Carl Sagan's new article can be found in the March/April 2007 edition of Skeptical Inquirer. It is titled "Science's Vast Cosmic Perspective Eludes Religion." Well, okay. As you know, Carl Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996. This "new" article was actually prepared by Ann Druyan, based on lectures Sagan gave…
Not very well, according to this article from Salon.com. Here's an excerpt: Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require…
Madison Avenue is so clever these days that most commercials are, to some extent, fun to watch. Adbusters.org is working hard to top Madison Avenue, though, with its own spoof commercials. Some of these are quite well done. You'll find more of Adbuster's spoof ads here. Here's what Adbusters…
One year ago, I made my first tentative post to this blog. It was really a test more than a post, as were the handful of posts for the next two weeks. We really didn’t get running until mid-March, 2006.
In that month of March 2006, “Grumpypilgrim” and I were happy to see that, on average, 29 people visited this site every day. Probably 20 of these daily visits were me. This month (February, 2007), there have been almost 2,000 visits to this site every day. I guarantee that most of them are not me. Over the life of this blog, we’ve now published 830 posts and we’ve received more than 3,000 comments.
I am honored that so many people would take the time to visit this site and to actually stay for awhile. The average visitor reads three pages, the most commonly read page being the home page, which consists of the ten most recent posts.
I am truly fortunate to be sharing this space with my co-authors. Some of them, such as Jason, have been my friends for a long time. Others are people I’ve met (in person or electronically) more recently. I carefully read everything each of them posts to this site.
Many people ask whether I can tell who is visiting the blog. The answer is no. My traffic software does not provide me with any meaningful identifying information. It does show me, though, that most visitors are from the U.S. Next in line are “unknown,” …
Today is the first anniversary of my dad’s death. Yesterday I came home from the crematorium “with me dad took’d under me arm,” to badly paraphrase the children’s song about Ann Boleyn. Death doesn’t frighten me in an abstract way. I grew up with Tom Lehrer music, Charles Addams cartoons, Hitchcock short story books, and other foils to the timid mortal. This package of charred and calcined particles I carry in the crook of my arm is merely a transient monument to the man in whom they once dwelled.
Although my father died a year ago, his ashes just now returned from the medical school circuit. He was first and foremost an educator, and this seems a fitting final use for his corporeal remains. It was also was his expressed wish.
“Ashes to ashes” is a lame phrase to someone whose head was usually far beyond the clouds. I grew up perfectly aware that my body was made up of ashes from the remains of a supernova, as is the rest of our solar system. The even my cell nuclei are literally composed of decayed nuclear waste!
Not all of the mass of these coarse ashes was actually part of his body during his life. Cremation binds oxygen to any atom that will have it, increasing the total mass from the proteins being torn apart and vaporized by the process. Sort of like how 6 lbs (a gallon) of gasoline produces 30 lbs of greenhouse C02
It doesn’t …