Historical Humanists- Thomas Aikenhead

Thomas Aikenhead was a Scottish student from Edinburgh, who was prosecuted and executed on a charge of blasphemy. Aikenhead was indicted in December 1696. The indictment read: “That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That … Read on…

The nature of random

Programmers know something about random number generators. For the edification of civilians, the simplest of those generators can be asked for a random number between 3 and 5, for example, and with a certain level of precision, say 5 digits, and will immediately respond with an answer like 4.28694, always randomly. The next time the number might be 3.74812. An almost unlimited number of possibilities exist. The random number generator is useful for programming most games of chance and for … Read on…