Was there an actual historical figure that corresponds to the biblical Jesus? The debate on this question has been going on for some time in academic circles but has seen a resurgence with the recent publication of Bart Ehrman’s new book Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. [Read more…]
Here are two kinds of unusual music.
The first is music played on an unusual instrument.
The second is music played unusually on a familiar instrument.
Music has always been a medium where innovation and creativity thrive and where even amateurs can produce wonderful new things by breaking the rules. It is nice to see fresh examples of that.
The US education system comes in for a lot of trash talk in the media and by politicians and business people. This has seeped into the public consciousness and it is now taken as a given that the US educational system is in dire straits and needs radical changes in order to be rescued from disaster. The 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa is another such book that pointed the finger at US college education as failing its students. Using a single measure of achievement, it compared a cohort of students from the first semester to the fourth semester and claimed to find negligible gains in learning, hence the title of their book. [Read more…]
You may have heard about the infamous question on New York State’s test for all eighth graders that gave them a fable about a hare and a pineapple and then asked them two questions. (You can read the fable and the questions here.) This caused a lot of head scratching by students, parents, and educators alike because the story and the questions seemed to make no sense. [Read more…]
No one on The Daily Show is as convincing in caricaturing clueless sexism as Jason Jones.
(This clip appeared on April 17, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
As I have written before most people, especially if they are not young and/or a person of color and/or poor, usually have no reason to fear interactions with the police. And most police officers are unlikely to abuse their power. But there have been occasions when unscrupulous police have abused people because of the presumption that their version of events will be taken as the correct one. [Read more…]
I first encountered the work of William Dembski during the time I was engaged in efforts to counter the intelligent design movement. He struck me as a smart guy who was trying to have his feet in two boats. He sought to be accepted by the scientific community by spouting sophisticated intelligent design stuff, while at the same time not alienating the fundamentalist Christian base that has no patience for anything that counters biblical orthodoxy. It is, of course an impossible task to bridge the two worlds as can been from his tortured attempts at bridging the Genesis story with evolution, that culminated in his laughable effort to explain how Adam and Eve killed the dinosaurs. [Read more…]
An Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo does a routine where she wears a tight black dress and heels and then dances on top of 15 blocks of butter, accompanied by rhythmic drumming. As you can imagine, she slips and falls heavily, picks herself up and resumes dancing, slips and falls again, picks herself up, and so on. Each time she crashed to the ground I cringed, because it looked like it must really hurt. [Read more…]
From NPR, I heard this highly disturbing story about a luxury cruise ship that seemed to have deliberately ignored a drifting fishing boat that had three people in it and which had sought help. Although passengers noticed the boat and brought it to the attention of the ship’s crew, the fishermen were not picked up. Two of the fisherman later died but the third survived and was eventually rescued by the Ecuadorean coast guard.
If it is true that the ship’s crew deliberately ignored people in distress, it would not only be a violation of international maritime law, it would be an act of shocking callousness.
How could anyone do that?
An always welcome development is the rise of alternative major English news sources to counterbalance those that report from the perspective of the US and Western European governments. Al Jazeera (funded by the Qatar government) is one such voice and now RT (which receives funding from the Russian government) is another rising force. [Read more…]