CIPHER LAB

My thoughts on language exchange that you can read in this blog are indirectly related to an already-established field of linguistics called...

For those of you who like to validate their belief in God with some pithy line like, "What are the odds that such and such happened?...

Francis Beckwith argues in " Why I'm not a Moral Relativist " that there are only three sources of objective morality: illusi...

In the previous post, I dissected the levels of language change from 1 to 4 in order of severity. The first category is a relatively mild am...

A particular deficit in linguistic literature that I feel needs research is a field I will call "Language Economy." That is, exami...

The above formula was developed in 1954 by Walter Isard to give a very good estimation of how much trade (numbered by currency, usually doll...

For the last two centuries, linguists have been tracing the roots of words back to their earliest states by means of comparative analysis (t...

Here's a standard form of "sharing the gospel" that is used by Christians. "If you were to die and stand before God and ...

Gary Kasparov, infamous for his 1980's matches with Deep Blue, IBM's chess machine, has designed a *new* way to play chess while sim...

I've received some wonderful comments on William Cornwell's talk at the last CIPHER workshop, who argued that technologically adv...

Recent talk of the film Avater (2009) has brought up an interesting moral question I've been tossing around for a while now. What are t...

The Chronicle has a good argumen t for working at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, reporting that jobs for professors in...

Here's a great article from NYT on the current state of braille use. Many blind users seem to be forsaking standard tactile braille us...

Once again the new virtual reality world called Second Life ignites a flurry of ethical quandaries. Patrick Davidson's talk at Ignite ( ...

National Geographic's feature article provides a nice overview of the present state of adaptive technologies. The graphic presentation...

My paper about our confused intuitions on moral status of virtual avatars is up in the latest edition of Stillpoint Magazine . A reader jus...

About four years ago, Ostler's classic book Empires of the Word was re-published. The book is a popular edition of his years of reading...

I'm wrapping a book review on Gregg Ten Elshof's book I Told Me So . Gregg is the chair of the philosophy department at Biola and a...

Christian Perring of Dowling College, who edits the helpful " Metapsychology Online Reviews " site, presented an interesting paper...