starve to death as a con artist. With modern technology, though, this minute fraction can equate to several hundred people given a spam list of 22 million. Scary. Wouldn't it be amusing if someone preemptively sent out an honest scam letter to future victims? Maybe the best way to fight these guys is for more people to take up scam baiting as a hobby. It looks like fun, actually. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do such things, but back in the day I used to mess with scammers, spammers and telemarketers. For example, amazingly, an early (true) story of how I messed with Radio Shack and their gathering of personal information is still floating around after 15 years.
(3/1/06) Thought experiment on the nature of existence & the soul
OK, it's not exactly empirical, but it's a question we're all interested in - I think the only way to get at something that can't really be measured (our self-awareness & will) is to use what we do know about the world and begin examining the logical implications of perturbing or altering the system, much like geneticists love to do (e.g. want to know what a gene does? Muck with it. First, knock it out. Then overexpress it. Then express it in the wrong time or place, etc.). So here are some of my non-exhaustive thoughts on the matter.