The other bits...

I recently finished Carlo Revelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” ( http://www.sevenbrieflessons.com/ ), a gift from my sister. It’s been awhile since I’ve delved very deep into physics, and it is a bit of a mind blowing read. One thing I learned is that we now believe there are trillions of galaxies, and not just the 100 billion that I had last heard. Trillions of galaxies. Galaxies average over 100 billion stars, so that’s hundreds of billions of trillions of stars. A certain percentage of those are G class stars like our Sun, and a certain percentage of those have a rocky planet the appropriate distance from the star that it could support life. So the number of rocky planets that may be able support life is amazingly high. Not “common” as far as planets go, but you know, in the billions of trillions range. On the one hand, I find this exciting - we might have friends out there! (Maybe little slimy amoeba friends, but still.) On the other hand, I now have to further adjust my i...

Friday morning I attended the @TulsaChamber ’s legislative breakfast. Several Oklahoma state legislators were in attendance to report on “how things went” this past session. Everybody reports that this was the toughest, worst legislative session they’ve ever been in. Of course the budget that passed is fairly terrible on the education front and perhaps not even legal. The bright spot was that a lot of my fellow Republicans seem to be waking up that we have a real Revenue problem, and it’s no longer taboo to say that. But the darkest moment for me was when a certain representative in the crowd in his comments said “You cannot tax your way to prosperity.” This is cute quip, quoting Winston Churchill, one of my favorite fellows to quote, and this is a quote I agree with up to a point. But the troubling part is that you could tell this particular legislator was completely black and white on this issue, such that even as his state’s education system is in financial flames, he is un...

Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. Michael Licona had an interesting debate in 2009 on the topic "Can Historians Prove Jesus Rose from the Dead?" Here's a link to the video and some comments. Dr. Ehrman's channel  /  Dr. Licona's channel Since they called each other "Bart" and "Mike", I'll take liberties and do the same. In this debate, Mike presented 3 Historical "Facts", and then used 4 accepted methods of Historical Analysis to propose that the most reasonable, historical conclusion to draw from these facts is that Jesus, in fact, was Resurrected. From there, Bart counters that the Resurrection can not be established as a "historical fact" by definition, because such an event would never produce the kind of criteria required for a historian to make any definite claims one way or another. And the debate goes back and forth from there, with many interesting twists and turns that I really enjoyed actually, but naturally n...