Note: This post was originally written by my friend Steven Den Beste who passed away last year. This will be a series of articles designed to preserve his writing for future readers to enjoy the way I did. The Human Eye: A design review Occasionally I see creationists point to the human eye as a miracle of design, as if this somehow is evidence of divine origin for the human form. Unfortunately, from an engineering perspective, the human eye is seriously suboptimal. It simply isn't...

Every few weeks someone writes an article comparing some amazing statistic from the Nordic countries in Europe and then compares that statistic to the United States in total.  It’s always some ridiculous apples and oranges comparison that results in a meaningless comparison. So just as a reminder, the populations of these countries are: Sweden: 9.5 million Denmark: 5.6 million Finland: 5.4 million Norway: 5 million In addition, demographically and cultu...

Shortly after the Northeast blackout of 2003, my wife and I started to take disaster preparedness seriously.  The blackout only lasted a couple of days but we realized that had the blackout not occurred in the Summer and had the blackout lasted much longer, we would have been in serious trouble.  The journey from being totally unprepared to being aware of how totally unprepared we are could be be described as “The idiot’s journey”.  BIG DISCLAIMER :  Muich of th...

My gift and curse is that I don’t require a “normal” amount of sleep. After 4 or so hours, I wake up, full of energy for the next day.  It’s come in handy when it comes to being productive but it's gotten me into a lot of trouble as well as I can almost always respond more in a “debate” than someone else giving the impression that I’m obsessing on something when in fact I just have…well, more time available to invest in something. With that introduction, let me introduce you to one of...

  There's a great line in Atlas Shrugs that goes like this: "You concluded I was the safest person in the world to spit on because I have power over you and that I would be tied by the fear of hurting your feelings by reminding you of it." Our society seems to have taken that view en-masse in recent years.