I spend a lot of my free time reading about religion. Most of that time is on the features that make one religion different from another. That's why G. Willow Wilson's article on why intelligent design doesn't work in Islam and Judaism riveted me.

"The God of the Bible is omniscient and all-powerful, but the God of the Torah and the Quran is omnipresent and omniparticipant. This essential difference has led some religious scholars to draw a distinction between monotheism, the belief in one God, and monism, the belief in One."

The crux of her article is that Islam and Judaism are monistic (believe in One essence), and Christianity is monotheistic (believe in one God). That is the God of Islam and Judaism is an omnipresent essence of the universe. The God of Christianity is omniscient but limited to one all-powerful being. This is why iconography is forbidden in Islam and Judaism (because God is not part of our world) but very present in Christianity (because a local God interacts directly with people's lives). These fundamental differences play a role in whether a religion endorses intelligent design (ID) or not.

I think Mormonism actually finesses this point a bit. They have a recursive notion of God that allows him to be one being that is a part of universe, but also omnipresent and apart from the universe. Perhaps that's why Mormons don't seem to be leading the charge for ID?

She goes into more detail about how these differences impact ID. There's some really good stuff in there. G. Willow Wilson is a woman of many talents. She's writing a new comic book series called Air that I really enjoyed.

David Byrne's March visit to Dallas (via Unfair Park) makes a point of mentioning the awe-inspiring High Five interchange.

I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I've ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance.

Other writers have described it in more medieval terms as a bridge between castle Dallas and the fiefdoms that surround it. Regardless of the metaphor, it's hard to convey how impressive the High Five interchange to people who haven't ridden it. Even harder is to make people understand how miraculous the transformation from dysfunctional eyesore to utilitarian wonder.

This is too long to fit on twitter but I like it too much to forget about it. The word absurd was actually first used to describe irrational numbers.

I'm working my way through a book on all the people that helped or solved problems on David Hilbert's famous list of 23 great math problems.

Many times a solution only presents itself after cultural change. One of the cultural norms that had to be updated to push math forward was the idea that irrational numbers are actually useful.

There was a time when irrational numbers were avoided by mathematicians. This disdain was so strong that the word "absurd" was created to describe how useless people believed irrationals to be. From Yandell's book:

An irrational square root was called a "surd," meaning deaf, silent (expressing the attitude toward it). The word "absurd" was first used in English in 1557, according to Oxford English Dictionary, for the purpose of pronouncing the number 8 - 12 (or -4) absurd.

It's clear to us now how important the absurd numbers are for solving real problems. But for a while math stood still while the culture had to catch up.

As a kid I wanted my life to be different from the one I imagined ahead of me. I wanted to be a master jewel thief or president of a unified North and South America. As I got older the dreams got smaller. I wanted to monopolize America's garbage collection industry. Now they're more abstract. I wish I'd had a comic book like Kick-Ass to inspire me when I was younger.

It's about a high school student named Dave Lizewski who wonders why nobody wants to grow up to be a superhero. One day he decides to put on a scuba suit and fight crime. Mark Millar's writing comes across as authentic and a fresh take on what makes a superhero. The way he integrates ideas from his fans drives home the point that Kick-Ass is something that exists in our world. We should all ask ourselves why we didn't choose to be superheroes.

With every issue I've gotten a little choked up, or felt a rush of excitement. Nothing else, except All Star Superman, comes close to engaging me like this every month. Every issue so far has sold out. Issue 3 mentions that they've started hitting Spider-Man/X-Men numbers with 75,000 copies of the first issue sold. I think this could be big.

"Think peace and and you'll get it. It's up to the people...If we really wanna change it, we can change it." -John Lennon

That quote is copied from the press kit for the Oscar nominated animated short film I Met the Walrus and hits upon a trifecta of my current interests.

The first being that reality is manufactured by the words in our pens and the thoughts in our head. Take responsibility.

Second, the Oscar nominated short films, live action and animated, are top notch. I continue to believe that the French, and French Canadians, are doing the most innovative animation work (Triplets of Belleville, Renaissance, Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go to Heaven all come to mind). Now if they just had the writing of Pixar.

The third is this nonsense about Barack Obama plagiarizing his speeches. Change, or at least the promise of change, has been a major theme of many political leaders. I don't know how Senator Obama could speak about change in a clear and direct way without building on the tradition of leaders before him. A far more dangerous idea is to demand that political leaders constantly dance around their ideas and relinquish any ability to speak plainly and directly.