I recently learned that opossums can carry a parasite that can cause serious injury to horses. When looking into it, I also discovered opossums might not eat nearly as many ticks as previously thought. My heart sank reading all this. I previously viewed opossums as a kind of superhero animal, cleaning up the bad stuff…
Author: Kenneth
Cat owner, educator, learner
Creationism and conspiracy
YEC is a massive conspiracy theory Young earth creationism (YEC) seems at first like a straightforward denial of science. One might say that young earth creationists believe scientists are wrong about the age of the universe, the age of the earth, biological evolution, and so on. Here’s the thing: if they are so wrong, what…
What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the most misunderstood scientific laws. Stated briefly, the law says that entropy increases over time in an isolated system. The misunderstanding can come partly from not knowing what an isolated system is, but mostly comes from not knowing what entropy is. What is entropy? First, entropy is…
Don’t be a ruminant
The suborder Ruminantia includes nearly 200 extant species in six families (Tragulidae, Giraffidae, Antilocapridae, Moschidae, Cervidae, and Bovidae), and is the most important group of large terrestrial herbivorous mammals. Hernández Fernández and Vrba 2005, p. 270 Ruminants are a cosmopolitan group of even-toed ungulates (artiodactyls). They are often distinguished from other large herbivorous mammals by…
The language of balanced parentheses
Grammatically, parentheses must be balanced, meaning every open parenthesis ‘(‘ must eventually be followed by a close parenthesis ‘)’. Parentheses can be nested, meaning there can be parentheses inside parentheses. If we were to take a piece of writing and remove all letters and punctuation except parentheses, we might end up with something like: ()()()(())()(),…
One thing at a time: how make effective assessments
This is specifically from the perspective of math education, but may apply to other areas just as well. Why do we give assessments? Surely the answer is to find out what students know and what students can do. Not in general; we want to know specifically whether students know certain things. We have learning targets…
The present’s relationship to the future
Stop being so serious. It’s destroying my mental health. Evil Neuro The glass is already broken “You see this goblet?” asks [Ajahn Chah], the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns….
Disagreement and subjectivity
Why do people disagree? In many cases, it’s due to differences in preferences and values, things that are entirely subjective. However, people also frequently disagree about facts, which should be objective. How does this happen and how can it be resolved? First, we don’t have direct access to physical facts, we only have access to…
Nihilism: the philosophy that doesn’t matter
What is nihilism? This is a question with many different correct answers. People have used the term to refer to different things. For me, it represents what I would call more specifically “philosophical” nihilism, a combination of philosophical positions that could loosely be said to form a worldview. These positions are as follows: With ontological…
thoughts on mind 