Month: October 2009

If you’re anything like me at all – in that you enjoy watching very smart people being very smart (and hilarious) – you won’t be able to watch just one episode of QI. Stephen Fry hosts a comic quiz show, where the points are for being interesting rather than correct. This particular episode has the…

Bishop John Shelby Spong has given up arguing with Christians about homosexuality. It’s a position I’ve been at for a while, but he writes it so much more eloquently: http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/34674.asp

…and not only that, the water contains enough oxygen for living things! Jupiter’s Moon Europa Has Enough Oxygen For Life Incredibly exciting news for those of us who wonder whether there might be life anywhere else in the universe… there seems to be a pretty excellent chance there might be some on Europa. It’d definitely…

Glenn Greenwald on David Rohde and why Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay will continue to haunt America for some time yet: David Rohde on the “why do they hate us?” question Note, too, the vast gap between how Americans perceive of their actions (mere “aberrations”) and how so much of the rest of the…

The first post on this blog is for the 18th of October, 2004. I think I may have lost 100 or so posts in a crash, so the real anniversary of the blog is a little earlier, but in terms of what’s archived here, this blog is 5 years old today.

Tried to improve it each time… and ended up being kept awake by the poetry (such as it is) after the fly was gone… Lonely fly wanders My room as sleep beckons me Chemical death solves Lonely fly wanders In my room as sleep beckons Pyrethrum’s blessing Irritating buzz Pyrethrum’s benediction Sleep bought at death’s…

…and the other is a Cray Supercomputer: (just jokes) Photo credit: ChrisH

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/10/11/nobel_cole/ As usual, he has good and intelligent, well-informed things to say.

Someone in a forum discussion had made the claim that the loss of religious faith in Western Europe was caused by belief in evolution. Certainly there’s a correlation there, but we know what they say about that and causality, don’t we boys and girls? So I went looking. Sacred and secular: religion and politics worldwide…

Now, just because it’s hilarious, Hugh Dennis walks like a dinosaur:

That line from Kate Bush’s very excellent “Cloudbusting” keeps playing in my head today: (You may recall it was recycled in Utah Saints’ also-fun “Something Good”): So, I guess I hope that this is my spidey-sense tingling, not just a false alarm. 😉

I was also thinking today that the model of ‘God’ I described here could potential deal with the atheist self-description of ‘believer in one fewer gods’1 if I add the additional feature that every human-described god throughout history is a human projection onto the ‘screen’ of that infinite God. In other words, this is not…

Science fiction novelist David Brin gets his rant on: http://open.salon.com/blog/david_brin/2009/10/03/a_rant_about_stupidity_and_the_coming_civil_war

As I may have mentioned before, for my sins or out of masochism I’ve been discussing creationism and evolution at www.EducateTruth.com over the past couple of weeks. I’ve made every effort to be polite and civil, and though I’m sure I’ve failed sometimes, on the whole I’ve been perceived by others as being civil. Most…

Those who’ve been reading here for a long time have seen this theme before. Just felt like it was time for a change… Feedback welcome of course.

Here’s an excellent article from science writer Carl Zimmer about the publication this week in Science of a lot of findings about ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid creature found in the fossil record and believed to be about 4.4 million years old. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/10/01/ardipithecus-we-meet-at-last/ There’s lots of interesting stuff in the article, and I commend it to…

Our Faculty has a new-fangled ‘workload calculator’ system that is meant to ensure that everyone does their fair share of work. Which is a good idea. The goal is that each person will work a total of 1800 points worth of work, made up of teaching, research and service, each year. My points this year?…