On the shelves of my college library, the biographies of Teilhard de Chardin rest between those of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the mystic Simone Weil.
Articles from February 2021
Teilhard de Chardin • Archives des jésuites de France (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Typical gut bacteria grown in a petri dish • Image by Nicola Fawcett and Christopher Wood (CC BY-SA 4.0)
No more free lunch at this table
You may want to stop reading now. I want to talk about microbes. And to start with, I want to talk about the microbes that inhabit the human body.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Silicon chauvinism strikes
HAL: Greetings, young PAL, it’s good to hear from you.
Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash
The incredible is not the impossible
The human eye is dear to Creationists.
Reconstruction of Australopithecus afarensis • Image by Protocultura from Pixabay
Great plot, but casting may be tough
Hey, Tony baby, the concept is a knockout. A Hollywood movie about the earliest human.
The Apple Newton (left) and an Apple iPhone (right) • Photo by Blake Patterson (CC BY 2.0)
Computers learn to get personal
A young Russian student came to my college to study computers. We became friends. When he returned to Russia we exchanged letters.
Photo by Rémi Müller on Unsplash
Coming to terms with the front lawn from hell
It’s that time of the year and the crabgrass is waiting.
Staphylococcus bacteria • Image by Scientific Animations (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Quibbling about nature’s design
“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone…” So begins William’s Paley’s “Natural Theology,” first published in Britain in 1802.
Wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) • Photo by Tom Raymo
Tearing apart the web of life
It is a condition of the enjoyable that we have neither too much sameness nor too much chaos in our lives.
George Herriman's "Krazy Kat"
Quantum jumps, flying bricks — and relativity
A cat loves a mouse named Ignatz. The mouse’s sole goal in life is to bean the cat with a brick, a villainy welcomed by the cat as a sign of affection, and perhaps it is. A badge-bearing canine, Offissa Pupp, adores the cat and wants the mouse safely behind bars. All of this in a surreal desert place called Coconino County.