The truth about Superman’s phonebooth

Phone booths have all but vanished from the American landscape, to the delight of the myriad faceless number crunchers who toil at Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. It's bad enough that the extinction of the public telephone has created so much hardship for cellphoneless citizens like myself, ... Continue reading

An uncertain reality

In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from "normal" positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist ... Continue reading

The end of chocolate as we know it

Scientists in Geneva, Switzerland, have created the most powerful particle beam collision in history — and they didn't destroy the world. Yet.This should be good news, but they plan to try the experiment again, which is the scientific equivalent of running around naked on a golf course in a ... Continue reading

It’s all in your head

It turns out that it's all in my head. The ringing in my ears, that is.For several years now, I've been hearing a persistent tone, 3,950 Hz to be precise, the highest B on a piano keyboard. Tinnitus is usually caused by damage to the ears from loud noises or music. Maybe I listened to Pink Floyd ... Continue reading

Uncomfortable with evil

"I know that there's a tendency to think that everybody can get counseling or can have a bowl of tomato soup and everything is going to be all right," she said. "But I think that evil exists, and I think that he was a mean person." — VT poetry professor Nikki Giovanni, on her former student Cho ... Continue reading

Science and Christianity showcase

One of the blogs I've been reading more and more is All Things 2 All. Catez is a deep thinker, a terrific writer, a woman who is passionate about Jesus Christ and the impact of Christianity on the world we live in.You need to go take a look at her most recent effort, posts by a number of ... Continue reading

Mystery and materialism

The idea of philosophy is mediation; Christianity's is the paradox. ... It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. ... The paradox is not a concession but a category, an ontological definition which expresses ... Continue reading