Dark Energy is weird.

Dark secrets of the universe by Marilyn Head | New Zealand Listener

With each scientific discovery, the universe becomes even more shrouded in mystery.

One of the great recent surprises in science is the discovery by Kirshner and his colleagues that the expansion of the universe is accelerating under the influence of a mysterious dark energy. In a strange turn of events, the simplest form of the dark energy looks very much like a modern version of Einstein's cosmological constant – a theory which Einstein proposed but then retracted and has been dubbed ‘Einstein’s greatest blunder’. Warned by Einstein's blunder, and contradicted by the initial results of a competing research group, Kirshner and his team were reluctant to accept their own result. But, convinced by evidence built on their understanding of exploding stars, they announced their conclusion in February 1998 – the universe is speeding up! We live in an extravagant universe with a surprising number of essential ingredients: the real universe we measure is not the simplest one we could imagine.
(tags: cosmos)

ROBERT P KIRSHNER, Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University, is one of the world’s leading astronomers, a popular public lecturer on science and author of “The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos.” Kirshner is described as a “raconteur of exceptional eloquence,” and by New Scientist as “one of the liveliest and most amusing lecturers in the world of astronomy”. His research has resulted in significant and surprising breakthroughs on the nature of our universe.

Human Significance

Following my earlier post: Our Place in the Universe, here’s a thoughtful response from “And All These Things”:

And All These Things: The Vastness of the Cosmos and The Place of Man
"The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God" Catechism of the Catholic Church 1700

Questions and exhortations about the insignificance of man compared to the vastness of time and space are based on confusion of quantity and quality, between what we can quantify about a thing versus what a thing is "worth." For instance a single gold bar can buy an entire tract of land many times larger than itself, and a rock in your garden is immensely older than the house it sits beside yet you would not say the house was worth less. Indeed qualitatively speaking a single celled microbe is worth more than all the lifeless stars and planets in the Universe. With life comes information, ontologically superior to the mere matter of non-life, and with his spiritual intellect and freewill man is ontologically superior again.
(tags: life cosmos)

Jaki and the Philosophical basis of Modern Science

The Origin of Science | Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science
It is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation.

To the popular mind, science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its philosophical origins in Christianity.

Modernity is unaware of this framework, but it is nonetheless soaked in it, like a fish breathing in water. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.
(tags: science faith philosophy)

Read the whole thing ..

The Christian Era

Essay by Gary Knapp, 1996. Reproduced from “NIV Classics Devotional Bible”. It clearly has several shortcomings* but I found it interesting and even inspiring in parts. It’s sort of a response to the recent debate in which Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens engaged in some joyous Catholic bashing.

Introduction

When Jesus Christ gathered his disciples at Caesarea Philippi, he spoke about an event of primary importance to the accomplishment of God’s eternal purpose. There Jesus said, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). During the brief period of Jesus’ ministry on earth, he spoke of three essential prophecies. First, he spoke of his own death and resurrection. Second, he prophesied about his future return to earth with all of its tumult and glory. And third, he spoke of the building of the church.

The first he fully accomplished with all of its profound effect on human history and individual lives. The second is yet to come. And the third is in process today, with each believer involved in some way with Christ in this work.

Of course, the building of the church has not been without its tumult as well.

Cool Blog Tools

Among the crop of new interconnected web2.0-ey sites, here are a few that I find very useful

BackType tracks your comments across numerous blogs. It’s on sidebar #2 (Commentosphere) and I really like it. (cocomment & commentful are good ways to report the whole discussion, but I want to just show MY comments)

Delicious stores and indexes links that you choose, and allows a few sentences. It can post a daily digest to your blog (but that function seems to be going haywire at the moment!)

Friendfeed is probably the most well-known of the new ‘lifestreaming’ services; feed it your ‘favourites’ from various sites (youtube, delicious, RSS) and it will collate them into a stream of your online activity (see ‘Cool Stuff’ in the far sidebar)

Yahoo Pipes are a collection of online apps that do very specific things — like unix, when used in conjuction (piped) they be quite powerful. I use a yahoo pipe for feeding my amazon wishlist into friendfeed.

Karl Barth vs. James Speight

Speights and Barth on real men « P e r ∙ C r u c e m ∙ a d ∙ L u c e m
One of the most alluring features of Speights is their ad campaign, exploiting all the time-honoured associations between beer, horses, open spaces and ‘real’ men. Not only are there the amazing photos, (the ones of the river crossing and of the stag are two of my favourites) but one can also complete the Southern Man ID Chart, and sing the Southern Man Song which promotes:

Now I might not be rich
But I like things down here
We got the best looking girls
And the best damn beer
So you can keep your Queen City [Auckland]
With your cocktails and cool
Give me a beer in a seven
With the boys shooting pool

All part of what it means to be a ‘real’ man, right?

(tags: men)

And then there’s Barth’s account in CD III/2 of what being a ‘real’ man looks like:

Denying Evolution = Defying Gravity? (+ a Vista tip)

slacktivist: Defying gravity
The problem with gravity on the quantum mechanical scale is that it doesn't quantize properly. Everything else can be broken up into these little packets of energy, even space itself, but apparently it doesn't bend right when you do that – I think they can't get mass to "couple" to space, the way charge "couples" to photons. The closest I think they've come is something called string theory, which involves a lot of arm-waving and postulating that everything is a vibrating string zipping around in something like 11 dimensions. Crazy talk. So far totally untestable, too. But it seems to be the best the scientific community has been able to come up with so far.

On the cosmic end of things, there are basically two problems:
1) Galaxies don't turn the way we'd expect them to, based on counting the stars that we can actually see…
2) Everything is moving apart, so (I think) either the speed of light hasn't always been the same, or a "dark energy" is exerting a cosmic anti-gravity force!

(tags: cosmos science evolution)

Windows Vista Recovery Disc Download — The NeoSmart FilesIt doesn't matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows Vista license – your computer manufacturer just don't want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows Vista installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.

(tags: tools geek)

Noonan’s 911 prophecy (+ other stuff)

Peggy Noonan | WSJ.com | There Is No Time, There Will Be TimeWe live in such unprecedented comfort! But can it last?
Tuesday, September 18, 2001 12:01 A.M. EDT
(Editor's note: In the summer of 1998 Ms. Noonan wrote this essay for the magazine Forbes ASAP. It was published in the Nov. 30, 1998 issue, devoted to the subject of time–how we experience time, how modern men and women relate to it in ways that might be different from our predecessors. Ms. Noonan has received many requests for reprints since the events in New York the past week. She loves Forbes ASAP too but thought most of her readers were more likely to find it here.)
(tags: freaky, evil, prosperity, society)

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen | 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
Scott's annual list. Highlights are: Paint.NET, Fiddler, PowerShell, EverNote, 7-Zip, Sysinternals, HippoEdit (cool name), STORM (ws test tool), NirSoft Utils, FireBug/YSlow/JSLint, FileHelpers, MemProfiler, LogParser, SketchPath, RegEx Toolbox etc etc etc…

Missing in Action: Cygwin, PuTTYcyg / PuttyTray, gVim, DQSD.net, Firefox addins (adblock+, noscript, nosquint, resurrect pages, selenium, betterprivacy), IEPro, GIMP, WinRAR, WinSCP, SoapUI, XML Tidy, Eclipse Galileo (extensions SQL Explorer, SVN Explorer), VLC Player
(tags: geek)

Mangling the Bible

The Antichrist Revealed! John Key has been Prophesised in the Word of God!! | The Dunedin School
[SATIRE SATIRE SATIRE] The Word of God, the Bible, provides many descriptions of the Antichrist. The Bible tells us that, in the End Times, the Antichrist will ascend to dominion over the coming New World Order. He will then begin his reign of terror, in which he will persecute the Church of the Saints.
It has become clear to some of us in recent months that this person has now revealed himself. So he must now be named and, although we believe he will do all in his power to suppress or discredit this information, we must bear a stong witness.
The Antichrist is John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand. The Scriptures are clear. He who has ears, let him hear!
The Bible’s description of the Antichrist are in agreement with the facts of John Key’s life – on every point! This cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence!!
(tags: bible satire)

The Jeebus Project | The Dim-Post
Tapu Misa has a column in the Herald about the Conservapedia project to rewrite the Bible:
[Conservapedia] has launched the Conservative Bible Project to produce a “fully conservative” translation of the Bible, expunged of what it calls “liberal wordiness” (because liberals apparently use a “high word-to-substance ratio”), “gender inclusive” language, and “socialistic words” like “comrade” and “labourer”. “Government”, it has decided, is a liberal word, whereas “volunteer” is a conservative one.
The Conservative Bible would exclude what it calls the “later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic”, like the adulteress story, in which Jesus saves an adulteress from an angry mob, with the words, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”.
(tags: bible)

GotQuestions.org: Does God Exist?

Does God exist? Is there evidence for the existence of God?How do we know God exists? As Christians, we know God exists because we speak to Him every day. We do not audibly hear Him speaking to us, but we sense His presence, we feel His leading, we know His love, we desire His grace. Things have occurred in our lives that have no possible explanation other than God. God has so miraculously saved us and changed our lives that we cannot help but acknowledge and praise His existence. None of these arguments can persuade anyone who refuses to acknowledge what is already obvious. In the end, God’s existence must be accepted by faith (Hebrews 11:6). Faith in God is not a blind leap into the dark; it is step of faith into the light.
(tags: faith spirit)