Jessica Bluemke grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Ball State University in 2008 with a BA in Literature. She currently works as a writer and resides on the North side of Chicago.
I feel the need to start this by saying that I really didn’t enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s Noah independently of the fact that it was based on a Bible story. I sort of walked out of the theater somewhat baffled, and now that I’ve made it to my laptop, I feel deeply apathetic about it. Which is a bummer, because when I found out that Creationist Ken Ham hated it, I thought “Well, I am going to love this!” Read more
On to Episode 9 of our series of interviews conducted at The Amazing Meeting 2013 — today’s episode is with evolutionary biologist Ed Clint. One of my favorite moments from this interview was when Clint shared a hypothesis about why babies have a tendency to put objects in their mouths — it may be a way to build their immune systems from an early age. Read more
We’re back with another interview from The Amazing Meeting 2013. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics currently teaching at Duke University. I had seen a few of his TED Talks before meeting him and found I was very interested in learning more about why people lie and cheat — how do they justify it to themselves, do they really think they’re doing something wrong, and so forth. In our interview, he went over the finer points of why people are dishonest, and perhaps how we can prevent it from happening. Read more
What a great day for science. In 1980, physicist Alan Guth proposed inflationary theory to modify the current Big Bang theory. Whereas conventional wisdom was that the universe started as a fireball, Guth theorized that it, instead, “inflated extremely rapidly from a tiny piece of space and became exponentially larger in a fraction of a second. ” Later that decade, Russian physicist Andrei Linde updated Guth’s hypothesis to what became known as “new inflation,” and then again revised it to “eternal chaotic inflation.” Well, today, it appears that Linde was proven correct — new evidence from the South Pole appears to support his theory: Read more
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about an interview between Gary Gutting, a former professor of philosophy at University of Notre Dame, and Christian philosophy professor Alvin Plantinga. I did not enjoy that interview. There were many atheist straw men and terrible arguments and it was frustrating. For the second installment of Gutting’s interview series about religion, he spoke to Louise Antony, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and editor of an essay collection entitled Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. Okay, this woman is a little more up my alley. And the interview starts well — from her end, anyway: Read more
