There was a massive solar storm on Friday which resulted in Northern Lights being visible on Saturday night almost all over the country, which I completely missed because I live in a big ass city with lots of light pollution. This gallery includes images from Nashville.

Spaceweather.com: May 2005 Aurora Gallery

] Using a skull shape determined by hundreds of recent CT
] scans, three groups of researchers have independently
] produced busts showing what Egypt's King Tutankhamen
] probably looked like on the day of his death about 3,300
] years ago.

A starkly realistic reconstruction.

Meet King Tut

] The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to
] participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular
] biology lab on eBay.

It was only a matter of time...

Wired 13.05: VIEW

] Some scientists now believe they may have finally
] discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers,
] they say.

I hate it when scientists use termonology like "mind reader" which is very misleading, but sounds sexier then a more accurate description of what is happening. However, this article is still interesting...

Scientists Say Everyone Can Read Minds

] Georg Cantor showed that the number of real numbers is
] rigorously larger than a countably infinite set, and the
] postulate that this number, the so-called "continuum," is
] equal to Aleph-1 is called the continuum hypothesis.

Things you wish you knew when you were 12 and counting the number of times you were "not it."

Countably Infinite -- from MathWorld

Awesome. The cloud data in these maps is updated every three hours. This is the earth from space in nearest to realtime that anyone has come.

World Sunlight Map

"Mars scientists and engineers are elated about a dust-busting blast that has struck the Spirit rover at its Gusev crater exploration site.

Turns out that a martian whirlwind – dubbed a dust devil – likely zoomed over the robot high up in the Columbia Hills. That fleeting flyby effectively cleaned Spirit’s solar arrays, giving the robot a new lease on life.

Engineers report that the rover’s power reading quickly shot up to almost as high as when the rover landed on Mars over a year ago."

LB

Spirit Gets A Dust Devil Once-Over

The interesting thing about the statement "There is no such thing as absolute truth" is that if you could prove it, it wouldn't be true. In that sense it defines itself and explains itself. You can't even agree with it, because if you do, you'll have to admit that you must be wrong. You can try to disprove it, but you'll keep butting your head against it over and over and over again and it will sit there, mocking you. Finally, you must accept it, and once you've accepted it 1000 realizations flow from it, and you can see everything in the world as it really is.

(This is extremely long. PLEASE do not rerecommend the full text. Thanks.)

First Email:

On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 16:07 -0600, Tom Cross wrote:
] Jonathan S. Shapiro writes:
] Suppose the creationists had come to the school system(s) and said
] "Evolution is a theory. Creationism (or whatever the name) is also a
] theory. Neither theory has conclusively been shown, and therefore we
] feel strongly that the creationist theory deserves equal attention in
] the curriculum."
]
] Scientists would surely have gnashed their teeth at this position for
] quite some time, but after a certain amount of useless resistance they
] would have been forced to accept it. It is a proposition articulated
] using the values of science, and it would ultimately be hypocritical for
] science to reject this proposition framed in this form.

This proposition is certainly not articulated using the values of science. It is
a perfect example of the semantic slight of hand that is being performed by the
Intelligent Design crowd.

Evolution is a theory. Creationism is not a theory. Creationism is a hypothesis.
There is a significant difference between these two things.

Theories have reproducible experimental evidence. Widely accepted theories have
a large body of such evidence that has been peer reviewed and withstood serious
criticism. A hypothesis is simply viable idea that has little or no experimental
evidence. Creationism is a hypothesis.

In everyday speech the word theory is used to refer to both theories and
hypotheses, and so to the uneducated reader it is easy to confuse the two
concepts and decide that Evolution and Intelligent Design are on equal footing
conceptually. They are not. However, the ID community is taking advantage of
this confusion to promote their adgenda in political circles, where it doesn't
really matter if people know what they are talking about so long as they agree
with you.

] So what we have is one side with an open (or at least potentially and
] reluctantly openable) view and another side that is determined to
] destroy that view.

This is exactly the arguement that the creationists are now making, through
intelligent design; that they simply want their point of view accepted along
side evolution but the scientific community views them as heretics and whats to
destroy them.

What is at stake is, in fact, the ability to teach critical thinking. If we put
Intelligent Design on equal footing in science class with Evolution, what we
are saying is that a hypothesis matures into a theory when it has a large body
of reproducible experimental evidence that has undergone significant peer
review, or when the idea is sufficiently politically popular that it must be
accepted even if there is no evidence to support it. This is exactly t... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]

] Archaeologists say they have discovered some stone
] remains from the coast close to India's famous beachfront
] Mahabalipuram temple in Tamil Nadu state following the 26
] December tsunami.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Tsunami throws up India relics