Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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Conceived and built in a lab by engineers using slide rules and tee squares, I was launched on a rocket, leveraged another rocket to shoot me into space, swept past Jupiter and Saturn, and then exited the Solar System across a career longer than my human creators. I am Voyager 1 and I have traveled… Continue reading I am Voyager 1 and I have traveled beyond the Solar System, further than any object made by human hands
Like a human with two sides to their personality, the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I behave like a wave in some cases, for example, when I am cruising across the universe, and like a solid object in others, literally a tiny, massless ball of light known as a photon. I am a beam… Continue reading I am a beam of light traveling from a distant star
How much should we care about the plight of a man too afraid to change his life, one who knows it, and yet can’t stop bitching about it, whether they are dancing alone or jerking off? Read literally, “Dancing in the Dark,” one of Bruce Springsteen’s biggest hits and the source for perhaps his most… Continue reading “Dancing in the Dark” and the art of self-help, Springsteen style
It’s human nature, but if you value what you have now, what you’ve seen, done, and hopefully learned, why would you want to go back to a point where you had none of it or at least less of it? Aging is a funny thing to say the least. I suspect almost all of us… Continue reading New Year’s, the mysteries of aging, and whether we’d really want to go back in time to be our younger selves
The entire aside is unnecessary purely in terms of the plot, but Hamlet remains about far more than that. Perhaps, it is best seen as a vessel for ideas, where they come from, how they evolve, and where they go, and the beings that carry them. The eminent literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom once… Continue reading “We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots,” how Shakespeare captures both the circle of life and the futility of existence in a single sentence
We, indeed all life on Earth, are as ancient as we are new, as grandly complex as we are simple. Indeed, it is fair to say that complex life wouldn’t exist at all without this contradiction. The mammalian ear is significantly more complex than our bird and lizard cousins in the vertebrate family. Rather than… Continue reading Evolution: Three new studies highlight the marvelous contradictions between preserved forms and new innovations that support complex life on Earth
Being a fictionalized account of a future where nothing grows for over twenty years and humanity, or at least the less than five percent that survived, subsists on manufactured foods in a secure colony at an undisclosed location. It was mid-May, but nothing grew. The grass outside Otto’s kitchen window was as dreary, desiccated, and… Continue reading A world without spring
On the surface, Hamlet ponders life and fear of death, but the subtext veers far beyond that into morality and conscience, reflecting the themes of the play and the broader range of the human condition. Not bad for a speech that seems almost accidentally stuck into the final product, as if Shakespeare wrote it for… Continue reading “To be or not to be” is the most famous speech in the English language, but what does it really mean?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 