I was delighted to receive this original poem written by Tessa Kale in an email this afternoon as a response to the posts and sermons about our human place in the Universe and our relationship to it and each other: The Overview Effect Their brightness was measured:they must be rational, logicalnot subject to raptures certainly not visions. They must beBlake’s naked Newton,a fierce focus on calipers and their calculus. But the astronauts did look […]
After all of This Time Searching for Aliens, Are We Stuck With The Zoo Hypothesis? – Universe Today: [D]espite decades of observation and SETI surveys, there is still no definitive evidence that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are out there. For the most part, these have consisted of radio SETI experiments that have observed distant stars and galaxies for indications of radio transmissions. […]Alas, these searches have found no compelling evidence of technosignatures within our galaxy or […]
Scientists Translated Spiderwebs Into Music, And It’s Absoutely Stunning : ScienceAlert: A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of a spider’s web into music, working with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive musical instrument, titled Spider’s Canvas. In 2021, the team refined and built on that previous work, adding an interactive virtual reality component to allow people to enter and interact with the web. […]”The spider lives in an environment of vibrating […]
An old friend of mine, Peter Thejll, a senior scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, is asking for help on a project (#NewMoonSnap) that will help to measure the reflectivity of the Earth (its albedo). The observations will be used to improve our present climate models. This project is being done along with a research program being undertaken by a Danish astronaut who is presently on the ISS. You can read more about the project […]
There’s a lovely article about Hildegard of Bingen by Erin Risch Zountendam posted this morning on the blog “Earth and Altar.” Hildegard, one of the four female doctors of the Western Church, was a theologian, a prophet, a mystic and a naturalist. Her life and her theology is, to my mind, one of the clearest examples of my argument that most scientists are, in truth, mystics at heart – seeking to understand a deeper meaning […]
I woke up this morning puzzling about this… The Sun is green and I’ve wondered for years about why plants reflect the most intense light from the Sun rather than absorbing it. Leaves are green because plants absorb more red and blue light than they do green light. Why are they being inefficient? Turns out the answer – only recently determined – is pretty interesting. at least sometimes — evolution cares less about making biological […]
Given the failure of all Dark Matter detection experiments so far, some have suggested that maybe classical understandings of Gravity (both Newtonian and the more complete General Relativity) are incomplete. The idea is that we have to tweak the equations a bit to explain the anomalous observed behavior at larger scales in the galaxy (and the local Universe). The tweaks are generally all thought to be part of a rethinking of our understanding of gravity […]
The unexpected release of a series of Lambeth Conference Call statements on assorted subjects, and the equally unexpected news that bishops attending the Lambeth Conference next week would be voting on them, has knocked a bunch of Anglicans around the world back on their heels. Some in the Communion are delighted with this sudden turn – but most of the voices I hear are dismayed. And here in the Episcopal Church, many people in our […]
I’ve wasted some afternoons binge watching the TV series Ancient Aliens on Hulu over the past few years. It seems like a harmless “what if” exercise. And it’s fun when in a particular episode I’m introduced to some new site or artifact that I’d not heard of before. But I do notice that if I know something about what’s being presented, the information shared is not very robust and often weirdly wrong. In an article […]
The Internet and its communications technologies are allowing us to work from home in the midst of this pandemic, to stay in touch with each other and “shelter in place” in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible even 10 years ago. But like most technological advances, it’s become a veritable Sword of Damocles. It has developed so quickly that we simply haven’t had time to adapt completely to what it makes possible. That’s particularly […]
