A press release from NASA, already shared as well on Phil Plait’s blog Bad Astronomy, highlights exciting news: a planet has been discovered in the habitable zone around a sun-like star. It is not yet known whether the planet, which is roughly 2.4 times as large as earth, is predominantly gassy or rocky, nor whether it has liquid water. But it is in the appropriate zone in which having liquid water is possible. Click through to read more about this... Read more
The stormtroopers are hot on the heels of the Magi, and send their human conscripts to Bethlehem to try to kill the child. But even though Luke Skywalker gets there too late, Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus have escaped to safety… Read more
To err is human. To learn to take the time to revise and improve on first drafts of one’s work may not be divine but it sure is important. In the freshman class I teach, students are required to submit a first draft of most papers, which is then graded and given feedback, after which they have to revise the paper and submit their revised version. It is an attempt to teach freshmen the importance, indeed the necessity, of doing... Read more
The Doctor Who episode “The Space Museum” explores a temporal paradox of the sort that the show up until this point has largely sidestepped, but which has characterized the post-hiatus series. The Doctor and his companions arrive in a space museum, in which they find themselves and the TARDIS on display. The Doctor realizes that they are getting a glimpse of the future, and must work to prevent it from happening. A key question, of course, is why they can... Read more
I didn’t get the chance to post about this yesterday when the two blog posts about it came to my attention. Fitting squarely in the intersection of religion and science fiction – in the category of religion as sci-fi and/or sci-fi as religion – is the suggestion made by a religious group that an approaching comet is in fact the return of Jesus and the New Jerusalem. Being as high as it is wide, the New Jerusalem apparently will take... Read more
Daniel McClellan, in a post about a doctoral thesis defense related to the concept of “the jealous God,” included this image: What reaction does it provoke in you? Doesn’t it suggest that at times religious believers, including some of the Biblical authors, have depicted God as reflecting some of our worst human characteristics? If a human husband said that to his wife, we would classify it as domestic violence. And rightly so. It reflects a view of the wife as... Read more
A commercial for the University of Huddersfield, featuring the voice of Patrick Stewart. HT IO9Â Read more
I didn’t like this one as much as last year’s equivalent, but it has a few nice moments, and it is still worth sharing, if only as an illustration of the way some try to update ancient stories into a modern medium. HT Chris Brady Read more
Recent discussions with young-earth creationists have illustrated well how young-earth creationists do serious harm to the Bible, and not only science, in their bizarre attempts to treat the Bible as though it were a scientific textbook and science textbooks as though they were someone’s Bible. Take, for instance, the parallels that scholars have identified between days 1-3 and days 4-6 in Genesis 1, illustrated best by using a chart: The first three days feature the creation of habitats, and the... Read more
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