Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

There are two questions that get to us all: Are we alone in the Universe? And, where did we come from? For me, science provides a much more satisfactory way to seek answers than does any religion I've come across. With that said, the universe is mysterious and wonderful. It fills me with reverence for nature and our place among the stars; our place in space.

I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It's not that we need more food. It's that we need to manage our food system better.

You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.

Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation or process of inference about our origin and the nature of the universe disproves creationism in every respect.