Adam Gopnik makes a good point in his assessment of the work of Philip K. Dick (the best of which is now being issued in a nice volume by the Library of America): The trouble is that, much as one would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut—or, for that matter, Chesterton… Continue reading

Ralph Alpher, one of the key contributors to the ‘hot’ big bang theory, the revised 1948 version of Lemaitre’s l’atom primitif that led to a prediction of the cosmic microwave background, has passed away at age 86. Dr. Alpher was awarded the 2005 National Medal of Science last month for his 1948 prediction that, if… Continue reading

Well, here’s a shocker. The global warming freak-out crowd has apparently been mistaking its data. First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United… Continue reading

Two proof copies of the new edition of Doctor Janeway’s Plague (see side panel) are in the mail from CreateSpace (aka CustomFlix, which handles my DVDs). One of the advantages of CreateSpace’s new set-up is that there are no up front costs for the writer (see Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s rule: “Money flows to the writer.”)… Continue reading

The limits of materialism. Scott Carson has the latest: The latest issue of Nature (08/16/2007) has an interesting cover headline: “Form Follows Function” introduces an article by Johannes Hermann called “Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function” that argues, in effect, that the function of a certain enzyme can be predicted on the… Continue reading