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Showing posts from February, 2008

A Reply to Mr. James

A reader was kind enough to comment on one of my recent posts . I will try to answer each of the points raised. The readers’ original comments will be indented and italicized. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors are as in the original and will be underlined for easy identification. Mr. Mark Northrup . I stumbled upon your space in msn spaces and followed your link here. I am not sure why I am commenting on your blog except that I, being a Christian, have never found an ex-Christian to really have been a true bible believing Christian as they claim. Sure there are those who say they believed as I believe. However after asking a few of them some simple questions I found they never really believed those things set out in your blog here under proposition #1 ever. I think Mr. James's difficulty in finding any ex-Christians that were ever, to his mind, “bible-believing” Christians, is the sense in which he uses the word “believe.” For my

Some Thoughts on Science Communication

As one who aspires to (humbly) carry on the noble work of conveying science to the public in the vein of people like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Stephen J. Gould, I recently become a student member of the National Association of Science Writers. For a senior-year science writing course, we were to review and critique the primary professional website in our respective fields. My classmates are from a number of different fields including computer science, several engineering disciplines, and pre-med, just to name a few. I realize that I may live to regret posting this here as my analysis may be read by other association members, but I feel this piece has a wider applicability than just the dozen or so people that would otherwise read it... In the first decade of the 21st century there are very few public policy issues that are not profoundly affected by science and to have an electorate that is not scientifically literate and informed is a recipe for disaster. This is why having a