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This article by Sam Harris makes the point that “Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief.” and that “The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is [...]

Thanks to Theodore Labadie who posted the link on the ‘Transforming Langara’ listserv, but this is not surprising. The interview subject is promoting the purchase of “carbon offsets” and the opportunities for fraud in that are so magnificent that no self-respecting greedy mogul could possibly hold back for long.

This is generally well-informed nonsense from a very smart nut.

A Washington journalist announces that for a period of over 24 hours the only person who chose to read his free on-line bio with any care was a “self-appointed hall monitor”. If someone was paying me in the hope that others cared enough about my thoughts to buy papers to read them I might [...]

April is Mathematics Awareness Month and this year the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics have announced that the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month 2007 is Mathematics and the Brain.

This post by Stephen Downes presents an interesting link, but I don’t agree that it supports his thesis about human reasoning. Pattern recognition at this level is characteristic of many species and devices, and it’s a capability that is probably necessary for human reasoning whether or not such reasoning is based on rules and language.
In [...]