Religious superstition fills in the gaps of our knowledge, like plaster filling holes in a wall. But when knowledge expands, the spackle isn't needed any more.

If evolution had done as little for me as it has for Texans, I'd hate it too.

If you know your algorithms and data structures, and have a firm grasp of the architecture of modern computer systems, you'll be way ahead of a depressingly large proportion of people with degrees in CS that come past me in interviews.

The most informative and entertaining book I can recommend on algorithms is Bentley's "Programming Pearls".

A wonderful deleted scene in "The Life of Brian" has shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem wondering "is it AD yet?"

I love being lectured in logic by a person who ritually cannibalizes a god's zombified offspring because a talking snake tricked a mud-man's rib-wife with magic fruit.

... we're supposed to treat these clowns with respect and allow their weird Sunday-morning social clubs to have tax-exempt status in the US?

And the Catholics are supposed to be the *smart* ones, too!

Did you really just spell "ceased" like that?

I explicitly said that they have at least one child named Mary. They could have two; it still works out.

Yes, I assume that not every girl is named Mary.

Okay, if you don't get the problem (and yes it is correctly stated), there are three things you can do to improve your understanding.

1) Write a simple computer program in your language of choice to generate a billion random two-children families and count the ones that meet the conditions.
2) Draw a Venn diagram.
3) Read up on Bayes' theorem.

A family with two children is chosen at random from a large population.

If I tell you only that they have at least one daughter, what is the probability that both children are girls?

Most people can get that one (it's 1/3), but fail miserably on this question:

If I tell you only that they have at least one child named Mary, what is the probability that both children are girls?

Assume the obvious: the boy/girl ratio is 50-50 and only girls are named Mary.

Most people insist that this is the same question with the same answer, but no, it's not, and the answer is actually 50%.

If you don't get this puzzle, you don't understand conditional probability.

What else would I need? A decent text editor that interacts well with the Unix environment around it. I use aoeui.

Christians know that "it was a small, tailed, probably tree-climbing, and now extinct primateâ"from a kind created on Day 6 of Creation Week."

You know, I'd hate evolution too, if it had done to me what it has done to the godtards.

The word "tragic" has an actual meaning, you know. If the accident were the ineluctable consequence of a character flaw -- and I do not suggest that this be the case -- then the usage would be correct and informative.

Students, now that we have covered the neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection and modern genetics, we should give some time to a competing explanation put forward by many prominent opponents to science.

In this alternative theory, the earth and all its life forms were created at 9:00 am on October 23rd, exactly 6,012 years ago, just shortly before a talking snake tricked a mud-man's rib-wife with a magic fruit. This crime required the Creator to impregnate a teenager several thousand years later, and now if you don't ritually cannibalize his zombie son, you'll roast in a giant lava pit forever after you die. All of the fossils you may see were caused by a giant flood or were deliberately planted by an evil spirit to deceive you.

You will understand America much better when you accept the fact that many more of your fellow citizens prefer this second explanation to the first one.

The most telling item in that memo: no merit increases in pay this year, either. How boneheaded is that?