Zaq is Baq!

Okay, I’ll admit it.  This blog basically died.  Some of that had to do with me working grad-school hours doing grad-school things, and some of it had to do with me trying to write a fantasy novel while working grad-school hours doing grad-school things.  But I think a lot of it had to do with me being less interested in fighting religion.  And that is because here in physics-grad-school-land, it’s the wildly religious who are in the minority.  So religion hasn’t been a big eyesore in my life these days, and that means I’ve lost some of my interest in fighting it.

Hiatus

Hey guys.  As you may know, I'm a graduate student studying physics.  I'm beginning the candidacy process tomorrow, and it's basically a 5-week ordeal that involves way too much work.  As such, I'm going to put the blog on hiatus until about the second week of June.

Eaten

This week's blog post has been eaten by my double grading load.  Sorry!

Sick!

Hey guys.  I've been sick for about a week now, so no blog post.

Grading

Hey guys.  It seems a two-week backlog of grading has eaten up all of my free time this weekend.  I will continue the current series next week.

Next Post Delayed

Sorry guys, but my next post is going to be delayed on account of getting sick this weekend.  I hope to get it up sometime on Tuesday.

The Five Point Plan

As you are undoubtedly aware, the past decade or so has seen a lot of atheists taking a stand against religion.  We’ve seen a proliferation of high-selling anti-theism books like The God Delusion and The End of Faith.  We’ve seen the formation of groups such as the Secular Student Alliance, the Rational Response Squad, and TAM.  We’ve seen an explosion of atheistic internet content, from Facebook and Blogs to Reddit and YouTube.  And the vast majority of this content shares a common theme: Religions don’t make sense, and many of them are quite problematic and need to be eliminated.

I'm Muhammad, and I Approve this Post

Hey guys.  Turns out outlining and detailing my plan of engagement is getting to be a big task.  I though I had a good idea for splitting it up amongst multiple posts, but then I realized that some of the parts wouldn't really make much sense without the others.  So instead of posting half now and half next week, I'm just going to delay the first half and post it all together next week.  However, I have managed to devise an insightful yet easy-to-demonstrate anti-Islam technique.

Surgery

Alright guys, there was no post yesterday and there might not be one this coming Sunday either.  I'm getting my pacemaker battery replaced tomorrow morning, so I've been a little pre-ocupied.  I will post an update letting everyone know how it went once I'm coherent enough to type something.

Oh, and if you ever get the urge to pray for me, I ask that you instead donate a couple of bucks to the Obama campaign and/or the Democratic party, so that we can keep this new healthcare plan rolling and make sure things like this go smoothly for everyone in the future.

Also also, I will still be updating the quotables page.

No Post Today

Sorry, but there will be no post today due to grad school plus headaches (I swear they're unrelated).  But don't forget to check the quotables page.

Possible Schedule Change

Hey everyone, I just needed to make a quick announcement.  I've been running a D&D 4e campaign over Skype with soem friends of mine, and we are looking at moving our sessions to Saturday nights.  If we do, I will move my regular weekly blog posts to Sunday nights, so that I don't have to try and plan a session while blogging.  So just a heads up.

Grab Bag

First off, I want to thank the five of you who gave feedback on what you want to see from this blog.  Since nearly everything got a vote, I'm going to go with the Grab Bag option.  So until further notice, I am going to post about whatever the heck I feel like each week.  I'll try to work a decent variety into the mix and avoid spending sequential weeks on the same topic.  So far, I have plans to address morality, mysticism, gender/racial equality, monogomy, taxation, and homosexuality.  I'm also going to try and relate as much as I can to the issue of religion, since that's more or less the point of the blog.

So stay tuned folks.  Next up: Chaos!

Direction for the Future

I have already identified three key attributes of science that makes it a much better epistemology than anything faith has to offer.  Next week, I will identify one more, called backwards compatibility.  In doing this, I will dispel a fairly common belief about the nature of scientific advancement, which was most famously put forth by Thomas Kuhn.  After that, I intend to tackle the problem of induction.  This may take two articles.  Every time I’ve discussed scientific induction (henceforth called simply induction.  Do not confuse this with mathematical induction, which is a deductively valid proof technique) with a philosopher, I’ve found that they seem to assume a few of things about the way science uses induction that just aren’t true.  The most notable of these are the ideas that science’s use of induction requires something to be constant in time, and that induction is specifically about the relationship between the past and the future.  So I think I will spend one article clarifying the use of induction in science, and hold off on addressing the problem of induction until the second article.

News Updates

A couple of news updates.

No More Editor’s Choice:  I’ve realized that I’m too indecisive to actually use this.  If I get a reasonably large readership, I may change it to a Reader’s Choice award, but for now it’s just gone.

Quotables: I’ve added a new page where I’ll be putting some snazzy one-liners.  They’re all original, and hopefully memorable.  There’ll be a new quote accompanying each new blog post.

Timetable: If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll have noticed that I tend to post Saturday nights (though sometimes it’s technically Sunday morning).  This is because of an RPG that my friends are running through Skype.  I’m not actually in the RPG, but I listen in and use the time to do E&M homework and make blog posts.  Over the summer, I will be in the RPG, so the timetable may change.  The posts will still be weekly and at the same time each week, give or take a few hours.

Site Layout

A list of all the different categories and what they mean.

Welcome

Have you ever questioned something?  Anything?  It seems impossible to go through life without finding something to question.  After all, people tend to say some crazy things.  If you don’t have a good method to sort through the crap, you will end up getting bogged down by the sheer volume of stupid, senseless, half-baked notions flying around.  Especially now that the information age is well under way.