How do we understand and interpret the historical events recorded in scripture – or elsewhere?
Understanding Scriptural History
Month: March 2021
Recommendations
Here are some things that I like. You might like them too.
Book Review of WEATHER, MACROWEATHER, AND THE CLIMATE by Shaun Lovejoy (2019)
Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate is an excellent book on climate science. Lovejoy engages both climate scientists and climate skeptics and attempts to persuade both. It tries to be accessible to a general audience, but I think it ends up being accessible to almost any scientist or engineer. This book is more about climate than about climate change. Lovejoy does not mention climate change until the 6th chapter, out of 7 chapters total. Instead, his main goal is for you to understand the patterns of motion in the atmosphere.
Managing Your Distinctiveness
You want to become a better person. But how? Should you try to become a well rounded person by developing all of the virtues and avoiding all of the vices? Or should you focus on what you are best at and hone the extremities of your personality into instruments for good?
Book Review of CREATIVE EVOLUTION by Henri Bergson (1907)
A radical view of evolution, founded on a very different understanding of time and knowledge.
Entropy
Entropy is a weird thing. It is used in multiple seemingly unrelated contexts. None of them have intuitive definitions. I hope to simply explain what entropy is in these contexts and why they all deserve to have the same word.
What More Could I Have Done for My Vineyard?
Jacob 5 is the longest parable in the Book of Mormon. It typically is interpreted as a fairly straightforward description of God’s interactions with His chosen people throughout history. Here, I present an original alternative interpretation.
Fractal Dimensions
You probably know fractals as cool-looking mathy shapes. Maybe you’ve also heard that fractals can have non-integer dimensions. This is extremely weird. I hope to give you an idea of what fractals are and help you to understand why we say that fractals’ dimensions can be non-integer.
Comment Policy
There rules and recommendations are both promises from me and expectations for you. I intend to follow them in my writings. You should do the same.
The Parable of the Optimization Algorithm
What should my first blog post be? I am sufficiently confident in this argument that I have presented it over the pulpit at church. And I think it also captures my personal peculiarities well.