Reading Time: 4 minutes When I got a press release inviting me to fully immerse myself into a multi-sensory extended reality (XR) story, I almost circularly filed it. Yes, the title “U.S. Premiere of a Multisensory XR Story Symbiosis at PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow” sounded intriguing. But after experiencing an overabundance of screen time for […]
universe
Posted inSpace
The universe doesn’t look designed for humans
Reading Time: 3 minutes The creation stories in Genesis do a pretty good job of explaining what a universe designed for humans would look like. But the universe isn’t really like that. At all.
Posted inScience
Anybody out there? Why our search for extraterrestrials is nearly pointless
Reading Time: 6 minutes “Where is everybody?” Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, reportedly once threw out this seemingly offhand question to colleagues during a lunch hour in 1950. But there was nothing offhand about it; the question is one of humanity’s most burning, ageless questions. “[Fermi] wondered, given that our planet was relatively young compared to the universe, we might […]
Posted inSpace
For all of humanity’s failings, we’ve never stopped wondering about the stars
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was an atypically dry English spring when a man in Bath scanned the skies with a 7-inch reflecting telescope he’d designed and built by hand, through painstaking refinements to Isaac Newton’s principles of optics. William Herschel was studying stellar parallax, the phenomenon that makes a nearby star look like it has moved in relation […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Contradicting the universe
Reading Time: 2 minutes One of the hardest things about being a fully secular human is realizing that the universe couldn’t possibly care less whether I am happy or safe, or fulfilled, or even alive. It doesn’t help that most of the pieces of the universe all around me—the ones shaped like me—care about my happiness only fractionally more […]
Posted inUncategorized
A Big Question
Reading Time: 4 minutes One of my Christmas presents last year was a book from my daughter, Julia. She knows my interests, and made an excellent choice: Stephen Hawking’s final work, titled “Brief Answers to the Big Questions.” The first chapter is an appropriate subject for this blog. It is titled “Is There A God?” Hawking, who died last […]
Posted inBiology, Evolution
Why Did God Wait to Create the World?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Well, it depends what kind of Christian you are as to how you interpret what happened in the creation of this here universe. The young earth creationist will, of course, believe that the world that we live on and the universe that we live in are only 6000 or so years old. The old earth creationist, […]
Posted inCartoons, General
That One Weird Angle
Reading Time: < 1 minute Death. Whether you think you’re going home to meet your maker or that your organic material simply returns to the earth to make something new, we all have ways of understanding mortality.
Posted inUncategorized
The Most Detailed Map of the Universe to Date
Reading Time: < 1 minute This has been doing the rounds, and it’s pretty cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNjMV9EjIfo Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook: A Tippling Philosopher
Posted inCartoons, General
Meditation Practices for the New Year
Reading Time: < 1 minute New year. New you. New Blinky.
Blinky tries his wing at mindfulness meditation and find peace and, perhaps, communicate with the universe itself.