Crown Science and Technology

Items related to technology and science

Firm Foundations?

Sun 27 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Pete Peterson

Is there a difference between earthquake-proofing and terrorist-proofing our buildings?

Nevada desert by Ken Lund (CC-BY)

The next steps in the eventual building of One World Trade Center were taken last month in a desolate patch of the New Mexico desert about ninety miles south of Albuquerque with little media fanfare, but a large bang. There, the building’s architects from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill witnessed the explosion of a three-story replica of the structure’s aluminum and glass casing. The test was a success as only few of the glass panels were smashed in the blast.

In a post–9/11 world, that’s how we must design and build the skyscrapers of the future: capable of withstanding acts of God and man. Here in California, earthquake-testing our tall buildings has been a mandated practice for decades, and in other regions of the country, formalized tests for withstanding high wind and rain are not only well-known, but are a required part of architectural education.

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The Pursuit of Science in a Christian Context

FeatureThu 14 Feb 2008 • Responses: 2 • by Randy Isaac

Science and Faith, by Herny Bahus, CC-BY

Modeling Dialogue Rather than Warfare

Physicist Randy Isaac, executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation, argues that the prevailing public view of the relationship between science and faith as a conflict is sadly incomplete. He offers another model of dialogue and integration based on the experience of his colleagues.

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The Elusive Goal of Mastery

FeatureTue 11 Dec 2007 • Responses: 1 • by Wilfred M. McClay

Caspar David Friedrich, The wanderer above the sea of fog

The Shadow Side of Technological Control

Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay recently had a friend die of cancer. It got him to pondering again about the implications of our ever-expanding control of our bodies and our world. In this essay, originally presented at an October meeting of the Trinity Forum’s Senior Fellows, he looks at the inescapable ironies of our quest for control. Progress is good, right? Longer lives and less suffering is good, right? Sure. But all treatments have side effects and every advance has unintended consequences.

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Attention Deficit Disorder

Wed 21 Nov 2007 • Responses: 10 • by Fred Harburg

The blinding pace of our world makes it tempting to split the signal rather than to give our full attention to the people with whom we are engaged at any given moment.

Texting by Moriza, Flickr

Increasingly common stories of traffic accidents involving people “texting” while driving add poignancy to the epidemic of fractured attention in our world. There is a presumption that multitasking is a necessary, even admirable skill in our hyper-speed age, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

As an Air Force instructor pilot one of the first myths I had to dispel for aspiring young pilot candidates was the idea that good pilots are multitaskers. Research supports a different conclusion. The best pilots are excellent at rapid sequencing. They give full and complete attention to a visual indication, an aural signal, or a kinesthetic sensation, interpret it accurately, act on it effectively, and then move to the next appropriate point of focus. Scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center conclude that attempting to split attention is deadly for a pilot. 

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Redeeming the City

Fri 10 Aug 2007 • Responses: 1 • by Dan Russ

In the city, then, the human tendency is to use technologies to create a way of life that ignores the existence or need of either Creator or of creation.

Varenna, Italy

In the biblical tradition, man as maker and as city builder is seen as both the only creature that bears the image of the Creator and the only creature that dares to usurp the Creator and devour the creation. Humanity, therefore, either blesses or curses the creation. In the context of Genesis, the great book of origins, God created all things, including that strangest of all things, humankind in his image, and pronounced them good. 

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The Woman and the Petri Dish

Mon 23 Apr 2007 • Responses: 6 • by Monica Slinkard

While abortion is an issue deserving thorough consideration by people of faith, it must not monopolize discussions about reproductive issues.

rose in morning sun by Marilylle Soveran

Louise Brown, the first person conceived through in vitro fertilization, turns twenty-nine this year. Since her birth the field of assisted reproductive technologies has marched ahead with little regulation and, until recently, little discussion in either the public square or religious circles.

Emerging reproductive technologies range from the various types of in vitro fertilization—joining sperm and egg in a Petri dish and introducing the resulting embryos into the uterus or fallopian tubes—to experiments with full ectogenesis, that try to accomplish everything from conception to birth outside the body. In the U.S. the President’s Council for Bioethics has recently been addressing these technologies and has recommended regulation and further research, but overall policy is still lacking.

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Thoughts on Global Warming

Wed 07 Mar 2007 • Responses: 9 • by Al Sikes

Our dominion over the earth is a gift from God. Indifference is not an option.

Snow  and sun on Spruce tip, Dec 2006. Photo: Marilylle Soveran, Alberta, Canada

In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists had concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950” (New York Times, February 3, 2007).

The most recent global warming report—this one from the United Nations Environment Program’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—escalated the forecasts of damage while concluding that humans could still act in amelioration. In the weeks following this report disparate dissenters renewed their claims that the warming changes are part of nature’s cycles. The dissenters declaim as reports, movies, papers, and the like rise like the proverbial flood tide.

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The Problem with the News

Wed 21 Feb 2007 • Responses: 5 • by David Aikman

“A picture of humanity that is relentlessly colored by its most gruesome crimes is as unrealistic as one that ignores such crimes altogether.”

remote and tv, stock.xchng courtesy romexico

As a journalist for many years (full-time for more than two decades), I’ve acquired a compulsive addiction to TV and radio news bulletins. If I’m driving a car and the time approaches the “top of the hour,” I’m quite unable to resist tuning the radio to the local full-time news network. If I’m watching TV (a fairly rare event), no matter what the program is that I might have intended to view, within a few minutes I find myself switching to CNN, or FOX, or MSNBC.

It was thus with utter dismay that I watched, on one of the news channels (for propriety’s sake I won’t say which), on a single middle-of-the-evening news bulletin quite recently, the following items: (1) a woman who thought she was a vampire had tied a man up, slashed him with a knife, and drunk his blood (presumably, he thought she had other things in mind when he submitted to being tied up); (2) a mother in a private home was barely prevented from drowning all of her children; (3) an 84-year-old woman was jailed for three years for having sex with an 11-year-old in her foster care.

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More Than Human

Tue 23 Jan 2007 • Responses: 3 • by David Cook

“Research is too important to be left to big business and scientists on their own.”

Chemistry lab, courtesy stock.xchng

A new face transplant is but the latest in the never-ending search for cures for the diseases and accidents that plague humankind. But what begins with the best of intentions in relieving pain, distress, and suffering can be abused and used for other ends and purposes than originally intended.

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Lennox on Dawkins

Tue 14 Nov 2006 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow John Lennox has a downloadable audio lecture and seminar discussing Richard Dawkins and his views on God, religion, and science. 

The 2005 lecture is an MP3 hosted at bethinking.org. It’s 29 MB and runs over two hours, including questions and answers. 

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Apparently, even when we have all the available facts, we may still have an incomplete sum of truth. Tangible evidence, plus established authority, plus unshakeable and self-evident theorizing, can add up to nonsense.

Theodore Sturgeon

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Cover image via AmazonJohn Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace by Jonathan Aitken.

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Orthodoxy: Georgetown’s Father Schall reviews G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy on its 100 year anniversary. “In coming to believe in Christianity, Chesterton, as he tells us, did not read a single Christian book in the process. Rather, he read book after book of those who maintained that Christianity could not possibly be true. After he had read many of these tractates, he suddenly realized that the intellectual opponents of Christianity were constantly contradicting themselves about what they were opposing. Chesterton, the most logical of men, figured that anything so odd as to be opposed for the exact opposite reasons must either be quite strange or, in fact, rather normal and true.” A helpful introduction to a lovely book. (James V. Schall, SJ, InsideCatholic.com , 2008 05 05)

Where Were Obama’s Friends?: Friendship under fire: “As for the supersized candidates, what strikes one most about them is their ‘aloneness.’ They look so solitary. Indeed, it is possible that the old and honorable notion of ‘standing with’ a candidate like Obama simply didn’t occur to his famous supporters this week. Everyone has become used to watching celebrity stars and athletes take it in the neck on their own. Even someone running for the nation’s presidency looks like just another personal crack-up.” Makes one pause.  (Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal , 2008 05 01)

There’s no way you’re going to convince me: Catholic professor Scott Carson covers the current debates on evil between N T Wright and Bart Ehrman on Beliefnet: “[H]aving had a look at this most recent exchange I have to say that it continues to astound me how simplistic and thoughtless the popular treatment of the problem has become. . . . It’s as if generations of sophisticated and complex theological and philosophical argument amount to nothing when compared to the emotional attitudes of a single individual living in a highly particularized time and place. . . . Just as atheists and agnostics are often—perhaps way too often—tempted to assume that believers only believe for emotional or psychological reasons, so too, it seems rather obvious to me, every non-believer almost certainly has emotional and psychological reasons for not believing that will trump any and every legitimate argument posed against them.” (extensive links from the article to the primary sources) (An Examined Life , 2008 04 27)

The Way We Weren’t: “The fifties really were a time when the culture broadly affirmed Christianity as a Good Thing. I was there. I saw it; I heard it. And yet some kind of demurral is strongly indicated: some sign of recognition that no human society, whatever its good intentions and methods, has lived unburdened, unencumbered by the crushing weight of human fallenness. Good as life may appear to have been in the cities and universities of France and Italy in the thirteenth century, or amid the sweaty fervor of the camp meetings in nineteenth-century America, or among the fierce faith of the emancipators, always human pride and general nuttiness were there to spoil the broth.” (William Murchison, in Touchstone , 2008 04 23)

Not on Sale (2008 04 14)
Seven New Deadly Sins, Suitably Updated (2008 04 10)
The Pope Comes to America (2008 04 09)
Both Read the Same Bible (2008 04 09)
Muslims Outnumber World’s Catholics (2008 03 31)

more . . .