The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrolog… - John Allen Paulos

Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify.

Define God in a sufficiently nebulous way as beauty, love, mysterious complexity, or the ethereal taste of strawberry shortcake, and most atheists become theists. Still, although one can pose as Humpty Dumpty and aver, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” others needn’t play along.

The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe.