This article, Hunting for a Mass Killer in Medieval Graveyards , informs us that: Modern [bubonic] plague is carried by fleas and spreads no faster than the rats that carry them can travel. [And this modern plague can be defeated by eliminating fleas and/or rats.] The Black Death seems to have spread directly from one … [Read more…]
Is it surprising to learn there is a Marked Rise in Intensely Sexualized Images of Women, Not Men? It’s funny we live in an age where we’ve learned so much that enriches the traditional understanding that men and women are shaped to their different roles in reproduction and we fail to transfer any of that … [Read more…]
About 20 years ago, a Ph.d. psychologist working for an executive placement firm told me that, out of all the people he’d ever tested or interviewed, I was the one least suited for life in a corporation. Some might say that to be good news in terms of the potential for good moral character, but … [Read more…]
As we explore God’s world, it turns out to be just as complicated and complex as some had suspected many centuries ago. And more so. Over the past century or so, DNA was discovered and shown to be that shadowy agent of heritability which was so important a part of the theories of Darwin and … [Read more…]
I’ve uploaded the novel Safe Harbours and Open Seas and have made it available under Version 3.0 of the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license as written and published by Creative Commons Corporation. This license can be found at \url{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/}. I wrote the first version of Safe Harbours and Open Seas more than ten years ago. I … [Read more…]
Slowly do I move forward in my efforts to develop words and grammatical structures and concepts adequate to describing the social and moral setting of man as he learns to shape himself, his societies, his technologies, to better reflect and take advantage of the richness and complexity of God’s Creation. This richness and complexity can … [Read more…]
This article is interesting though hardly surprising: Can PTSD Become Hereditary?. We can pass on to future generations the psychiatric problems we develop during our lifetimes. To simplify a lot: Our genes carry out some very important tasks for the organism of which they are part, such as providing active templates — tiny assembly plants … [Read more…]
I have gathered a large collection of my weblog writings and have organized them into general topics and have formatted them into a downloadable book: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2010. The book is large, on the order of 1200 pages and 3MB. Enjoy browsing or taking a more serious read … [Read more…]
Here’s an article about a mildly interesting finding that low-information voters are more likely than others to vote for the best-looking candidate: Face Value: Looks of Political Candidates Are Key Factor Influencing Low-Information Voters. In more blunt terms, these low-information voters can be described as willfully ignorant and morally irresponsible. I’ll make an impolite request … [Read more…]
[The original version of this essay was published as Ways of Speaking and True Being. It was finished and uploaded on 2008/11/22.] Wikipedia tells us that metaphor is: is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: “The [first subject] is a [second subject].” More generally, a metaphor … [Read more…]