Graham’s Number, folksily abbreviated to “g64,” was long famous as the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. I quote...

Yes! One of the characters in Ghosts in the Machine mentions this, and it’s true! Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is...

In my first philosophy class, the professor began by saying something I've been repeating ever since: “Philosophy asks just two...

“Is the word ‘Absolutely!’ overused?” “Absolutely!” Or, for a change of pace: yes. I first heard someone complain about the Infestation...

One minor character in my Ghosts n the Machine is the Slipher Space Telescope. This is me giving a big fat fictional hint to NASA, in...

The short explanation: I’m lazy. I can predict with great confidence that I will not die wishing I had spent more time at my computer....

The Bretz Erratic, a giant rock, plays a minor role in the plot of Ghosts in the Machine, but it doesn’t exist, no—it just seemed like a...

Today, June 16th 2016, is the 200th anniversary of the stormy night in Geneva when Byron told his houseguests they should all try their...

Dean Swift’s take on the problem is from On Poetry: A Rhapsody, 1733: Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline; Be...

The Babel Trilogy is about consciousness: what is it, and where does it come from, and how is it possible? But that problem is bound up...

In The Fire Seekers, Bill Calder is struck by the way similar myths emerge in cultures that have had no contact with one another, and in...

It’s spreading like rot, and there it is yet again, in this morning’s Seattle Times: a sports journalist praising one man but then...

A lot of Americans hate JD Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye because it was forced down their throats as a ‘classic’ at school. I missed...

A note on re-reading Gulliver’s Travels: I’m struck again by the fact that it’s always fun to read the first three books, and always...

As detailed in The Fire Seekers, many linguists have thought the Phaistos Disk will never be translated, because it’s a unique artifact –...

Alert Fire Seekers reader (and diver) David Jeffrey just pointed out to me that my description of divers using GPS to map an underwater...

It’s fascinating. Some reviewers have said “The Fire Seekers” is great YA sci-fi. Others (including some who obviously enjoyed the book)...

First, you do the writing. Then, the rewriting and throwing away and rewriting and rewriting. Then, editing, and more rewriting....

According to a story in this morning’s New York Times, there’s controversy at Bryan College in Tennessee over a new addition to the...

I wanted to wish Neil deGrasse Tyson well  on his rebooted COSMOS project, I really did: he’s a good scientist, and he can write well....