The Martin Gardner Interview Part 2

Continuing from last week, we’ll continue with Don Albers‘ 2004 interview with Martin Gardner right where we left off:

Navy Service
DA: In December of 1941, the U.S. entered World War II and you enlisted in the Navy.
Gardner: I ended up serving on DE 134, a destroyer escort, in the Atlantic. I was miserably seasick for about [...]

AIG or WMD?

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh
If you consider where we were only seven years ago, the notion that the world and President Bush’s record would be the victim not to terrorism but to bad mortgages would have seemed incredible. And yet, the political terrain today is not made by the war on terror as much as [...]

Win a New Martin Gardner Book #4

September 24, 2008

[Update] This week is over! The winner, and the current contest, will be announced here.
Today, we’ll start on the puzzles from Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi. I’ll run three; that’s three more weeks of puzzle goodness.
Incidentally, don’t miss Don Albers’ lengthy interview with Gardner, updated weekly.
Last week: the final [...]

Does American liberalism have a future?

The overriding question of James Flynn’s latest book is so great that he’s named his book after it: Where Have all the Liberals Gone? His conclusion: liberals in the US need to show more courage in confronting the rhetoric and policies of the out-going administration, or they’ll prove themselves to be complicit. And that doesn’t [...]

Science and Religion – the Physics Angle

Science, after all, is supposed to be searching for absolute truths verifiable (in principle) by anybody who cares to. It is supposed to uncover Nature using mathematical or logical tools, of course to formulate theories and hypotheses but to treat these with deep skepticism. Faith is anathema to science. Please understand me. Faith, a moral compass, spiritual values, all have a vitial role to play even in the life of a scientist. When you are stuck on a problem you have to put forth a hypothesis. You have to have some faith in it to take it seriously enough to explore.