We're actually going to be topical today, which is odd because the topic is sports and I'm nut much of a fan.  But hockey and basketball are in their championship phases so here's an interactive map from Slate.com that shows all the championships ever won in every city in the US from 1903 (1971 shown below). Enjoy: ... (More)

In 1963, I graduated from East Lansing High School (Michigan), a white-bread community far removed from reality.  I then attended Michigan State University for a year.  After completing my first year of college, I signed up for a Mormon mission and received a call to the Franco-Belgian Mission.  At the time, I didn’t have a testimony and during my 2-1/2 years in Europe, I never really deve ... (More)

This is from Jeff Stahler's single-panel comic Moderately Confused. ... (More)

Intelligent Design Above is a link to the unabridged version of Gabriel Rothblatt’s presentation on Genetic Engineering as a means for the advancement of Seasteading. Delivered during the lightning rounds at the 2012 Seasteading Conference in San Francisco, California’s Le Meridien Hotel. ... (More)

A recent post by BHodges on bycommonconsent.com reviewed the book The Power of Parable:  How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus.  In the book, the author John Dominic Crossan wonders if the four gospels are parables?  According to Hodges’ review: . . . [Crossan] makes the unique argument that the four gospels (combining Acts with Luke) . . . are parables about Jesus, or “meg ... (More)

In some ways, this trip is a vacation. In other ways, it's a self-imposed exile, in which we must slum around the world, often without food, showers, or the benefits of clean clothing. The terms of our exile are these: * 40 days, almost 6 weeks. * A meagre daily budget. * No cell service, no data, no texts. * Lodging at hostels, airports, and as provided by the kindness of strangers. * We don't spe ... (More)

who can answer the questions we ask every day about different concepts of truth, facts, phenomena, criteria, and it sounds something excretable what some teachers will be able to say that everything is ephemeral, redundant, simple, changing, ie the reality exists because our senses perceive it, not because it really is true, is tangible. The truth which will be first and last, how to show ... (More)

quien puede responder las preguntas que nos hacemos a diario sobre los diferentes conceptos de la verdad, realidades, fenomenos, criterios, y suena algo excretable lo que podran decir algunos maestros, que todo es efimero, superfluo, simple, cambiante, es decir, la realidad existe porque nuestros sentidos lo percibe, mas no porque en verdad sea cierto, sea tangible. La verdad primera y ultima cual ... (More)

Let's do a transit two-fer.  We'll start with a Nyan Cat sticker somebody put on the transit map for the BART rail system in the Bay Area.  What's Nyan Cat you may ask?  Know-Your-Meme can explain. And the next one is from last fall when cartoonist Tom Toles made a comment on public transit on the other side of the country in Virginia: And if you want to get into it very deeply, ther ... (More)

Tom Bartlett has an interesting post on religiondispatches.org (18 May 2012).  It concerns the followers of Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show caused a minor doomsday mania.  He predicted or prophecied that the world would end on 21 May When the world didn’t end, Bartlett wanted to understand what affect this had on true believers. In order to find out, I go ... (More)