a blog by chester delagneau

It’s Friday the 13th. “No more bets,” says the croupier before spinning the 21 mm ivory ball around the roulette wheel. The man with the $50,000 bet on black watches on greedily as his bleached-white teeth pounce on his nubby fingernails. The ball yawns and eventually kneels into a pocket. The roulette dealer calls it:…

Two opposing themes stood out to me about Christopher Nolan’s cinematic portrayal of The Odyssey (and The Aeneid): trickery and hospitality. “Zeus’s Law” or the social contract of hospitality when broken was a severe offense against the gods. In the movie, we see both hosts and strangers violating this sacred Greek code—what’s supposed to be…

Proponents of M-theory, who think they escape the implication of a creator for our universe birthed by the “Big Bang,” are stuck between an empirical rock and an intelligently designed hard place. Consider the fact that M-theory—the “Theory of Everything” in physics that connects quantum mechanics with gravity—while being a credible mathematical framework is not…