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Saturday, September 06, 2003

Forgotten New York <a href="http://www.forgotten-ny.com/">Forgotten New York</a> is a huge site, filled with all sorts of articles about historic New York appearing in present-day New York. The HTML is a little unfortunate -- the pages have fixed widths that are two wide -- but it's worth the effort. [Electrolite] 4:18:38 PM  Permalink  comment []

The Great Books Workout. There's not much indication that reading substantially improves anyone's character -- in fact, it often seems to have the opposite influence. By Laura Miller. [New York Times: Books] 11:25:13 AM  Permalink  comment []

“If science can’t say where the laws of physics come from, why imagine religion will do any better?” That kind of skepticism is not shared by all ... [Arts & Letters Daily] C olin Humphreys is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That is, he is professor of materials science at Cambridge. He believes in the power of science to explain the nature of matter. He believes that humans - like all other living things - evolved through the action of natural selection upon random mutation. He is also a Baptist. He believes in the story of Moses, as recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes in it enough to have explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of natural or scientific explanations for the story of the burning bush, the 10 plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that fell in the wilderness -and then written a book about it. "I believe that the scientific world view can explain almost anything," he says. "But I just think there is another world view as well." 11:13:05 AM  Permalink  comment []

A final, first Heinlein novel. Well, this is astounding news: As of this writing, August 31, 2003, there are only about half a dozen people in the entire known universe who can accurately claim that they have read every novel Heinlein has written. For those... [The Truth Laid Bear] 10:52:12 AM  Permalink  comment []

It's baaaaack. The Agonist has a link to the original Snopes "Flight of Fancy" page, so once again, you can contrast and compare. Also, there's more here. Update: according to a poster on Metafilter, via August, Snopes now has a metatag which... [This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow] I've always been a big Snopes follower, but the've lost some of their lustre lately with the revelations of their handling of the bin Laden stuff. The Tom Tomorrow link above documents it nicely, as does this Shock and Awe story. 10:30:25 AM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.