Stephen Hawking has a new book coming out (The Grand Design, with Leonard Mlodinow). Among other things, he points out that modern physics has progressed to the point where we don't need to invoke God to explain the existence of the universe. This is not exactly a hot flash -- I remember writing an essay making the same point for a philosophy class my sophomore year in college -- but it makes news because it's Hawking who says it. And that's absolutely fine -- Hawking has a track record of making substantial intellectual contributions, there's every reason to listen to him more than random undergraduates waxing profound.
This issue is, of course, totally up my alley, and I should certainly blog about it. But I can't, because I'm on hiatus! (Right?) So, as an experiment, I made a video of myself talking rather than simply typing my words into the ...