While commenting at a well-known science blog, I was casting around for some background on the science of dating things by counting tree rings – AKA dendrochronology. Yes, the Intelligent Design crowd also attempts to refute any scientific discipline that threatens the Genesis story. And they have a website full of talking points: Tree ring dating (dendrochronology)
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Oh boy! I hardly ever participate in memes, but this one I’ll take a stab at. 1. WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother’s and father’s middle names): Elizabeth Carver 2. NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother’s dad, father’s dad): Charles Clayton 3. STAR WARS NAME: (the first 2 letters of your last name, first 4 letters of your first name): Gi-Ginn 4. DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal): Lavender Lynx 5. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you live): Elaine Hoffman 6. SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd favorite color, favorite alcoholic drink, optionally add “THE” to the beginning): The Green Irish Cream…
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This is just teh awsum. Sailors and light sabers and Navy tradition: it’s all good. Also, there’s a break for snacks and some commercials. [kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8791995853219747625" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /] Episode 67: Seeds of Betrayal
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After the Election, Rebooting the Right – TIME When a party suffers the kind of beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored amnesty and ones who fought it. Evidently voters did not believe that Republicans of any stripe offered solutions to the challenges America faces now. You know that former girlfriend or boyfriend you dated for a while, that kind of stalked you after it was…
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BBC NEWS | Middle East | Jail terms for Israeli neo-Nazis Eight teenagers have been sentenced to time in jail by a court in Israel for carrying out a series of neo-Nazi attacks that shocked the nation. That’s what I thought you said. Some male teens will do anything to work off those crazy hormones…
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President Bush delivered a speech at an international gathering in Peru earlier today, and waxed nostalgic about those warm and wonderful days immediately after 9/11, when the entire world was on our side and was ready to stand with us against a common threat. Excuse me, I need to get rid of a load of bile now. Because this same brush-clearing faux cowboy diplomat worked reeeeal hard to screw up our reputation world wide, totally squandering the goodwill that we had gained, and also totally squandering our short-lived sense of national unity. Thousands of lives were lost before the war…
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It seemed like things had been starting to move on the “Episcopal split” front, what with dioceses like Quincy, Ft Worth, and Pittsburgh shaking the icky liberal dust from their sandals. It seems like such a terrible waste of everybody’s time and talents. But then, I forget: homosexxxuls are teh evul! They do not deserve to live, let along marry! The Devil is constantly going about tempting people to decorate with pink flamingo accent pieces and sing show tunes! Anglican Primate ‘Disturbed’ by New Rival Body| Christianpost.com Nevertheless, breakaway Anglicans have expressed little hope that the current church bodies in…
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The tech problem was solved this morning and we’re up and running again. However, we’re not terribly busy and so later today they’ll probably offer “downtime” or unpaid time off. I won’t be able to avail myself of it because I’m covering for someone who specializes in small groups. Ominously, there are now memos making the rounds about training for new accounts, more advanced training, and one-to-one feedback meetings. It’s the season when travel cuts back, but this is pretty quiet even for November. Ironically, this is the time of year when I get hit with small hotel blocks for…
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Lovely. Work is totally borked. Can’t work because the main system is run as a secure webpage, and somehow everyone’s logins and passwords have been lost. Some webpages work that are either within the firewall or company pages, but nothing “outside.” In about an hour they’ll start going around re-enabling the native version that everyone still has, mark my words.
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David installed the white-painted shoe molding earlier this afternoon, and even got through the angsty moments trying to get the floor brackets for the closet doors re-installed. Now all that remains is the quarter-round. We’d had a bad time with the oak trim that came with the floor product (actually, it was quite expensive) as it was such dense, hard wood that no matter how we pre-drilled and pounded and used an electric nailer, we couldn’t get the nails to go in all the way. So we regrouped, bought plain pine and it’s now all cut and mitred to fit…