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I am reading a book I hadn’t read before by my favorite New Testament scholar, the late Burton Mack. It’s a study of the hypothetical Q document called The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins. In it, Mack gives a brief overview of New Testament scholarship from John Locke up to the...

Amazing how many hits he wrote. The Beach Boys were really the soundtrack of my adolescence. Don't Worry Baby I Get Around

MS Tharmas had an opportunity to participate in a workshop/master class in one of her favorite craft hobbies – rug hooking – set in a wonderful old hotel in the heart of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The hotel, La Fonda on the Plaza, turned out to be elegant and expensive, but there was a deep discount...

Although I am neither British nor Australian, I have always admired the painting “The Last of England,” by Ford Madox Brown. Recently I googled it and found that the British public had voted it in as #8 on the list of favorite paintings. I found myself idly wondering how popular it was in...

In a post in the General Religion section Steve Bank includes the following opinion. I told him I’d like to start a dialogue on the topics of pop music and Dylan in particular. So here it is: I’ll parse the above opinion in a bit, but first as one of those “60s counter-culture types” I want to...

An interesting article in the Washington Post adds momentum to the RNA world theory. Self-replicating RNA has been created in a lab. The copies made are quite similar to the original, which has apparently been a stumbling block to earlier efforts. We are inching forward to the creation of life...

An interesting article in the Washington Post adds momentum to the RNA world theory. Self-replicating RNA has been created in a lab. The copies made are quite similar to the original, which has apparently been a stumbling block to earlier efforts. We are inching forward to the creation of life...

My daughter and her family moved to Denmark for business almost two years ago. It turns out they love it and they're not moving back. So, Ms. Tharmas and I bit the bullet and traveled there to see them where they live now, in the smallish (50,000) medieval town of Roskilde, about half an hour...

I found this article and images in the Washington Post. The article explains what we're looking at in each image. [Follow the link that appears shortly after the second image.] Enjoy!

It’s the NBA all-star weekend. Personally I believe the NBA outdoes all the other North American major sports with their all-star weekend, hands down. There are a number of games throughout the weekend: Rising Stars, Celebrity All-Star, classic college game, Next Up game (NBA G League), and the...

This article is several years old, but I did a search on this forum and turned up no discussion, so I'm wondering if it's just "old news" or if it's of any real interest. It's the kind of thing that would have attracted my interest.

A flawed human being perhaps, but the father of Rock 'n Roll piano.

I’m having a website problem. I know HTML reasonably well, and I’m learning CSS. So I’m coding a personal website. I’ve got an image that simply won’t appear on the website when it’s loaded on my server. It shows up fine when I look at the site on my PC. I’ve used two different browsers...

Several years ago MS Tharmas took a class in welding, and since then she has created many artistic objects out of old tools, old electronics, and miscellaneous scrap. Here is her latest creation, Pegasus. I was quite impressed when she brought it home.

PZ Myers over on Pharyngula has an interesting blog piece about Occam’s razor. The linked article is quite lengthy, and I’ve only skimmed it, but it essentially makes the point that Occam’s Razor (simplicity of theories), while it may be useful, is tricky to justify philosophically. It's...

I've used Google as a search engine for years, and since search is a function I use more than any other, I've even made Google my home page. But today it's stopped working. I get the following error message: 403. That’s an error. Your client does not have permission to get URL...

My wife has gained a sudden interest in cooking, at least in a certain recipe that requires a food processor. So we are shopping, but there is a confusing variety of models and sizes. Any recommendations? I might add that 95% of our cooking is just for the two of us and counter/storage space...

I’m in the market for a new desktop computer. My old one is starting a slow death, after six years of daily use, including 3 ½ years of working from home. I’ve pretty much settled on a Dell XPS and I can afford a few bells and whistles, but I’m not sure which ones. It’s come down 32 GB of...

I’ve lived at my current address for twenty-six years and in all that time I’ve had only three or four door-knocking Christians out to save me. Then this morning I got a message on my mobile that wasn’t a robo call. It was from an actual person, a woman who started out with “You don’t know me...

Watched a pre-season baseball game the other night. The stands were empty but they played recorded crowd noises, keyed to the action (close call: crowd mummers – home run: crowd goes wild). Then they sent out the human interest reporter into the stands to see what she could turn up and she...