More Quora Inanity

Mike Flynn recounts another example of why the overwhelming amount of stuff on Quora is a waste of time (apart from things written by Tim O'Neill and that Batman post).

Mike Flynn's Great Ptolemaic Smackdown Series

A brilliant series of posts (Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4, Pt5, Pt6, Pt7, Pt8) from Mike Flynn on the Galileo controversy, rightly praised by Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus.

I will be so sorry when this series ends.

The Age of the Hollow Men

Mike Flynn has a wonderful post on the "Passing of the Age of Reason".

It requires no commentary from me but it is interesting to note the difference in the presentation of argument between the scholastic method and most of the debate that takes place nowadays. The former required that you clearly counter the strongest objections first whereas the latter seems to take a perverse delight in the wilful misrepresentation of opposing views.

Hypatia and the Flight from Reality

Mike Flynn returns to one of his favorite topics and systematically takes apart the entry on Hypatia on the (so-called) RationalWiki. Again, it is rather like shooting fish in a barrel as the demolition is so comprehensive that it is clear that the poor individual, or group of individuals, who wrote the article had no understanding of any of the methods of historical analysis, such as, for example, the use of primary sources. It's a simple rehash of the anti-historical myths about the war between science and religion that produced the recent film Agora, which itself was the subject of a comprehensive analysis by Tim O'Neill on his old blog.

The post has a useful link to the TOF's previous writing on this matter in his Aulde Blogge.

More Modern Myths about Galileo

Thony Christie takes apart the recent paean to Galileo by Adam Gopnik that was published in the New Yorker.

The Galileo Farce

I despise Guardian writers even more than I despise Guardian readers who are a pretty moronic bunch (just see the comments here). I can't stand the smug, pseudo-intellectual, self-satisfaction that comes from the uncritical assumption that you are on "the right side of history" so that little things like facts and "the truth" don't matter.
A case in point is the lazy so-called journalism evident, this time, in the Science blog, which is torn to pieces with typical gusto by Thony Christie and Mike Flynn.

The First US Computer Science Graduate

This at the CACM blog, via Mark Guzdial's blog:

Who Earned First Computer Science Ph.D.?

Who would have thought it?