Logic as Magical Thinking

These battles over definition are not taking place in the same universe as the one in which men throw around these terms online. But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by e...

 Greg Epstein Secular Invocation

Mayor-Elect Walsh, and distinguished and honored guests of all backgrounds and beliefs: it is my great honor, on behalf of the Humanist, secular, and nontheistic community, to share this poem, “To Be of Use,” by contemporary Massachusetts poet Marge Piercy, in honor of the important work you and all of us will soon be called to do. The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become ...

 The ENMOD Treaty

There are also major foreign policy concerns, beginning with the international ENMOD treaty—the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use ot Environmental Modification Techniques, ratified by the United Nations in 1978 in response to the United States' use of silver iodide cloud seeding to alter the weather over the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. Operation Popeye was an effort to "make mud, not war" to slow North Vietnamese supply lines by lengthening the...

 Thomas Paine and George Washington Conduct an Experiment

The muddy bottom of rivers contains great quantities of impure and often inflammable air (carbureted hydrogen gas), injurious to life; [begin page 309] and which remains entangled in the mud till let loose from thence by some accident. This air is produced by the dissolution and decomposition of any combustible matter falling into the water and sinking into the mud, of which the following circumstance will serve to give some explanation. In the fall of the year that New York was evacuated ...

 The Unique Properties of Ice

By the standard of other substances, the properties of ice are bizarre, yet ice is so perfectly suited to our purpose that if it didn't exist we should have to invent it. With few exceptions, the solid phase of matter is more dense than the liquid phase; water. alone among common substances, violates the rule. As water begins to cool, it first contracts and becomes more dense, in the typical way. But about four degrees above the freezing point, something peculiar happens. It ceases to contrac...