Monthly Archives: December 2010

My New Favorite Christmas Song

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Google Books App for iPad

Free books by the millions? I haven’t downloaded the app for my iPad yet, but this looks really seductive. I wonder what the catch is: Here’s the link: books.google.com/ebooks And I looked up Thoreau’s Walden. It reads pretty nice: http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=yiQ3AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader

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A New Atheist Ad Campaign: Choose Your Hell Realm

ABC News is reporting a $200,000 holiday season atheist ad campaign in the United States, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. One of the group’s ads sounds particularly interesting, for it specifically targets women: One of the association’s television spots … Continue reading

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California is Spain: A Debt Crisis Looms for the Golden State

This is front page news in the New York Times today, and, as a California resident, it’s alarming: [M]any state and local governments have so much debt — several trillion dollars’ worth, with much of it off the books and largely … Continue reading

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Adam Sandler’s “Happy Hanukkah” Song

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Handel’s Messiah in the Mall: Totalitarian Creepiness or Just a Song for the Holiday Season?

Even though I’m an agnostic, I love Christmas music and Christmas movies. I must, for example, have upward of 300 Christmas songs on my iPod. And every year my family and I watch Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and … Continue reading

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Gnu Atheism, Movement Conservatism, and Civility

At Commentary’s website this week, Peter Wehner appeals to his fellow conservatives to find, in themselves, a greater habit of civility, and resist the temptation to always confront one’s opposition in a spirit of relentless ridicule, dismissiveness, and ad hominem. What struck me in … Continue reading

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The Apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln into the Arms of George Washington, Accompanied by Angels and Light Breaking Through Clouds

I love this. It was drawn by an anonymous artist in the 1860s and is now housed as part of the collection at the George Eastman House:

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Has Felisa Wolfe-Simon Discovered Arsenic Based Life? Chemist Steven Benner is Skeptical for This Reason: “Arsenic compounds break down quickly in water while phosphorus compounds do not.”

The Washington Post today has an exceptionally clear report on Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s claim that she may have found arsenic based life at Mono Lake in California. Here’s how the Post piece opens: All life on Earth – from microbes to elephants … Continue reading

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Evolution v. Creation Watch: Felisa Wolfe-Simon on the Implications of Arsenic Based Life

In the below BBC clip for an upcoming special on whether there is life on other planets, Felisa Wolfe-Simon says something to the interviewer that ought to blow everyone away. If what she has indeed recently found at Mono Lake is … Continue reading

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Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s Microbes are Not Just Arsenic Loving, They’re Arsenic Based, and That’s Why This News is HUGE

How on earth did the Mono Lake arsenic eating microbes discovered by Felisa Wolfe-Simon go (presumably) from eating phosphorus and utilizing phosphorus in their DNA to eating arsenic and utilizing arsenic in their DNA? This is far more than just another extremophile organism … Continue reading

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Dr. Lewis Dartnell on Arsenic Based Life in Mono Lake: “They’re aliens, but aliens that share the same home as us.”

In front of the NASA news conference scheduled for 11:00 AM Pacific time, reliable news is finally leaking. A science correspondent for London’s Telegraph quotes an astrobiologist as saying this about a bacterial discovery in Mono Lake on the eastern side of … Continue reading

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NASA’s Felisa Wolfe-Simon Appears Poised to Announce Arsenic Based Life in Mono Lake

Today (Thursday), at 11:00 AM Pacific time, a team of NASA scientists appears poised to announce a discovery of arsenic based life at Mono Lake in California. The implications of this discovery are enormous. It means that NASA might begin an intensive … Continue reading

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Is Love, Beauty, and Ecstatic Vision Just a Higher Form of Pain?

The swoon, obsession, and agony of the heart after a visionary epiphany in Badfinger’s “Day After Day” (1971). And notice the role of memory in the haunting and heightening of longing for what is not, in fact, present:

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