For a couple years now, creationist like Ken Ham have been delighting in teaching little kids to challenge scientific claims regarding the age of the Earth or the universe with the clever, albeit disingenuous, response: “How do you know? Were…
Louisiana Legislators and Science Literacy (or Lack Thereof)
We can choose to ignore, misrepresent, or deny the nature of reality—as the Louisiana legislators are currently demonstrating—but doing so is an act of sheer folly that will have actual, negative, and often avoidable consequences.
Help Me Beta Test Slim Surveys
I’m helping to beta test a new online survey tool called Slim Surveys. The silly little survey below was created using the beta version. If you have a minute, please: Take the survey below (there are only four questions) so…
It’s All About Abstraction
I started writing a new post this morning about one of my favorite topics: levels of abstraction. While looking for references, I ran across this post I wrote for Google+ on January 6, 2012. So, with the author’s permission, I’ll…
How to Interview a Software Developer
Yesterday, I stumbled across a four year old blog post that made me laugh, A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. When I mentioned this online, my friend and fellow software conspirator, Scott Rehorn, made a brilliant…
7 Tips for Proofreading Your Own Work
If you do much writing at all—blogs, memos, proposals, papers, even e-mail—you know the difficulty of proofreading your own work. It’s all too easy to proofread what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote. To paraphrase Simon…