Welcome to Bill Jefferys' Goodies Page

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. (It's rather like getting tenure.)" --Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 177.

Dennett credits the tenure analogy to Rodolfo Llinas; It can be found in Llinas' article, "'Mindness' as a Functional State of the Brain," in Mindwaves, C. Blakemore and S. Greenfield, Eds. (1987), p. 341. The Dennett quote gained wide circulation after an NPR piece by Andrei Codrescu, which aired in 1996. The piece itself isn't in the NPR audio archives, which apparently started shortly after it aired, but the event is memorialized here.

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Please consider supporting the National Center for Science Education. NCSE is the only national organization devoted exclusively to opposing the religious right's attempts to get Creationist pseudoscience taught in the public schools. Members ($25/year) receive a significant discount on books, as well as the newsletter, NCSE Reports, and the magazine, Creation/Evolution. If you click on the picture below, you'll see the front cover of a comic book I got from NCSE. It first appeared in Rolling Stone, and a full-color reprint can be obtained from NCSE. A $25 contribution to NCSE will get you a gift "Darwin's Fish" that you can put on your car. Here's how you can contact NCSE:

    National Center for Science Education
    P.O. Box 9477 
    Berkeley, CA 94709-0477 
    Telephone: (800) 290-6006 
    Internet: 

Here are some simple calculational rules for the Dates of Easter, Rosh Hashanah, and Passover (thanks to John Horton Conway, of Princeton University. These rules are based on his book with Berlekamp and Guy, Winning Ways.)

Here's some information on Julian Day Number Calculations. There is also a calculator for calculating Julian Day Numbers and their corresponding dates.

Science

• Tom Loredo's Bayesian Inference in the Physical Sciences Page
• Space Telescope Science Institute Home Page
• John Baez' Home Page
• UT Austin Astronomy Department

UseNet

• Jim Lippard's Blog
• Constructing a logical argument
• Russell Turpin's "Characterization of Quack Theories"
• University of Ediacara Home Page
• Talk Origins Archive
• Mathematician's Statement on the Bible Codes

Quaker stuff

• Quaker Home Page
• soc.religion.quaker FAQ

Other stuff

• Fully Informed Jury Association

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All materials at this website Copyright (C) 1996-2007 by William H. Jefferys. All Rights Reserved.