The Millennium Shrimp

I’m not a particular fan of hardcore Atheism, but I’m even less a fan of Creationism. Here’s a good example why:

PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist who blogs and engages Creationists in debate over evolutionary theory reports that the producers of the Creationist film Expelled kicked him out of the theater a few days ago:

They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn’t notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn’t recognize him. My guest was …

Richard Dawkins.

He’s in the theater right now, watching their movie.

Now, technically, they are within their rights not allowing someone to watch their movie. A Movie theater is private property and you can kick someone out for parting their hair the wrong way if you want to. But (a) it’s not very Christian to throw someone out just because they disagree with you. (b) It just makes you look like a ham-fisted moron when you can’t even do it right.

In case you don’t know who Richard Dawkins is, he’s a rather prominent evolutionary biologist who’s also firmly anti-Creationism. The fact that the producer wanted to kick out a blogger and not the author of “The God Delusion” just makes you wonder.

According to the Beeb, Columbia has confirmed the death of an Ecuadorian citizen in a cross-border raid on a FARC camp three weeks ago. Rafel Correa’s government has not yet commented, but has previously stated that it will not forgive the killing of Ecuadorian Franklin Aisalia and promised a strong diplomatic response. The Columbian military has not specifically identified the individual killed by name, but Aisalia’s family has stated that they’ve confirmed the identity from media pictures.

Amanda emailed us a prayer request last week for the international crisis that Columbia’s raid has caused:

I’m sending you this message to ask you all to pray for Ecuador. Those
of you who follow international news have probably heard that Colombia attacked a rebel camp inside the Ecuadorian border and, understandably, the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa got a little upset about that.
Ecuador cut off diplomatic relations with Colombia. Things escalated when the U.S. expressed support for Colombia and Venezuela supported Ecuador (and also cut off diplomatic relations with Colombia). Things were
pretty tense this week. Both Ecuador and Venezuela sent troops to their borders with Colombia. There was talk of going to war (which really neither country was in a position to do). Things have calmed down a bit
since then. The presidents got together and agreed to work this out diplomatically. So that’s good news. But please pray for this situation.

From London’s Telegraph:

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time, paying a surprise visit to pray at the tomb of St Francis of Assisi.

Gorbachev’s acknowledgment confirms decades of speculation that, although he publicly professed Atheism in line with Soviet dogma, he was in fact a secret believer.
(more…)

From the Beeb:

A woman whose parents disappeared during military rule in Argentina wants the couple who adopted her to be jailed for kidnap and concealment.

Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragan was born in a secret camp run by the Argentine military . She, along with some 200 children who were born in these camps, was taken by a family with connections to the Argentine military who forged paperwork to make her appear to be their natural born daughter. Some 10-30,000 people disappeared or were killed during the period of military rule between 1976 and 1983. Her birth parents are still listed as missing.

(more…)

Here’s your military porn of the day

Later this year, scientists will put a 40,000-pound chemical laser in the belly of a gunship flying at 300 mph and take aim at targets as far away as five miles. Boeing’s new Advanced Tactical Laser will cook trucks, tanks, radio stations—the kinds of things hit with missiles and rockets today..

The article, part of Popular Science’s “How it works” goes on to describe how the ATL will work.

(more…)

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who co-wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was 90…

In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke once said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit.

“One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time,” he said. “Move over, Stephen King.”

More commentary here and here.

The Wikipedia article on Childhood’s End is here.

0 Comments

European Archaeology
Ancient Roman throne found
Archaeologists today announced the discovery of a wood and ivory throne in the villa thought to belong to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (the father-in-law of Julius Caesar). Caesoninus’ villa, known to archaeologists as the Villa of the Papyri because of the thousands of scrolls found there during excavations, was preserved along with the rest of Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and buried the area under meters of volcanic ash. Only the back and legs of the throne were preserved and feature bas-relief carvings depicting mythological figures such as Attis and Dionysis. The throne was found 25 m below the present ground surface, which illustrates how deeply the city was buried (the chair would have been on the surface when the eruption began).

Wire story in Globe and Mail:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071204.wthrone1204/BNStory/Science/home

Pictures from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7128553.stm

Grotto of Roman legend revealed
(more…)

From Smithsonian Magazine

Just last month, a study published in the research journal Science secured more pieces in the cat-domestication puzzle based on genetic analyses. All domestic cats, the authors declared, descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris, which literally means “cat of the woods.” Cats were first domesticated in the Near East, and some of the study authors speculate that the process began up to 12,000 years ago.

The human domestic relationship with the house cat began with the development of agriculture and the development of a cultural need for vermin control. A role that cats seem to remember, even if we don’t. Our cats at home would occasionally leave dead mice or moles in a conspicuous place, like they were letting us know that they were still on the job.

“Clearly when we draw up a battle plan for what we’ve been working for the last several years, trying to get SCO’s intellectual property rights fought through in the courts and the marketplace, the endgame didn’t have this sort of outcome for me personally,”

Daryl McBride (link: interview in Salt Lake Tribune) is leaving as CEO of SCO Group after driving them into bankruptcy and earning himself possible even more animus in the FOSS and Linux communities through a series of “kamikaze” lawsuits.  However, as Linux Watch notes:

In addition to his CEO pay, McBride received a 70 percent bonus in 2007 on his base salary of $265,000. His total compensation for the year that SCO sank into bankruptcy was $571,220.

Yep, I’m definitely in the wrong business. Won’t someone pay me $500,000 to run their company into the ground.

“What is this thing, anyway?” said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands.

“It’s called a shovel,” said the Senior Wrangler. “I’ve seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical.”

— (Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man)

 

Well, in case you haven’t heard, we’ve been hit with a huge spring snow storm. First Mennonite cancelled services (Geoff Bowden may still have showed up, but probably not anyone else); the pastors and other Ohio Conference delegates were stuck out in Bluffton and, well, it’s a lot of snow. I was talking with my cousin June last evening and her husband, Chad, and Joe Troyer, who were also out at the conference, had gotten as far as Mansfield before they gave up and got a motel room.

I finally got outside and started digging out around 11 o’clock. It may not be obvious, but shoveling snow is very similar to archaeological excavation (When you’re digging out from under 14″ of snow, you have a lot of time to think about things like this.) Of course, having lived in Vermont and Maine, where it starts snowing sometime around the end of September and generally lets up for a few weeks by the beginning of June, I’m sort of used to seeing a clear series of discreet depositional events in a profile/snow bank. You’ll get 20″ of snow, the diurnal cycle freezing and thawing soon creates a crust, and then the whole process repeats itself a few days later. Sandwiched in between the hard upper crust of the first layer and the soft fluffy bottom of the superimposed layer you’ll often find traces of human activity – depositions of snow and ice, rock salt, cinders and a garden gnome or two or mittens. In archaeological parlance, this boundary between depositional events is a surface – an area that was exposed long enough for human activity to take place on or around it.

The snow on my front porch, of course, represents one single deposition event, but even within that we can make stratigraphic distinctions. The first thing that archaeological students are taught is the importance of digging within natural strata. Generally, however, when archaeologists are talking about strata, they don’t mean exactly the same thing that geologists mean. For instance, from the perspective of a physical geographer or a sedimentary geologist, a soil pedon is going to represent basically one depositional event. Most archaeologists, however, will treat the soil’s individual horizons as separate context, at least as far as the initial context is concerned. So, returning to the example of the fourteen inches of snow on my front steps, can we discriminate between different phases, even within the same depositional event? Maybe. Snow will not be of a uniform density throughout the profile. It becomes denser, and thus heavier to lift, the further down you go in the profile. Now, normally this isn’t a huge issue, but when you’re dealing with fourteen inches of snow, the last four inches of snow seems to be heavier than the ten inches above it. I didn’t actually weigh it to see if this observation is correct, but I found it remarkably easy to lop off the first ten inches and toss it aside and then go after the last four inches or so.

Who says College doesn’t teach you anything useful? Six years of higher education and three minutes of poking at the snow to gain knowledge that my next-door neighbor was willing to impart for free. “It’s a lot easier if you take off the top half first.”

**Update**

I went out again later in the afternoon (4-ish) and I couldn’t tell a difference in the density of the snow from the top of the snow to the bottom, other than a lot of freezing water in the bottom half inch or so.