DiscussMormonism.com

We have thorough and involved accreditation proceedings, and the finally determined rules for what a student has to do to get a degree are so rigid that they literally have the force of state law. It can take years to get them changed, even if a whole department wants to change them. The thing is, t...

Oh, I know that quote is in the Hadith. It's the idea that Muhammed used those words when he was shrugging his shoulders about picking a successor that's screwy. Yeah, that's probably right. That saying in full might imply an indifference, by omission, but that's at most arguable, and it's probably...

It's an interesting question why you can't go back and revise published papers, nowadays. Historically, of course, it wasn't physically possible. Papers got printed on paper, and while the current journal issues might lie out on display like magazines in supermarket checkout lines, everything older ...

I understand that Muhammed is … supposed to have said to his followers nothing more specific than, "Rulers will follow me, render them your obedience." As you pressed 'submit' to post this, 160 million Shi'ites felt an involuntary shutter. Edit to add: I don't think even Sunnis believe this. Sounds...

One of my brothers and I once built a trebuchet on a sandy beach using a middling-sized tree trunk as the throwing arm and a washtub full of rocks and wet sand as the weight. Our fulcrum was a steel crowbar—the longer and straight true crowbar rather than the shorter S-shaped wrecking bar—supported ...

(Gravity isn’t a force, but rather an accelerant) This might sound like more mumbo-jumbo but it's actually a true and important point that High Spy is expressing with a non-standard word. Or at least, there is a true and important point which somebody might well express in this way, so it only take...

I've learned more from this thread than I had known before about how the LDS movement survived Smith's death and rallied behind Brigham Young. My guess would be that Smith never made real succession plans because he was expecting to live on for many more years as sole Prophet. He might have recognis...

I don't think I do have a favourite. The one that I'm just about to finish and submit real soon now is usually the current favourite. Usually there's at least one or two things that I really like about a paper, but you spend so long fussing with all the details that by the time it's finished a lot o...

As far as teaching goes, technically I can teach whatever I want. I'm required to offer what amounts to one course each semester, but I have Lehrfreiheit —the freedom to decide for myself exactly what it is that I'll teach. In my department nobody is enough of a jerk to teach useless courses and for...

"The age of the universe" is the age that would be measured by a co-moving observer—that is, by an observer for whom the expansion of the universe is equal in all directions. That kind of co-moving observer is a lot like the old Newtonian concept of an observer who is at absolute rest. And it's true...