How can we know reality? As a SETI scientist, Ellie Arroway is in the business of quantifying and measuring things. For Ellie, something can be known if it can be measured. God — whoever or whatever that is — cannot be dealt with in these terms, so Ellie is unwilling […]
This is one of my favourite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons (official page). Bill Watterson is criticising academic writing for its obscurantism (in plain English: the inability to communicate in plain English). The fact that fake, randomly generated academic writing is so realistic would seem to support this! Dick and Jane, […]
We had dinner with my family on Monday night and, amongst the vast array of silliness mixed with theological discussion with a dash of personal reflection, one of my sisters was telling us about the fantastic speaker she heard at the recent Out of the Valley conference. Louie Giglio is […]
This popular cartoon is by Randall Munroe (you can now buy posters of it too). I especially like the submerged land of Usenet* and the tiny principality of Attractive MySpace Pages! Where do you live? * Usenet was/is a huge and ancient kind of e-mail-based discussion system
Are we alone in the universe? This question is the starting point for the film Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. Ellie Arroway (Foster) is a woman driven by her thirst for answers. As a SETI scientist she scans radio transmissions, seeking intelligent signals from across the galaxy. […]
Last week, my boss at EU, Geoff, asked all staff members (and, I believe, the student leaders as well) to buy a copy of Lindsay Brown’s ‘Shining like Stars: The power of the gospel in the world’s universities’. I finished reading it this morning and it is one of the […]
During our weekend away, Tamie and I watched the film Ray, recounting the life of musician Ray Charles. It’s a biopic similar to another we saw recently, Walk the Line, telling the story of musician Johnny Cash. Both men experience a rags-to-riches rise into stardom, transcending socioeconomic lowliness, the traumatic […]
Meet Jesus at uni 