Author Archive

I’ve been spending some time lately reading online articles and blogs about many different aspects of religion, particularly the issue of science and religion. One of the many things that bugs me about the mostly vapid discussions you see online are the arguments made by folks on both sides of the believers/non-believers divide related...

You hear it again and again: Forgiveness is one of the important pillars of human wisdom and even human happiness. Such talk is easy to discount if you’ve never had any real challenges before, and quite frankly I never really believed in the power of forgiveness until fairly recently. Last June, on the Monday...

Next week, Capital Metro in Austin, TX will begin service on their new light rail system. The trains will run north to south, from Leander, past UT and then right into downtown Austin. A few years back they introduced a new network of toll roads, all of which has done much to increase traffic...

About two weeks ago, I tried to update the apps on my iPhone. I got an error message that said the update failed because my “account had been disabled.” Great. The Apple support site offered little help. There was no way to talk to anyone about this problem, and the discussion forums just directed...

This post is more or less a “message in a bottle”. Over the last year or so, I have been searching for groups or individuals in the San Antonio, Texas area who might be interested in starting a project to launch a Roman Catholic “classical education” college in the San Antonio area. A classical...

The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a report describing Internet usage amongst Latinos in the US. Overall, the report was very encouraging. From 2006 to 2008, the percentage of adult Latinos who used the Internet grew by 10 percentage points from 54 to 64 percent. The percentage of adult whites who used the internet...

This advice is intended for anyone interested in pursuing graduate education (toward the Ph.D.) on a full-time basis, not for part-timers or weekend scholars. Also, my graduate education was in the sciences, so some of what I say may not apply to someone in, say, management or the humanities. 1. Maintain a positive attitude...

One of the big ideas in the world of education (both K-12 and postsecondary) is the whole notion of “learning styles.” By this, we mean that people have different ways of learning and recalling knowledge and information. For example, some people consider themselves “visual” learners, which means they need to see pictures and words...

In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Chen, Cohen, and Miller report that kids from low socioeconomic status (SES) families show elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. From their abstract: Individuals with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are at increased risk for mental and physical health problems, and the relationship may be mediated...

There’s been a lot of news lately in the world of artificial intelligence. First up, was the news from IBM Research. Last month they reported that they had constructed a cortical simulator built upon the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture. According to IBM, this cortical simulation is able to run at near-real-time, and possesses...