“…There is a profound irony in what you are asking from me… it hinges on the truth that when a man sees evil and does nothing, he becomes a part of it…”
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Burning down the gates
When galaxies collide
The historicity of Jesus
Did Jesus really exist, or is he just a rehash of older myths? Check out the debate I’m having with my new pal xenlogic over at The World According to Xenocrates, where we’re scrutinizing the Metternich Stele and studying star charts…
Program for creating orthogonal matrices
…In one dimension, a number has only one square root (√1 = 1). But in higher dimensions, there are multiple possible square roots…
Wrong-Way Corrigan and the ubiquitous Floyd Bennett
…Corrigan insisted that in the dark, he couldn’t tell that he’d been following the wrong end of the compass needle. By the time the sun had come up, it was too late for him to turn back…
How subtle is subtle?
…The sentences are actually a skip code. Beginning with the L in Lately, and counting spaces and punctuation marks, if we were to take every tenth character we would find the message…
Identification of the ancient Egyptian constellation Osiris
…There are countless websites stating that the Egyptian constellation of Osiris was the constellation we know today as Orion. This is incorrect. Orion is a Greek constellation, not Egyptian…
Exploring the apocrypha
…Seeking to prepare some of my students for future forays into other religions, I prepared a lesson in which we critically analyzed some Christian apocrypha. This is the shallow water; I didn’t want to start with the Zoroastrian Arda Wiraz Namag…
Second-order differential equations and dark adaptation in vertebrate photoreceptors
Mechanisms of dark adaptation in vertebrate photoreceptors are well understood, and are known to be mediated by calcium ion concentrations. A careful look at the actual mathematical results that experiments yield suggest that calcium ion concentrations should be modeled as a second-order system. This model helps us to see more clearly phenomena that experiments reveal only imperfectly.
I AM THE ALAMANACH 