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Evanescent

This word is from one of the books that I am now reading, Mark Jerome Walters' Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinctions on a Hawai'ian Island. This book is a fascinating portrayal of the myriad difficulties involved with trying to save an endangered species. Evanescent (ev-uh-NES-uhnt) [Latin ÄvÄnÄscent- (s. of ÄvÄnÄscÄns): vanishing, disappearing.] adj. vanishing; fading away; fleeting. tending to become imperceptible; scarcely perceptible. Usage: The bird, I sometimes imagined, were I to fully comprehend its many dimensions, could deepen my understanding of both…

The Sushi Conspiracy

As some of you might remember, I lived in Tokyo for awhile when I was a grad student. When I left the States, I had never eaten Japanese food before and, as a microbiologist, I was worried about my impending death after being eaten alive by parasitic worms that I would get from eating raw fish. I worried about this until I had my first taste of sushi. After my first taste of sushi, well, I didn't care if I died as the result of eating Japenese cuisine; I simply knew that I had to have more and that, if I did die, it would be with a smile and tuna sashimi on my lips. The food was fabulous…

Adoption Day!!!!!

More soon, but I can finally show you pictures of my whole family. We celebrated the adoption of Deniece, Rimonah, Judah, Malkiah and Hezekiah yesterday, to our incredible joy! I have professional pictures coming, and will do good ones of each individual child, but here's the best one of the whole family so far. Thanks to my mother, who bought the color-coordinated purple clothes for all 10 kids months ahead - when we still didn't know when there would be an adoption. From left - Eli (16 in a few days), Me (43), Rimonah (6), Deniece (13), Malkiah (4), Eric (45), Kai (3), Judah (6),…

Hmmmm....

This is an interesting paper indeed - a new PNAS paper argues that before an abrupt climate change, there is a characteristic SLOWING DOWN of climate change that might be a warning sign: Putting our results in an even wider perspective, it is important that slowing down is a universal property of systems approaching a tipping point. This implies that our techniques might in principle be used to construct operational early warning systems for critical transitions in a wider range of complex systems where tipping points are suspected to exist, ranging from disease dynamics and physiology to…

Baghdad, Indiana

"like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime" The LA Times' John Kenney reports: "...The F-14s flew by low. Each of us activated our earpieces and hand-held mini walkie-talkies, agreed on a frequency, and I slowed the car to 15 mph as Carol and the boys opened the doors and rolled out, taking cover under shrubbery near the Bibb lettuce stand (the boys love salad!)." Typical journamalisms! I mean, everybodyyyy knows that the F-14 was retired from service last year. The only people still flying F-14s are the Iranian Air Force... Oh, my god, you don't suppose they got Indiana…

RIP Osterbrock

Prof Don Osterbrock, of the University of California at Santa Cruz former director of the Lick Observatory had a heart attack and passed away yesterday, Jan 11th 2007. There will be a shot remembrance at lunch today at UCSC, with a more formal celebration of his life to be scheduled at a later date. A View of the Future As Seen From the Past UC Bio I just saw him in Santa Cruz three months ago, had a nice chat with him about spectroscopic variability of double AGNs and prospects for doing a broad search for close black hole binaries, he was really fired up about the new observing techniques…

Dark Energy

The following are the competing mission concepts for the JDEM (Joint Dark Energy Mission) launch slot: SNAP DESTINY also press info here ADEPT All of these make an interesting case, although how much could be done from the ground with modest HST and JWST followup is a key issue. It'd be interesting to learn whether DoE would accept a NASA-style forced marriage on mission concepts, which has happened in the past when two groups have different strengths for mission concepts, and only one slot is open. PS: NASA press conference on thursday - reputedly they will have tighter data points on the…

I know...

What Chuck Norris can never do. The question whose answer is 42 Who the jams are and why we must kick them out The axioms of physics Whether Hissing Sid was guilty Whether P=NP How 7/3 arises in Navier-Stokes theory The bin you can never choose from Whether to be or not to be W' Our place in the universe The chemistry of Cold Dark Matter What evil is How magnetic fields reconnect The emergence of consciousness What life is Where the aliens are The Nine Billion Names of God Whether any given program will halt But I ain't telling. Do you know?

AAS: more snippets

more assorted science results from AAS Jimmy Irwin et al (UoM) has a Chandra x-ray source in an extragalactic globular - and they have Magellan spectra. Surprise! No H lines. There is O and N - WTF is N emission doing there? Suggestion is that it is a white dwarf tidally disrupted by an intermediate mass black hole... Maybe. That N emission is bothersome, shouldn't be there. Press release at Chandra website. click to embiggen Nidever et al have Green Bank Radio Telescope data showing the Magellanic stream is quite extended... Press release at NRAO Pretty Picture!! - click to embiggen…

did you hear...

that Iran said, that Israel said, that Cheney said to Oman that the US might attack Iran... unsourced, unsubstantiated, speculative but do the Iranians believe it? Press TV (Iran) also has an unscientific "quick poll" on that website according to it, 2/3 of respondents think Fallon resigned from CENTCOM over issue of attack on Iran game of perceptions, innit. Cheney also said he believed Iran may have restarted its nuclear weapons development program. He also went fishing in the Gulf on the sultan's boat. I wonder if his personal intelligence estimate is a probability of more or less than 0.…

how many deadlines?

so... does anyone know if signatures drawn using Adobe Illustrator, or equivalent, count? yes it is mini-proposal season and the e-mails and faxed are humming I actually played with illustrator to see if I could do a convincing signature writing with a mouse - couldn't quite pull it off and was reduced to finding a working scanner - we've gone rapidly from The One Precious Scanner, too scanners littering every desktop, to The One Precious Scanner Which Still Works Funny that 'cause scanned sigs pasted into PDFs count, which seems slightly risque, espcially given federal agencies proclivity…

pirates, a-hoy!

A WaPo op-ed unveils a new skulk of the usual suspects. On the starboard side, mateys. MindingTheCampus.com "Dedicated to the revival of intellectual pluralism and the best traditions of liberal education at America's universities." "best"? "liberal"? Really? With a Horowitz article right on the frontpage... Sponsored by The Manhattan Institute - http://www.manhattan-institute.org and its "Center for the American University" - http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cau.htm I never knew they cared. Why .com, and not .org for the subsidiary? On a completely unrelated issue UC Irvine hires…

Unknown Knowns

Ok, so the USAF knew there was something interesting in Taurus in the summer of 1967, but they didn't tell anyone or follow it up, so it didn't count. It was an "unknown known"! So, for a while, were gamma-ray bursts; adaptive optics and public key cryptography. So... what current unknown knowns do you think we have right now? That we may or may not hear about 40 years from now? What discovery, invention or nifty useful or fun science of technology thingie is known by a small number of people out there, but buried by classification or stored in some vast warehouse at an undisclosed location…

iPod Classic Remakes

A pseudonymous commenter proposes a Classic of Rock and Roll for remake as an iPod v-ad Namely this: This is like, so krazy k00l. A fair fraction of my iTunes purchases are random "songs of my youth", not one hit wonders necessarily, but feel-good music from bands where I may not want a whole album, not even a "best of", but I do want a random mix of "classics". Get the right demographic targeted, or some viral campaigns, and some olde groups could have decent late iTunes sales and resurgent ringtone sales. I'd personally want to see this remade into iPod ad: or this: and definitely this…

Frederik Pohl on Alan Turing

Following up on my post from a few days ago, a short appreciation of Alan Turing by noted sf author Frederik Pohl: The close of Pride Month seems an apt time to talk about Alan Turing, inventor of the famed Turing Test for identifying independent intelligence in computers, worked for the British code breakers in World War II, and was one of the leading figures who successfully cracked the secret German messages, a feat which played a considerable part in the victory over Hitler. Pohl is one of my all-time favourite sf authors and his blog The Way the Future Blogs is an excellent updating of…

Presidential positions on science revealed…or not

You can now read McCain's position, as well as Obama's, on science policy at SEFORA and at Science Debate 2008. I tried to read them comparatively — the big differences that jumped out at me are that McCain wants to build lots and lots of nuclear power plants, and that McCain runs away from the issues of genetics and stem cells as fast as he can — but I just can't care very much about McCain's answers at all. I don't believe anything positive he might say. I just want to ask, if he is so pro-science, does that mean we can ask his running mate about the dinosaurs now?

Best Science Books 2009: The New York Times

A pretty good list from the Times, who've been a bit spotty with their lists the last few years. The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by…

Non-priests too opulent, declares Pope

The Pope has berated selfish secularists: Pope Benedict XVI condemned unbridled "pagan" passion for power, possessions and money as a modern-day plague Saturday as he led more than a quarter of a million Catholics in an outdoor Mass in Paris. But…this is from the Mr Fancy Pants in silk clothes with gold stitching who lives here: The pope has already hit the max in flashy clothes and overly elaborate residences, so the only way to increase the glitz is to pose against a backdrop of dreary people in dun clothes living in shacks, I guess. More poverty, please! We need to make the papacy look…

NIC is back!

The Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Objects Spectrograph on the Hubble has been resuscitated. Damn, that means those 50 odd supplemental proposals are in the running as well as the almost three hundred WFPC2 proposals already in the queue... "As of 1:20pm EST Tuesday 16 December 2008, the compressor on the NICMOS Cooling System / NICMOS Cryo-cooler (NICMOS NCS/NCC) was restarted and the system has since started cooling successfully, with NICMOS expected to be operational in a few weeks from now." They let the pump warm to 10C, the blockage must indeed have been water ice and it is gone - cold…

because linking is an intrinsic good

Look to your left. Now look to your right. No. Lower. Ah, there. See it? Science News from the New York Times. And right back at ya. Yes! ScienceBlogs and The New York Times are now link buddies. We link to them. They link to us. On a "best of..." basis. I'm not quite sure if this makes the NYT more hip, or us more stodgy, but I am sure it all for the best. Guess I'll be owing Overbye some more link love, eh? NYT started off with a link to Chad's Quantum Burger. Chad is apparently frozen out today, so he may not know this yet...

Those wacky muslims

Now one Islamic cleric has declared that Mickey Mouse must die. He's unclean, after all. "Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases." Mr Munajid seems to be a little confused about what is real and what is fiction, but at least this is a step up from declaring that people should die. And then there is this: Last month Mr Munajid condemned the Beijing Olympics as the "bikini Olympics", claiming that nothing made Satan happier than seeing females athletes dressed in skimpy outfits. Looks like another bit of…

Let's Become Terrorists for Jeebus!

tags: evangelical christians, religion, brainwashing children, streaming video Do you want to see something truly frightening? This streaming video is a trailer from a documentary that shows how evangelical christians are brainwashing children into becoming an army for jesus. This is simply outrageous, not only because of the blatant brainwashing, but also because it is just what muslim extremists are doing with their kids. When will the world wake up and realize that religion is the cause of most of the world's problems? When will we wake up and realize that religion is nothing more than…

Old wounds

Remember the Viet Nam war? I know, we've been suffering with the most recent military cock-up, but it's still worth looking back at what evil old Tricky Dick was up to. A new batch of tape transcripts from White House discussions about the war have been released, and wouldn't you know it — Nixon was engineering the defeat, putting pressure on the South Vietnamese government to accept a settlement that would lead to failure, but would at least postpone defeat until after the American elections. Did I really need to be reminded that practically my entire lifelong exposure to American politics…

This is what real militants do

We uppity obnoxious "New Atheists" often get called "militant" or "rabid" or even "fundamentalist", and unless you're doing it as a joke, it's highly inappropriate. Real rabid radicals do things like these animal rights lunatics, who have targeted the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, setting fire to his vacation home and stealing his mother's ashes from her gravesite. Now that is unconscionable and damaging behavior. The site also has a poll, if you've been pining away for one lately. Maybe you can express how the actions of the real militants make you feel. Animal research: Is necessary 43…

A Visit to the Emperor Penguin Rookery at Snow Hill Island, Antarctica

tags: antarctica, emperor penguins, penguin rookery, official blogger, Quark Expeditions, streaming video Here's one of several videos by Quark Expeditions, the group from whom I am trying to win the official blogger job ("Penguin Whisperer") for their February 2010 Antarctic trip .. I think that, after watching this video, you will agree with me that I'd be a superb choice for official blogger because I am familiar with penguins and other birds and would love to tell you more about them in words, pictures and video, as I experience them in real life (as well as telling you about the voyage…

The Declaration of Independence

tags: politics, the declaration of independence, fourth of july, independence day, streaming video The United States was born with a single document -- the Declaration of Independence. Have you actually read it? Few people get beyond "... Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." But it really is fascinating. It lays out all the justifications for separation from Great Britain. And it clearly states the founding ideals. In this video, you'll get a chance to hear the entire document read by some of Hollywood's A-list celebrities. But the words are the real stars. It's not a perfect document…

I am Helping a Natural History Museum with Darwin Day

tags: Darwin Day, Idaho Museum of Natural History, Darwin's Green Side: Discoveries in Evolutionary Botany, evolution, education, teaching, public outreach Here's some interesting news: the Idaho Museum of Natural History asked permission to use some of my images from Darwin's Garden and Greenhouse photoessays for their Darwin Day celebration! (Do you remember my wonderful trip to London that you paid for?) The museum is presenting a special exhibit, Darwin's Green Side: Discoveries in Evolutionary Botany [free PDF], that focuses on Darwin's work with plants. If you live in Southern Idaho…

Monckton on the loose again

Non-lord Christopher Monkton is out and about again after laying low for a while, calling people nazis, using his Pink Portcullis coat of arms, etc. Greenman has a short video on that, though I must say I found more interesting the clips and content on James Delingpole. I must say he does not come out looking too good in that! Seriously though, it is a perfect analogy no wonder he faltered and stuttered like he just woke up from one of those dreams where you are naked in a crowd only to find it was no dream. I actually felt embarrased for him! Think he mistook this cartoon as a "How To"…

Worth reading: Survival, harassment, and independence

A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Alana Semuels in The Atlantic: How Poor Single Moms Survive Nina Martin of ProPublica interviews David Cohen: For Abortion Providers, a Constant Barrage of Personalized Harassment Terry Fulmer at the Health Affairs Blog: Independence -- It's What Older People Want Charles D. Ellison at The Root: Wake Up, Black People. The Supreme Court Is Poised to Drop a Bomb on You Vanessa Heggie in The Guardian: World AIDS Day: How AIDS activists changed medical research (also, it's not a new publication, but World AIDS Day was a good opportunity to re-read this…

Let's Talk About Kachingle

The Kachingle social micropayment site has been nagging me periodically for the past year. It's something along the lines of Flattr, and finally I thought OK, let's try this out. All they want from me is my email address and my permission. And would you believe it – I just got a US cent. Micropayment indeed. Looking at their web site it seems that there's a way to make those cents arrive more often by installing a clickable widget. But it looks a lot like the only way for me to get that widget is to start putting money into the system myself as a subscriber. Pyramid scheme, much? So, Dear…

Distributed Sun-Staring

Human eyes and brains are still way, way better at image recognition than computers. There are many visual tasks that we do swiftly ourselves but that we can't yet get machines to do reliably at all. In January of '06 I blogged about the Stardust @ Home project where you can help identify particles of interplanetary dust and comet-tail debris in a huge library of digital micrographs. Now I've learned from the BBC's Digital Planet podcast about Solar Stormwatch, where you can help forecast coronal mass ejections and other destructive solar activity that humanity needs early warning about.…

Roland Emmerich: the upscale Uwe Boll

I've been seeing all the ads for this new movie, 10,000 BC, but I haven't even been tempted to want to think about going to see it. Come on, people: One Million Years B.C., while even more grossly inaccurate, at least had Raquel Welch in that adorable bikini, and Quest for Fire had the invention of the missionary position. This movie has nothing but nicely modeled woolly mammoths, and I don't see any teenagers stampeding the head shops for that poster to hang on their bedroom walls. Anyway, here's a review of the latest dreck from Emmerich. That's as close as I'm getting to it.

New Book on the Early History of the Stockholm Archipelago

In addition to the archive reports on my two seasons of fieldwork at the Late Medieval and Early Modern harbour of Djurhamn, I have now published a paper that discusses and interprets the results. It's in a symposium volume from the Royal Academy of Letters, edited by my friend Katarina Schoerner and bearing the name SkärgÃ¥rd och Ãrlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgÃ¥rds tidiga historia. ("Archipelago and naval warfare. Case studies in the early history of the Stockholm archipelago"). Other contributors are Jonathan Adams, Kajsa Althén, Jan Glete, Sven Lilja, Peter Norman, Mary Pousette,…

NRK nationalised

In order to prove my financial acuity, when Northern Rock fell to about 200p and the govt guaranteed its deposits, I bought £250 worth, believing it would bounce back. Its now down to 90p, and the news now is that its to be nationalised. My shares are now worth so little I hardly care, but this looks to be a disaster in the making, or rather in the continuing. I can't see the govt making a success of running a bank. I guess the people who gain from the mess will be the vast numbers of lawyers and auditors who will spend the next decade crawling over the carcass sucking out any blood that…

You could have knocked me down with a feather

RP Sr sez: "We have shown in several studies that the downscaling of multi-year global model predictions by regional climate models is very strongly dependent on the lateral boundary conditions of the parent model". Good grief, really? Well you'd hope so, wouldn't you, since thats exactly what is supposed to happen. It looks like rumours of RPs blog retirement have been greatly exaggerrated, though alas he is following in Pat Michaels footsteps by not allowing comments. And if you're going to talk tosh like my quote from him above, thats a very good idea indeed. And we all love pre-…

Tolkien grave

Taking a walk from a course at lunchtime I come across Wolvercote cemetary and little signs pointing to "J R R Tolkien, author". So I follow them. And there he is, along with Edith aka Luthien (checking up on wiki I find that "Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W" - isn't that cute. Just think what might have happened had he started on F, instead). On the grave is a thick red book, which proves on inspection to be a copy of LORT in,…

Holy Science Museums, Rapman!

It seems that Chris Rapley is moving on from Director of BAS to be director of the Science Museum. He said... I am thrilled at the prospect of taking on the leadership of such a cherished national institution, especially as the task I have been set is to make it the most admired museum of its type in the world. This will include building the museum's international profile and reputation, strengthening its national position and being the benchmark for best practice. Well, good luck to him. Bring on Nick Owens. [Update: maybe he can get rid of the stupid Giant Ring, or maybe kick out the…

Fornvännen's Spring Issue On-Line

Fornvännen 2011:1 is half a year old, and so has been published as an open-access full-text journal. Six months is the Berlin Declaration's limit for what qualifies as Open Access. Check it out! Joakim Goldhahn on early Swedish rock art documentation Frans-Arne Stylegar et al. on two bronze masks from Avaldsnes in western Norway that look Celtic and may thus either be pre-Roman or Viking in date Jonas Monié Nordin on rural Medieval social/religious guilds Sonja Hukantaival on Finnish folk magic as seen in archaeology and early folklore documentation Sven-Gunnar Broström et al. on new…

Dismay as climate science bosses travel in private jet?

Mark Lynas has a posting on this (sadly I can't work out how to link to it directly, so I'll have to tell you its the Oct 19th post), saying that various from the NOC have nipped off to the states in a private jet. Which is probably dubious. But the disturbing (to me) point about the post was the assumption he appears to have that all climate-related researchers are required to believe in GW and live the life. I thought we were supposed to be doing science in as value-neutral a way as possible and trying to keep our personal beliefs out of it.

Fuel for Thought

Michael Tobis is always worth reading, but he has a particularily well done essay up on Gristmill about some of the deeper implications and causes of the current global food crisis. Visit his post about it here, and after bookmarking his site, click through to the Gristmill article he has linked. I think he dismisses too much the importance of biofuel demand in the current equation, but that is a minor disagreement. He correctly identifies the real problem as one of food distribution being governed by financial mechanisms only, and the lamentable lack of any other metric aside from ability…

Revealed: the man behind court attack on Gore film

...so says the headline of a Guardian news paper report from one week ago (this has very likely been covered already in other climate blogs but I am too far behind on my blog reading to know any better!) The school governor who challenged the screening of Al Gore's climate change documentary in secondary schools was funded by a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists' claims about global warming. Hardly the grassroots at work here, surprise surprise. Al Gore's spokesperson hase already addressed the ruling's list of 9 "errors" in…

WSOP Extra Chips Mystery: Solved

Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli appear to have solved the mystery of where the extra $2 million in chips during the World Series of Poker main event came from. The answer is: incompetence. They pinpoint it down to a single break on day 7, when the $5000 chips were colored up into $25,000 chips. Instead of exchanging one stack of $25K chips for a rack of $5K chips (500k for 500k), they gave 2 stacks of $25K chips, or $1 million, per rack of $5K chips. That was a big advantage to the bigger stacks at that point. The incompetence is pretty much unforgivable on the part of Harrah's.

Christianity and Hitler Again

As a follow up on the question of Christianity and Adolf Hitler, I refer you to this 2003 article in Free Inquiry. I don't agree with all of it, nor do I really put the blame for Hitler on Christianity (we must bear in mind that a great many Christians both risked and gave their lives to fight against Hitler and to protect his victims and hide them from Nazi soldiers). But I don't think any reasonable person familiar with the history could deny that centuries of Christian anti-semitism, found in both Catholic and Protestant traditions and advocated by prominent church fathers and theologians…

Randall Terry's Family Values

Recognize these folks? It's Randall Terry and his family. The picture is taken from the mailers he sends out in his campaign for the State Senate in Florida. But it's missing two of his children, Jameil and Tila, both adopted. Why aren't they in the picture? Well, Jamiel is gay. And Tila had a baby out of wedlock. And we wouldn't want to spoil that image of a perfect family, would we? For that matter, there's no mention of the wife of 19 years he divorced only to marry his 22 year old personal assistant 7 months later either. Tell us all about your "family values" again, Randy.

Stand Up for Kansas

As Carl Zimmer notes, the IDers are pouring huge amounts of money into Kansas in advance of the August primary elections for the state school board. Kansas has been a battleground since 1999. And as Zimmer also notes, the pro-science folks are getting no support at all from our side. I urge you all to support the Kansas Alliance for Education and Kansas Citizens for Science. Another good project to support is Jeremy Mohn's Stand Up for Real Science project, an answer to the DI's campaign. Jeremy is a biology teacher in Kansas fighting a battle against the incredibly well-funded Discovery…

The Second Phase of ScienceBlogs

ScienceBlogs is set to launch into a new phase in about 15 minutes, with about 25 new blogs joining the list. They're also rolling out a whole new homepage that looks dramatically different from the old one. I can't tell you all the new blogs that are joining us, but a few of them are really exciting to me personally because I'm a fan already. And I can't wait to explore the rest of them and find new gems. So head on over there in a little while and see the new kids on the block. And if you run into Tim, our tech guy, you might wanna give him some oxygen.

More ID Whining

In addition to their constant whining about us "Stalinist" evolution supporters oppressing them, it seems the ID crowd has a new complaint: anti-ID "bigotry". Dembski's latest whine declares "Anti-ID bigots -- they're everywhere in the academy, and your tax dollars support them!" He then posts part of an email from an anonymous ID supporter complaining of opposition among the scientists he works with. I'm sorry, Bill, but disagreement is not the same thing as bigotry. Victim chic is annoying enough when it's engaged in by people who have historically faced oppression; it's downright…

Roy Moore for Alabama Governor

Judge Roy Moore, a genuine theocrat, is running for governor in his home state of Alabama and he's currently not doing very well. The polls show that he is trailing by a 2-1 margin to incumbent Bob Riley. And I found this rationalization from one of his pals rather amusing: The Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition in Washington, D.C., and a good friend of Moore's, said he believes Moore's support is stronger than the polls indicate. "He seems to have strong grass-roots support that doesn't poll strongly," he said. I think he might be right. After all, how many of…

Stop Nodding!

Rob Knop talks about a great teaching moment: A student who refused to just smile and nod: I was very grateful for that student. You see, when professors ask, "do you understand that?", it's not a test. It's not the professor trying to catch the students up in admitting to being confused, it's not the professor trying to sepearate the good students (Hermiones) from the bad students, the latter being the ones who will admit to struggling with the material. When we ask the question "do you understand that?" we ask it because we want to, yes, find out if the students understood what we just did…

You Can't Tell the Players Without a Program

Via Jim Henley, a handy guide to the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity: Catholics Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of Catholicism: discuss). Catholics all wear matching uniforms, and are divided into "parishes," or "squadrons," to make choosing softball teams easier. Catholics are rigidly controlled by a hidebound hierarchy that starts with priests and ends with priests' housekeepers. Catholics are not allowed to read…