By SteveP, on January 3rd, 2011%
 There are many ways to get into trouble visiting foreign ports of call. I seem to find them. For instance millions of people go to Vietnam a year and do not come down with killer bacterial brain infections (see ‘My Madness’ in the side panel). I am unlucky I fear. I tried to come out of the womb backwards and have been doing the same (metaphorically speaking) ever since.
Here is the tale. It is a story about fear actually, but I’ll get to that. On a Thursday back in March we drove to Sally. A small costal city in Senegal where there was a company that flew mini-helicopters that we were thinking of using to drop sterile male tsetse flies over wide areas (you know—to make it hard for a female tsetse to find a good man). Continue reading Don’t eat puffer fish
By SteveP, on September 20th, 2010%
Check out my guest post at Jana Riess’ Flunking Sainthood!
By SteveP, on September 17th, 2010%
From BYU Studies 35(1) 1995. Companion to BCC post.
By SteveP, on August 15th, 2010%
BCC’s Ronan introduced me to the work of Nick Bostrom, an Oxford Philosopher. He writes and thinks on technology and ethics issues. He has a fascinating line of reasoning. He argues that quite possibly we are living in a simulation, like The Matrix. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: What if you are just a minor character in a computer game
By SteveP, on August 4th, 2010%
It is Thought Experiment August! Time to once again put on your thinking caps and ponder the dicey issues of modern thought.
I’ve explored the issues related to allowing artificial life into your religious community here and what it might mean to be an artificial life here. But let’s back off and decide when, for the first time, an artificial life might deserve rights. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: Your new Z11 robot
By , on July 19th, 2010%
Hopefully, you are now convinced by the evidence in Part I, that I am not afraid of snakes. The point being, not that I am fearless and brave, but this:
I am jogging along the banks of the Danube. I turn into Danau Park, with its green grasses, large old trees, strolling couples, and a smell and feel of wild things (even though it is quite tame). It’s a beautiful day. The sun is shining. I am tired. I am glad to be almost done with a long (for me) run. Suddenly, and without any premonition that this was about to happen, I find my knees at eye level. This is quite shocking as you can imagine. In the next few milliseconds, I register absolute and utter surprise that I have leaped into the air. Continue reading Summer Classics: The Shrew in my Brain: Snakes and the Evolved Body—Part II
By , on July 2nd, 2010%
Time’s short! If you’ve been thinking of getting something in for this, there is still plenty of time!
‘Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought,’ is planning an issue devoted to Mormonism and the Environment. For this issue, we would like to invite select papers related to this topic, including academic articles, personal essay, creative . . . → Read More: Get those environmental papers into Dialogue!
By SteveP, on March 2nd, 2010%
I just returned from Bali. A large island in Indonesia just below the equator. It seemed like the perfect place to talk about large flies that either, (a) lay their eggs in the wounds of animals or that (b) transfer diseases when the flies take a blood meal (like the tsetse fly that I work on!). Nothing like a tropical paradise to send your mind thinking about flesh eating flies, heh? The two just seem to go together naturally. Most of the researchers are on-the-ground field entomologists, geneticists or GIS specialists. They came from many parts of the world: Iraq, Brazil, Yemen, Indonesia, Kenya, France, Ethiopia, Austria, Australia, UK and me, USA. We all gave presentations and, no surprise, climate change (CC) was the topic of conversation in many of the presented field studies. The climate change deniers keep picking at supposed anomalies in climate temperature readings and ignore the great swaths of other supporting data. But temperature measurements themselves (which all show global warming) aren’t the only story, there is stunning data showing drastic changes on the ground in real ecological systems. Continue reading The Flesh Flies of Climate Change
By SteveP, on February 5th, 2010%
To claim that climate change is a conspiracy is to misunderstand science in fundamental ways. To even imagine a scientific conspiracy suggests a lack in science education that scares me. Continue reading Is the science of climate change a conspiracy?
By , on February 2nd, 2010%
OK, I can’t help myself. My book is reviewed by Bored in Vernal here.
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There are many ways to get into trouble visiting foreign ports of call. I seem to find them. For instance millions of people go to Vietnam a year and do not come down with killer bacterial brain infections (see ‘My Madness’ in the side panel). I am unlucky I fear. I tried to come out of the womb backwards and have been doing the same (metaphorically speaking) ever since.
