In one of his responses to my previous post, Jared* is probably not alone in thinking that Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s final conference address and his discussion of seeing God in the last two chapters of his book The Promised Messiah suggest that he himself had been visited in person by the resurrected Jesus Christ. Elder McConkie clearly believed in the potential reality of that blessing, and the importance of seeking after it with all one’s heart; but he makes his case based on scriptures and teachings of Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, and does not recount any such experiences of his own or anyone else of our generation. In fact, a careful reading of these sources may suggest that while he lived hoping to receive this blessing in mortality, he died without having attained it. (more…)

As a matter of ontological outlook, atheism seems to have been foreign to ancient cultures and mindsets preceding and surrounding the Greeks of a few hundred years B.C.; but skepticism with regard to individual claims of prophetic power and authority seems to be a more ancient, deeply rooted, widespread, and respectable tradition. In fact, while he would probably not go all the way with the Rolling Stones in having Sympathy for the Devil, the witness of the Old Testament seems to be that on at least one pivotal occasion Jehovah himself had sympathy for the skeptic—at least, the skeptic of individual claims. (more…)

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t read beyond this headline in The Washington Post: “Study Claims Iraq’s ‘Excess’ Death Toll Has Reached 655,000.” I wouldn’t expect pre-med students to become skilled at Fermi problems, and indeed I wouldn’t expect your typical practicing M.D. to remember much at all from required physics classes I’m sure they’d prefer to forget. But even if they are M.D.s, those who author, referee, and edit papers presenting quantitative results in (allegedly) respectable academic journals have no excuse for forgetting the related but lesser basic quantitative skill of ‘ballparking,’ typically taught sometime around—oh I don’t know—maybe the first problem one ever approaches in freshman physics? (more…)

The last edition of The Weakest Links, available on the sidebar under the heading “Temporalia (Week of 2 October),” started off with three links and no further links were added. This post provides a place to sound off on this week’s links. (more…)

The last edition of The Weakest Links, available on the sidebar under the heading “Temporalia (Week of 28 August),” started off with three links and ended with four. This post provides a place to sound off on this week’s links. (more…)

It was announced today that George F. Smoot—for whom I worked one summer as an undergraduate at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory—has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with John C. Mather, “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.”

The award honors the scientific harvest of two of the three instruments aboard the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which provided key observational evidence that our universe began in a hot and dense nearly-uniform state (the ‘Big Bang‘) and evolved the presently observed large-scale structure of walls, voids, filaments, and clusters of galaxies from the gravitational growth of tiny random density fluctuations (about 1 part in 100,000) in this primordial soup. (more…)

Here are brief first impressions of talks from the second day of General Conference, to be updated throughout the day. (more…)