Loren Petrich's Notebook-Binder Page

• Here are some UFO and ancient-astronaut paradoxes; if skepticism about oddball theories further interests you, check out The Skeptic's Dictionary and The Skeptic Friends Network.
• Here's one of my great disappointments of the year 2001: that it was so far behind the famous Clarke/Kubrick movie "2001" in computer AI, as explained in this comparison.
• The attacks of September 11, 2001 have provoked me to make some interesting comparisons between them, Japan's attack on the US's Pearl Harbor military bases on December 7, 1941, and Japan's "kamikaze" suicide-attack squadrons of the last 10 months of World War II.
• The Tragedy of the Commons is one of the Satanic Verses of free-market economics, since it represents a case where individual self-interest represents collective disaster.
• If you want to get away from it all, then consider a floating city in the middle of some ocean. Though it will not be as distant as a space colony, it will be a lot cheaper.
• If you ever wanted to know what a "reich" was, check out my "German Reichs" page; I have a whole list of candidates.
• If you want to see some interesting research into the history of (natural) languages, I have a list of references on that subject. I cover Indo-European (ancestor of many languages in Europe, India, and in-between), Nostratic (proposed ancestor of several language families in Europe and Asia), some similar proposed families like Dene-Sino-Caucasian, and even a bit of Proto-World (humanity's hypothetical first language; a well-known magnet for crackpottery, as I point out).
• I also have a discussion of vestigial features, which are very widespread in the biological world. I have tried to be reasonably comprehensive in scope, covering not only the animal kingdom, but also plants and even cells. These are clear evidence of evolution, or at least something like Philip-Gosse-style pseudo-evolution. He was a mid-nineteenth-century biologist who had written a voluminous tract explaining in gory detail how all the evidence of the great age of the Earth known by then was just created to look that way; this would-be reconciliation of science and the Bible was widely rejected as implying divine fraudulence, though some latter-day creationists do recycle versions of it now and then. For more on this and other such subjects, check out the on-line talk.origins archive and the University of Ediacara.
• Creationists are not alone in using emotional rhetoric. Consider Lamarckian rhetoric, which includes some juicy examples of emotional rhetoric in favor of the hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Those wanting to give equal time to paradigms other than modern evolutionary biology ought to consider giving some time to Lamarckism in light of the rhetoric I quoted. As I point out, science education could involve "Lamarck-Lysenko science" as an alternative to "Darwin-Mendel science", in parallel with the creationists' "equal time for the opposition" demands.
• How mythical was Jesus Christ? Comparing him to various mythic heroes suggests that his biography strongly resembles those of Moses, Hercules, Romulus, Krishna, and other mythical figures, and not those of notable real people like President John Fitzgerald Kennedy or biologist Charles Darwin. If the question of Jesus Christ being mythical interests you, you may want to check out this case for him being mythical: The Jesus Puzzle.
• And if you want to see a rather iconoclastic view of the Bible, I have just the thing for you. But a first a word of warning. If you don't enjoy negative comments about the Bible, then I advise you NOT to read this document. So if you don't like it, don't claim that I didn't warn you. So here are my Biblical Satanic Verses. I call them that name because they are parts of the Bible that many who wave it around may well wish were not in it. To find out more, check out The Secular Web. One of my favorites in it is The Parable of the Insane Dog Breeder, especially if you are as nauseated as I am by the idea that you deserve eternal damnation for your sins, but that you can nevertheless get away with them just by believing in Jesus Christ.