bicycles
The first mathematical analysis of bicycles suggested that this is also what keeps a moving bike on its wheels. But although the equations were written down in 1910, physicists always had nagging doubts about whether this was the whole story. The most definitive analysis came exactly a century later. It involved an experimental bicycle that had all its gyroscopic effects cancelled out by a system of counter-rotating wheels. The effort of building such a strange contraption was worth it: the resulting paper was published the prestigious journal Science. The publication plunged bicycle dynamics back into chaos. It turns out that taking into account the angles of the headset and the forks, the distribution of weight and the handlebar turn, the gyroscopic effects are not enough to keep a bike upright after all. What does? We simply don’t know. Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe; the bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics.
francis collins
How have people in fundamentalist churches responded to you, when you have spoken there?I've had people get up and walk out! And I've had people come to the microphone clearly very upset, and imply that I am under the influence of the devil. I also get some fairly unpleasant emails from the atheistic scientific community, but the nastiest ones come from believers who are infuriated that someone who claims to be a believer could say these things about the truth of the evolutionary process. To them, I am clearly a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I'm allied with the devil. I've even been excommunicated a couple of times, though I'm not Catholic!
reza aslan's conversions
His first:
Actually, it was part of this group called Young Life, pretty famous nation-wide group. They go into High Schools and Junior High Schools and they evangelize. I went to this summer camp where you hear the Gospel message, and yeah when I was 15 years old, a sophomore, and so it was before my sophomore year of HS. Yeah, I found Jesus, he was awesome.
LW: How was that, what was that experience like when you were an Evangelical?
RA: It’s magical! The thing about Evangelical Christianity and why I think it is so appealing, particularly to young people is that I mean it is just such a brilliant and profoundly moving story. There is a reason why it is called the greatest story ever told, right? That God had this physical son, like His little baby boy you know that came down to earth and because you yourself are such an awful human being, because of all the terrible things you do, God decided to have His son tortured and murdered in order to save you from yourself and that if you don’t accept that story, not only are you spitting in God’s face but oh yeah you are also going to burn in hell for all eternity.
It’s an amazing story, that’s why it is so appealing. Now the important thing to understand is that is what it precisely is, a story. I am not by any means discounting it or criticizing it. All religion is story, all mythology is story but that is a particularly good one, and it’s a story, I think particularly for young people looking for easy answers to complicated questions, that they can flock to, and the last 2000 years are testimony to that.
His second:
I spent the summer before I went off to Harvard just reading some books about Islam, reading the Quran really for the first time as an adult and the more I started reading about it, the history, the theology, the Quranic studies, the more I was just kind of excited about it. I always talk about how I had an emotional conversion to Christianity but a rational conversion to Islam. Reading about the way Islam talks about the divine and the relationship between human beings and God and conceptions of the universe and ideas of the transcendent, these made a hell of a lot more sense to me cosmologically speaking than some old man in the sky impregnated a virgin and His son came out and died for us.
From an interview on Loonwatch ("a blogzine run by a motley group of hate-allergic bloggers to monitor and expose the web’s plethora of anti-Muslim loons, wackos, and conspiracy theorists." ok, whatever.)
the love of god
This morning I re-read bits of a book (David Benner's Surrender to Love) that has been very helpful to my own understanding of the love of God.
Here's a quote:
Looking back, I find it remarkable how easily I accepted ideas about God as substitutes for direct experience of him. It took me a long time to begin to know God through my heart and not simply my head. In my depths I longed to really know the God toward whom my heart was drawn. But all I seemed to be able to find was beliefs. I believed that God was love, and if I thought about it, I could see that this meant he loved me. But I didn't know that love in a deep, persistent personal basis. God's love was an idea, not a personal experience.
In later chapters I will say more about how this began to shift for me. But let me be clear at this point that it is possible to know God's love personally, beyond simply knowing about it. The fact that I am deeply loved by God is increasingly the core of my identity, what I know about myself with most confidence...
At the end of that first chapter:
Does it seem hard to believe that when God thinks of you, love swells in his heart and a smile comes to his face?
If your identity does not rest on knowing yourself deeply loved by a God who is head-over-heels in love with you, spend some time prayerfully meditating on several passages. First, however, let me describe what I mean by meditation.
Christian meditation is like spiritual daydreaming. Rather than analyzing or thinking about the passage, simply let yourself soak in it. There is no need to do anything with the words you read. Instead let them do something to you. Don't be preoccupied with examining what is happening. Just allow the words to turn over in your mind and wash over your heart.
Prayerfully reflect on the following passages one at a time, taking as much time for each as you wish...
Here are the passages Benner lists.
- Psalm 23
- Psalm 91
- Psalm 131
- Isaiah 43:1-4
- Isaiah 49:14-16
- Hosea 11:1-4
- Matthew 10:29-31
- Romans 8:31-39
logic puzzles
So you think you are clever, right? Then here is your chance to pit your brain against some of the world's hardest logic puzzles ever created. After having created number puzzles like Calcudoku and Killer Sudoku for many years, I decided to try and find the most challenging ones out there. Every once in a while I added a new type of puzzle, until I ended up with a list of 10.In the following list you will find both familiar puzzles and games such as Sudoku and Calcudoku as well as lesser known ones such as the Bongard Problem and Fill-a-Pix. Some of these puzzles can be solved right on this page while others can be downloaded or reached elsewhere. All of them, however, are promised to test your solving skills to the absolute limit and keep you busy for hours, if not days.
time & aging
It’s simple: if you want time to slow down, become a student again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do something novel. Put down the thriller when you’re sitting on the beach and break out a book on evolutionary theory or Spanish for beginners or a how-to book on something you’ve always wanted to do. Take a new route to work; vacation at an unknown spot. And take your sweet time about it.