The secret of the web
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O.C. teen sells Zune Web site for $62,000"Hansup Yoon (pictured right), 15, has sold ZuneBoards, an Internet forum devoted to Microsoft’s Zune media player, for $62,000.The teen, who recently moved from Irvine to Fullerton, created the site months before Microsoft introduced its answer to Apple’s iPod in 2oo6."
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There was a time I could do a cartwheel without fearing what I might break...
A time I could eat pepperoni rolls without worrying what I might gain...
A time I could watch horror films without a pillow over my eyes...
and hands over my ears...
And there was a time when I could eat avocados without dying, nearly.

That's right, avocados nearly killed me.

It started about three years ago, right about the time I became pregnant with my little love. I was feasting on guacamole and extra salty tortilla chips and enjoying a perfectly perfect summer day.

In an hour, everything changed.

When I tell you I experienced the most violent stomach pain imaginable, believe me. There wasn't a single position that made it tolerable either...lying down, standing up, sitting down...all the same excruciating, stomach-on-fire pain. I had to talk myself out of dying, and thankfully, I was successful.

Of course, I didn't know it was the avocado right away. Afterall, who is allergic to avocado? After a few more experiences, it became evident that I was.

Well, I had another dance with death on Saturday. I had gotten a little arrogant and figured a bite or two of my husband's sushi was harmless, the avocado was no bigger than my pinky nail, how much harm could it do?

A lot. And it made up for lost time.

Turns out, the allergy isn't terribly common, but it isn't unheard of. Apparently, the oils from the avocado pit are the culprit...other people experience a similar sensation from onions and bananas, even.

Unfortunately, the latest experience did take causalities. Because the avocado was mixed with other foods, like sushi and vanilla flavored yogurt (formerly a staple in my diet), I will probably never ever be eating them again, either.

Tainted love.

How about you? Any foods you can't eat due to allergy or overdose or casualty of either?

Weekend Splurge
Still doing really great with the restricted spending. I've been able to cut my grocery bills pretty significantly by paying attention to sales and clipping coupons...and buying meat on sale and then freezing it. (I was never really good at that because the whole thawing thing never meshed with my planning or patience scale).

So the big splurge of the weekend will probably involve another shot at rice krispie treats that end up in our stomach and not underfoot...
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Hello from David & Sheri Burns at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We want to say a big hellow to all our fellow beekeepers and beekeepers soon-to-be!

Here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, we've been busy keeping up with rearing queens, building hives, processing honey and putting the final touches on our new store/learning center/bee-lab.









We've made great strides on our Illinois Queen Project. We produced so many great queens this year and sold many queens too. And by the way, now is a good time to requeen your hives. It is a little harder to have new queens accepted late in the year, but August and September queens will produce better brood going into winter, and will certainly help the hive to over winter. Do consider it! It is very important to requeen your hive once a year.




It has been a very productive summer for the bees. And our bees are still acting like it is July 11th instead of August 11th.



We are hopeful this is the case and that the bees will provide us with one more month of good, strong foraging here in Illinois.




I've had beekeepers call in and say something close to this: "I've got two hives and while one is doing great, the other one hasn't pulled out all the frames in their top deep yet. They just don't seem to be moving up at all. What's wrong and what should I do."

This is why I always encourage new beekeepers to start with 2 hives instead of one. Because if you start with just one, and it gets off to a slow start, then you have nothing to compare it to and nothing available to help it with.

During heavy nectar flows, your hive should look like this one in the video below. This is one of our hives working aster and other late summer flowers. This queen has done a great job at raising a huge amount of brood and that's why there are so many foragers now! A poor queen will have the entire hive down in number, which means less comb building, less bees, less nectar gather etc.



First, it is hard to say why one hive doesn't do as well as others. There could be many reasons. Generally, I point the finger at the colony's failure to maintain a strong queen. What I mean by that is that the hive may have supeceeded their queen or tried to swarm and made swarm cells and in the process the colony may have actually become queenless for a good part of the season. This does happen. In fact, in my opinion, queenlessness is actually a worse problem than mites! Maintaining a close eye on your queen and/or any queen cells is vitally important.

Between the months of April and June, you must inspect your hive every 14 days, making sure your queen is laying good and that there are no swarm or supercedure queen cells. During these critical build up months, you must maintain a good laying queen. Once I get into July and my nectar flow is at its peak, I seldom go back into the hive except to remove honey supers because I do not want to disturb the hive's passion to gather nectar for me. I stay out of my hive until the 2nd week in August and then I begin to prepare my hives for winter. August and especially September determines how well your bees will do in the spring of the next bee season.
So what is typical is that a hive will lose its queen, try to replace her, fail, try to replace her and fail again, and finally get the job done but considerable time has been wasted in the effort and after she starts laying, maybe they are not pleased with her performance and they replace her again. This can go on all summer. Other causes for slow build up might be that the queen was not mated well and is only able to lay an unacceptable brood pattern resulting in low bee population.

Beekeepers who choose not to monitor the queen and the brood pattern are taking a gamble and may find out much too late that the hive is not progressing well. When this happens, the first thing to do is to assess the queen and the amount of eggs and capped brood. Nearly solid sealed brood is what you want to see. Spotty brood means the queen needs replaced.

Okay, let's say that you need to get two deep brood boxes drawn and full before winter, and here it is in August and it doesn't look possible. What do you do? First, since this hive is weak, and you have another hive that is strong, swap locations during the middle of the day on a nice sunny day. By swapping the two hives, you actually are transferring the foraging bees from the strong hive into the weak hive because as they return to their home, it is actually now the hive of the weaker colony. Incoming nectar from a larger foraging team means more drawn comb too. Rember, it takes nectar to produce wax which is used to build comb.

Secondly, feed! Place an entrance feeder in the hive and feed 2:1 sugar water. If robbing is a problem, use a top feeder. We sell both top feeders and entrance feeders. Also, take two or three drawn frames with bees and move them up into the top deep and take the undrawn comb from the top deep down into the bottom deep. This will spark the bees to move up because some other bees are already up there.

If the weaker hive still does not seem to build up within the next month, say by the middle of September you should consider combining it with another hive. It is always better to go into winter with one strong hive rather than two weak hives.

If your plastic foundation is not drawn out yet, you might spray it with sugar water or you might need to melt some beeswax and recoat the plastic.

Visit our website at: www.honeybeesonline.com for a complete listing of our products and hives. Or give us a call at: 217-427-2678


Now, you've got to get rid of your mites!! This is the time of year that mites can be bad and spread viruses throughout your hive. A hive that enters winter with a mite infestation is likely to be doomed. So, our next lesson will give you some non-medicated ways to reduce your mite count greatly! Stay tuned.

Thanks for allowing us to share with you today, and please share these lessons with others. We are a family business, simple folks working hard to make a living. We're honest and sincere in helping you enjoy being a beekeeper. Help us out when you can and we will certainly appreciate it!!

If you have trouble reaching us by phone, please email us at david@honeybeesonline.com
David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
www.honeybeesonline.com
217-427-2678

Remember to BEE-have yourself!
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101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site
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Photo Courtesy of Rick Mandelson


I learned that there is a direct connection between your jaw and your hips.
To ease the tension from both, rest your tongue behind your two front teeth, soften your face.
Remember how that feels, and then try to do it often.

Or just look at this picture.

Splurgin' Sweet

Ava and I made Rice Krispie treats for my husband's work get-together. They had lots and lots of sprinkles ("there mommy, that's better" said Ava after emptying the entire jar into the crispy, marshmallowy, buttery mix).

We decided to go for a run while they cooled, because there's always room to fit in "one more thing." (I can hear my husband sighing).

That meant that we were running late, so after we got home everything was in rush-time. We cleaned up, cut them into squares, and arranged them on a Hello Kitty plate, which complemented the sprinkles nicely, I might add.

I quickly carried Ava, her shoes, her drinks, and who knows what else I grabbed along the way. Threw everything (except her) into the car, put the treats on top, and set Ava in her car seat. Watched her buckle herself in (because everything is, "I have to do it myself" these days). Shut the door, buckled in myself, thought for a second about where we were going, and left.

With the treats on top of the car.

When we got to the party, Ava said, "Mommy, forgot the treats!"

Oh yeah. The treats...

And then I remembered the last place I saw them. On top of the car.

When I went out to check, they were, of course, not there. No treats.

But when we drove home and turned onto our street, there they were, one with the pavement.

I spent the next 15 minutes scraping them up. Those darn sprinkles.

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Yesterday's NYT had an interesting piece on female suicide bombers. While many draw a straight link between religion and motivations for suicide bombings (yes, Sam Harris), the actual data is much more complicated. To add another layer, this article looks at the differences between motivations for male and female suicide bombers - but doesn't find any evidence of "uniquely feminine motivations driving women's attacks".

I have spent the last few years surveying all known female suicide attacks throughout the world since 1981 — incidents in Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Uzbekistan. In order to determine these women’s motives, I compared the data with a database of all known suicide attacks over that period compiled by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism.

This research led to a clear conclusion: the main motives and circumstances that drive female suicide attackers are quite similar to those that drive men. Still, investigating the dynamics governing female attackers not only helps to correct common misperceptions but also reveals important characteristics about suicide terrorism in general.

To begin with, there is simply no one demographic profile for female attackers. From the unmarried communists who first adopted suicide terrorism to expel Israeli troops from Lebanon in the 1980s, to the so-called Black Widows of Chechnya who commit suicide attacks after the combat deaths of their husbands, to the longtime adherents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatist movement in Sri Lanka, the biographies of female suicide attackers reveal a wide variety of personal experiences and ideologies.

And about the connection with Islamic fundamentalism:

Blaming Islamic fundamentalism is also wrongheaded. More than 85 percent of female suicide terrorists since 1981 committed their attacks on behalf of secular organizations; many grew up in Christian and Hindu families. Further, Islamist groups commonly discourage and only grudgingly accept female suicide attackers. At the start of the second intifada in 2000, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, claimed: “A woman martyr is problematic for Muslim society. A man who recruits a woman is breaking Islamic law.” Hamas actually rejected Darin Abu Eisheh, the second Palestinian female attacker, who carried out her 2002 bombing on behalf of the secular Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

And for their motivations (which are not different for male motivations):

For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group. Correspondingly, the primary individual motivation for both male and female suicide bombers is a deep loyalty to their communities combined with a variety of personal grievances against enemy forces.

Read the full article here.

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I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Graham's essays. Alas, they aren't published in a dead-tree medium yet, so I can't say something like "they are the essential reference on my bookcase..." but rest assured they would be.

A Fundraising Survival Guide
http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

Raising money has a mysterious capacity to suck up all your attention. Even if you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day. It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward.

What I tell most startups we fund is that if someone reputable offers you funding on reasonable terms, take it. There have been startups that ignored this advice and got away with it—startups that ignored a good offer in the hope of getting a better one, and actually did. But in the same position I'd give the same advice again. Who knows how many bullets were in the gun they were playing Russian roulette with?

The Hacker's Guide to Investors
http://www.paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html

Whatever help investors give a startup tends to be underestimated. It's to everyone's advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. The goal of the investors is for the company to become valuable, and the company seems more valuable if it seems like all the good ideas came from within.

I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always overestimated. The danger here is that new founders, looking at existing founders, will think that they're supermen that one couldn't possibly equal oneself. Actually they have a hundred different types of support people just offscreen making the whole show possible.

How to Fund a Startup
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

It's obvious why investors delay. Investing in startups is risky! When a company is only two months old, every day you wait gives you 1.7% more data about their trajectory. But the investor is already being compensated for that risk in the low price of the stock, so it is unfair to delay.

Fair or not, investors do it if you let them. Even VCs do it. And funding delays are a big distraction for founders, who ought to be working on their company, not worrying about investors. What's a startup to do? With both investors and acquirers, the only leverage you have is competition. If an investor knows you have other investors lined up, he'll be a lot more eager to close-- and not just because he'll worry about losing the deal, but because if other investors are interested, you must be worth investing in. It's the same with acquisitions. No one wants to buy you till someone else wants to buy you, and then everyone wants to buy you.

The key to closing deals is never to stop pursuing alternatives. When an investor says he wants to invest in you, or an acquirer says they want to buy you, don't believe it till you get the check. Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. Alas, you can't; you have to keep looking for more investors, if only to get this one to act.

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If you get a chance, please go and see the new Werner Herzog film, Encounters at the End of the World. Its about people who live and work at an Antarctica research base. This movie is a wonderful depiction of Herzog's eccentric and peculiar vision and it touches on everything from the origin of life, aliens, the future of humans on Earth to the human desire to know and test its limits of endurance. Even religion - at one point he amusingly makes a comparison of the preparation of underwater divers to priests preparing for Mass, and the frozen underwater landscape underneath to a cathedral. The people he interview are all fascinating. It is not a standard Antarctica documentary, and as Herzog himself puts it, its certainly not about any "fluffy penguins" (though a penguin does feature in the most memorable and haunting scene of the film). Please, go and see it. Here is a review by Roger Ebert and the trailer for the film below.

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Even if we grant for a moment that prayers work (hmm..no they really don't), would any self-respecting god really listen to this idiot's prayer? (hat tip Religion News Service)


More remarkably, he (Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family) makes Governor of Georgia's prayer for rain last year, seem almost reasonable.
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This seems a bit odd to me. But here is a story about a study that claims that protection from infectious diseases may be the driving force behind religions (hat tip 3quarksdaily):

Dr Corey Fincher and Prof Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas.

"Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask.

The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests.

Ok, I have to get hold of the published paper. Somewhere here there seems to be a causation/correalation problem, but I'll comment on it after seeing the paper. In the mean time, here is their prediction and test:

Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus.

Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time.

" If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity," they say.

And the team finds evidence to back this.

"A sample of traditional societies shows that the range of those societies is lower in areas with more disease agents, compared with areas with few pathogens, and in countries religion diversity is positively related to two measures of stress caused by infection with parasites. Religion richness was positively related to disease richness (and significantly so)."

As predicted, "we found that religion diversity is the highest where disease diversity is also the highest and the lowest where disease diversity is also the lowest. To our knowledge, previous evolutionary models do not offer an explanation for why religion diversity varies spatially across the globe.

But what about other competing socio-poltical forces affecting the growth of religious groups? Or non-religious factors leading to the segmentation of the population? I will get a copy of the paper and get on this.

Read the full story here. And of course, for more on origin of religions, check out David Sloan Wilson, as part of our Science & Religion lecture series at Hampshire College.

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Mental models are can be exhausting.

They are internal assumptions that we hold about how things/we work, how things/we are, and how things/we should be--and then apply them to our external surroundings.

In other words, it's what we believe mothering, weight, parenting, marriage, cleanliness, simplicity, tidiness, organized, healthy, smart, pretty, savvy, chic, creative, looks like.

And often, we spend our time comparing how far away or how far surpassed we are to that model in our life.

• How clean our desk should look
• What kind of relationship we should have with our children
• What good home-keeping looks like
• What successful feels like
• What thin looks like
• How fast we should be running
• How much money we should be making
  

You get the idea.

And while mental models are important in making sure that we aim high, their existence doesn't guarantee that the aim is right. For you. Or your family.

I do a lot of journaling as a way to help challenge my own mental models and to make sure that my aim is right. Usually, if the model is wrong or our aim is off, we feel tension around it. I ask a series of questions in the process, an adaptation of which I'll share below. To illustrate their impact, I'll use an example that a friend shared with me recently:

Mental Model: Good employees go to the office summer party. I should go.

Questions:

Why should you go? Because they're expecting me too and they've put a lot of time into arranging it. I'll probably end up having fun, anyway.

What happens if you don't go? I'll feel guilty.

What would you rather do? Stay home and spend time with my husband and son.

How will you feel if you don't do what you'd rather do? I'll feel guilty, too. And resentful. But they'll understand more than work would.

If you had a party and someone couldn't come because they wanted to spend time with their family, how would you react? I'd totally understand. I'd probably even envy them a little bit.

What makes you think that work wouldn't feel the same way? I'm not sure, actually. Maybe they would.

Does considering that make you feel differently about going? A little bit. But I'm also afraid I might miss something.

And you're less concerned about missing something at home? I'm more confident at home, I trust home more than I trust work.

She thought that being a good employee meant attending the summer office party. But through the questions, she realized that her model was more a mask that perpetuated some time sucking energy draining behaviors. She left our conversation questioning her values and wanting to spend more time with her family, with whom she felt at her best and who deserved her best.

I suspect that by reallocating her energy to things that bring real fulfillment, she'll have more positive energy to give to things that bring the financial fulfillment as well.

Not all models are masks, or drains. But it's important to continuously challenge them to make sure they are helping us to become our best, not getting in the way of it.












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Here is a good interview on The Evolutionary Origins of Belief. Wolpert's main idea is that the origin of belief in supernatural lies in the human ability to make tools (i.e. understand cause and effect). He also makes a departure from the New Atheists and believes that religion can be useful for some people. Overall, he has an interesting take on things. Check out the interview here.

Lewis Wolpert is Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology of University College, London, focusing his research on the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the Royal Society of Literature. He has presented science on both radio and TV for years, and was Chairman of the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science in the UK. Among his books are Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (the basis for the BBC documentary entitled 'A Living Hell"), The Triumph of the Embryo, and A Passion for Science (with Alison Richards). His most recent book is Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief.

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Once bitten, twice shy. It seems that Holland is still suffering from the A.Q. Khan and Pakistan's nuclear program debacle. From Science (Jul 11, 2008):

Iranian-born scientists and students are upset by new Dutch regulations, announced last week, that ban them from nine fields of study and five research facilities where they might have access to nuclear technology. The Dutch government says the rules are an implementation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1737, which seeks to limit Iran's access to nuclear technology (Science, 1 February, p. 556).

But the new rules are the strictest of any country and are unfairly singling out one group, critics say. "This stigmatizes the next generation of Iranian scientists," says Nasser Kalantar of the Nuclear Physics Accelerator Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, who says he plans to investigate whether the measure is constitutional. Peyman Jafari of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam hopes the Dutch parliament will intervene. The Netherlands is particularly sensitive to the issue because Abdul Qadeer Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear program, passed on highly classified material to Pakistan while working at a Dutch uranium-enrichment plant in the 1970s.

Loved the bit about "the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear program". This is funny because its true. During the 80's and 90's, A.Q. Khan did present himself (yes, he was much fond of self-promotion before his recent house-arrest) as the next Einstein. To his credit, he did copy the right material from the Dutch nuclear facilities - and you do have to have some smarts to copy the right material in the right way. So definitely no Einstein - but may be a James Bond? ;)

Of course, nuclear bombs are no laughing matter (unless you are Dr. Strangelove). So it was great to be reminded of Cosmos at Pharyngula this past weekend. I think this is the episode I have watched the least over the years, as it gets a little too preachy at times. But this bit is great and holds up fantastically well, even after almost 30 years! Enjoy.

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Today's Washington Post has an interesting opinion piece on the teaching of evolution in class rooms: Evolving Toward a Compromise. The key point is that simply defeating creationists efforts over and over again is not enough - in fact that can create a sense of persecution amongst those defeated (see this persecution complex in full display at Uncommon Descent). Instead, we need to understand some of their points of discomfort and, may be, compromise on some aspects not related to science. This is a good tactical move. I don't think this will be very effective in dealing with the ID folks at the Discovery Institute or the Ken Ham type creationists, but this will resonate well with those who are not too familiar with these controversies and have many misconceptions about the evolutionary theory and end up supporting "teach the controversy" or "strength and weaknesses" brand of creationism in classrooms.

Intelligent design and previous creationist debates appear to center on where humans came from. A less public yet similarly powerful motive of activists is their belief that the materialist underpinnings of evolutionary theory harm children's values. For example, the defender of fundamentalism in the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," Williams Jennings Bryan, was motivated by his conclusion that Darwinism taught "the law of the jungle" and had led to World War I by subverting the morality of the Germans. More recently, "the Wedge," an infamous leaked strategy document of intelligent design proponents, suggests that advocates are not as concerned about the truth of evolution as they are about the underlying values they think it teaches. The paper concludes that teaching evolution leads to moral relativism. As one contemporary supporter of intelligent design put it, "Darwinian evolution tells us not only where we came from but also what behavior is natural and normative for humans. . . . Teach kids they are animals, and they'll act like animals."

We propose a compromise that would neither violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment nor limit the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Most defenders of evolution do not consider valid the critics' fears that evolution teaches values. Even so, teachers could take these concerns seriously by clarifying what evolutionary theory does not imply about values. To assuage the type of concern articulated by William Jennings Bryan, teachers could tell students that even though evolutionary science talks about the survival of the fittest organism, it is not a model for how humans should treat each other. They could explain that students should not make an "ought" about human behavior from an "is" of nature and that competition in contemporary society will not lead to increased survival rates. Moreover, they could explicitly note that just because mutations in organisms are random, it does not follow that human morality is random.

We are not asking teachers to discuss what morality should look like but, rather, to explain that morality does not logically flow from evolutionary theory. This will not allay all the fears of those who could be attracted to intelligent design. But it's understandable that parents could be concerned that evolution entices their children to think unconsciously of themselves as creatures with animalistic impulses, to lose faith in their religious traditions and to think that if the nature of animals is determined by random mutations, then morality must be random as well. Teaching consciously what evolution does not need to imply for morality recognizes these concerns and does not cross church-state separation boundaries. Furthermore, challenging students to think about the connections between science and society would promote high-quality science instruction.

Read the full article here.
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Image by: Little Friends of Printmaking Photostream

Earlier this week I had an interesting conversation with my husband.

Well, the topic wasn't interesting, but the circumstances were.

He was looking over my shoulder, onto my computer screen, where I had my Google Reader page displayed.

"What's that you're looking at?" he asked.

"You mean my Google reader?" is how I replied, but what I thought was, "duh, are you serious?"

Because context is important, let's get something straight. I like pens and I like pencils. I love paper and I don't care if its already been used, I'll find a way to use it again. The extent of my computer-wizness is that I can type really really fast. And while there's a strange and bit obsessive reason as to why, I'll save it for another day. The bottom line is, other than their keys, I don't know much else about computers, even less about the world wide web, and double less about electronic gadgets that can make life easier.

But I do know an itty bit about RSS feeds.

Don't worry, you'll read all about them in a minute.

So I proceeded to probe my husband who knows everything about technology and websites and efficient surfing (doesn't he?) and learned that he knows nothing about Google reader.

Once I got over the initial shock, it occurred to me that if he doesn't know, then there are probably a lot of people who don't know.

So I sat down to write a blog about it. This was on Tuesday.

I eked out a paragraph and then did some procrastinating, specifically, other blog reading. You can imagine my total and utter disbelief at the first post I landed on.

It was all about RSS feeds. Written THAT DAY.

At first, I was a little bit freaked out. Then I was a little bit discouraged. What was I going to write about now?

But the truth is, Simple Mom did a WAY better job of describing what this time-saving genius application is than I ever could have done. So you must visit her blog and read all about it. Then set yourself up with one.

I'll give you a primer, though: subscribing to a feed, usually through your email account, is like an inbox for all of the websites you visit regularly. You don't have to keep checking to see if they've been updated, once you "subscribe" to them, they appear bolded in your "inbox" as soon as they are.

There's another really strange occurrence related to blogs and topic ideas that I also experienced with Simple Mom, but I'm afraid you won't believe me if I told you about it, so I'll skip it and marvel in silence at the way God gets his messages to us.

Splurge & Crafts

Ava and I spent about an hour in Michael's craft store this week. I'm not very crafty. Creative, but not crafty. But she loooovvvvveeeeesssss "arts and crafts" so we went for some resupply.

Is there anything better than a secret sale you don't know about until you're in the checkout? We picked up what I estimated to be about $25 worth of stickers, beads, glue, and paper lanterns--but ended up being (drum roll please)....$9.08!

We hit it right on Wednesday. Big sale on things already on sale. What a feeling. I don't need breathtaking sunsets or crashing waves (okay, yes I do) I just need an unexpected savings every once in a while.

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Salon has an interview with James Carse, who has a new book titled, The Religious Case Against Belief. His main point is that beliefs don't have to be linked with religion, and that the only defining characteristic of religion is "longevity". Some of his ideas are interesting and some not so smart. (read the full interview here)

Carse, who's retired from New York University (where he directed the Religious Studies Program for 30 years), is out to rescue religion from both religious fundamentalists and atheists. He worries that today's religious zealots have dragged us into a Second Age of Faith, not unlike the medieval Crusaders. But he's also critical of the new crop of atheists. "What these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it," he writes in his new book, "The Religious Case Against Belief."
...

I think the vast majority of people would say belief is at the very core of religion. How can you say religion does not involve belief?

It's an odd thing. Scholars of religion are perfectly aware that belief and religion don't perfectly overlap. It's not that they're completely indifferent to each other, but you can be religious without being a believer. And you can be a believer who's not religious. Let's say you want to know what it means to be Jewish. So you draw up a list of beliefs that you think Jews hold. You go down that list and say, "I think I believe all of these." But does that make you a Jew? Obviously not. Being Jewish is far more and far richer than agreeing to a certain list of beliefs. Now, it is the case that Christians in particular are interested in proper belief and what they call orthodoxy. However, there's a very uneven track of orthodoxy when you look at the history of Christianity. It's not at all clear what exactly one should believe.

I think this is quite reasonable. What about religion?

So what is it that holds together a belief system?

A belief system is meant to be a comprehensive network of ideas about what one thinks is absolutely real and true. Within that system, everything is adequately explained and perfectly reasonable. You know exactly how far to go with your beliefs and when to stop your thinking. A belief system is defined by an absolute authority. The authority can be a text or an institution or a person. So it's very important to understand a belief system as independent of religion. After all, Marxism and Nazism were two of the most powerful belief systems ever.

What, then, do you mean by religion?

Religion is notoriously difficult to define. Modern scholars have almost unanimously decided that there is no generalization that applies to all the great living religions. Jews don't have a priesthood. Catholics do. The prayer in one tradition is different from another. The literature and the texts are radically different from each other. So it leaves us with the question: Is there any generalization one could make about religion?

But aren't there certain core questions that religion grapples with: God or some kind of transcendent reality? Evil and the afterlife?

Well, let's talk about the five great religions: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Hinduism is 4,000 years old. Judaism is hard to date but about 3,000 years old; Buddhism 2,600; Christianity 2,000. And Islam has been with us for 14 centuries. The striking thing is that each of them has been able, over all these centuries, to maintain their identity against all kinds of challenges. Let's say you're a Muslim and you want to know what Islam is about. So you begin your inquiries and you find that as you get deeper and deeper in your studies, the questions get larger and larger. If people come to religion authentically, they find their questions not answered but expanded.

And he considers "longevity" as the only defining characteristic of religion. huh!?

In your book, you say the only defining characteristic of religion is its longevity. It has to be around for a very long time to qualify as a religion.

Exactly. That's a very interesting contrast with belief systems. Belief systems have virtually no longevity. Think of Marxism. As a serious political policy, it lasted only about 70 or 80 years. Nazism only went 12 years. And they were intense, complete, comprehensive, passionately held beliefs. But they ran out very quickly. The reason the great religions don't run out as quickly is that they're able to maintain within themselves a deeper sense of the mystery, of the unknowable, of the unsayable, that keeps the religion alive and guarantees its vitality.

Hmm...are there no reasons other than "a deeper sense of the mystery" that make a religion survive? And what length of time makes one system qualify as a religion? It appears that couple of hundred years certainly doesn't cut it (he excludes Mormonism). Would astrology qualify - its certainly older than Christianity? By the way, from his definition, science will be the only real religion left (woo hoo!) - the only problem is that he doesn't seem to be a big fan of science.

Ok, lets get to his views about the New Atheists:

Given what's happening in the world right now, do you think there's a lot at stake in how we talk about religion and belief?

Absolutely. In the current, very popular attack on religion, the one thing that's left out is the sense of religion that I've been talking about. Instead, it's an attack on what's essentially a belief system.

Are you talking about atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion. Therefore, it's too easy for them to pass off a quick notion of what religion is. That kind of critique also tends to set up a counter-belief system of its own. Daniel Dennett proposes his own, fairly comprehensive belief system based on evolution and psychology. From his point of view, it seems that everything can be explained. Harris and Dawkins are not quite that extreme. But that's a danger with all of them. To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

Ok, now he is right on one thing: The New Atheists often don't distinguish between religion and belief. For example, Dawkins often focuses on the lack of evidence for a supernatural entity. But religions are also a social-cultural complex, where the belief in the supernatural may (or may not) be only one of the many components. So he is right in pointing out the importance of the specific god for attack rather than using "religion" as a broad term. But then he makes the same mistake of defining atheism in a narrow way that fits his own line of attack:

And yet, you've just told me that you yourself don't believe in a divine reality. In some ways, your critique of belief systems seems to go along with what the new atheists are saying.

The difference, though, is that I wouldn't call myself an atheist. To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe. That's a mode of being that has nothing to do with belief. So I have very little in common with them.

What?? So atheists are not "stunned by the mystery of things" or "to walk around in wonder about the universe". Has he ever read Dawkins? Or Sagan? (heck - or Einstein?) Its a shame that he is talking all about definitions, and then he comes up with such a dismal definition for atheism. Ok, so he has a bizarre idea about religion ("longevity" as the defining characteristic) and he has a terrible definition of atheism (not to mention his hostility towards a cognitive understanding of belief) - may be its a good idea to skip his book. The end of the interview is about poetry and his view that religions at their roots are inspired by poets. Ok - so this is a nice point, but it doesn't do enough to negate his views above.

You can read the full interview here.

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Its great that archeologists are taking a preemptive stance against the possible idiocy of bombing Iran (from New Scientist):

PERSEPOLIS, once the capital of the Persian empire, and the massive mud-brick Bam citadel are among the nine listed World Heritage Sites in Iran. Yet leading archaeologists are urging colleagues to refuse any military requests to draw up a list of Iranian sites that should be exempted from air strikes.

"Such advice would provide cultural credibility and respectability to the military action," said a resolution agreed by the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin, Ireland, last week. Instead, delegates were advised to emphasise the harm that any military action would do to Iran's people and heritage.

And not that it matters much even when they cooperate:

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, bombing damaged important monuments, including the Al-Zohur Palace in Baghdad, and museums and archaeological sites were later looted - even though archaeologists had been consulted in advance. "If these archaeologists had little impact in terms of saving even the few selected archaeological sites listed, what did they achieve?" asks Yannis Hamilakis of the University of Southampton, UK.

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An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple RumorsFrom the article:It had been a hobby — albeit a time-consuming one — while Dr. Kim earned his medical degree. He kept at it as he completed his medical training and began diagnosing patients’ kidney problems. Dr. Kim’s Web site [Macrumors.com] now attracts more than 4.4 million people and 40 million page views a month, according to Quantcast, making it one
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I had earlier posted news about the call for rights for apes (also see here). Here is a post from Done and Progress that takes another look at the interconnectedness of species:

But we can defend the value of interconnectedness without all that talk about substances by taking a more naturalistic turn. First, we have some biological similarity with other beings. This is closest with other primates, mammals, and then spreads out from there. We are also increasingly concerned with sustainable development, partially because we’re starting to realize (as a political whole, hopefully), that our lifestyle depends upon a better stewardship of the resources we use to maintain those lifestyles. As our interests are similar to the interests of some other creatures on the planet, and also tied up within the interests of other non-human beings, it makes sense pragmatically to place more value on how our goods are tied up with the goods of non-humans. If we want better lifestyles for increasing numbers of people, it seems like this is a value that will help us achieve that goal.

Read the full post here.
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Here is an interesting combination (hat tip to RichardDawkins.net):


Too bad, Harun Yahya's name wasn't mentioned. It would have been cool to see Dawkins go after him on Al-Jazeera.
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Here is an interesting article that looks at the role and influence of uncertainty and doubt on religion in the US. The interesting thing is that it makes an effort to mine data from the recently conducted United States Religious Landscape Study to test competing hypotheses: Is doubt (and uncertainty) of modern age causing the retreat of faith or is it forming a strong modified faith with its roots in doubt:

But the idea that contemporary faith, at least in the economically developed West, is shadowed by uncertainty on a new and different scale begs for some empirical investigation. Is such a doubt-haunted belief merely the intermediate stage in that slow retreat of the “Sea of Faith” that Matthew Arnold lamented in “Dover Beach,” and that has left much of Western Europe with little more than a veneer of cultural or nostalgic religiosity? Call this the familiar transition hypothesis.

Or is there a newly emergent faith that is deep and constant, marked by familiar forms of prayer and practice, but nonetheless alert to, perhaps even enlivened by, the whisper saying, “I am convinced I’m right but I could be wrong”? That would be a faith lived, to use a favorite phrase of Professor Taylor, “in a different register.” Call this the new steady-state hypothesis.

Here is the set-up for the hypotheses:

At first glance, the latest findings from the United States Religious Landscape Study, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, promise a way of examining those alternatives. This survey of more than 35,000 Americans asked people not only whether they believed in “God or a universal spirit” (92 percent did), but also whether the believers were “absolutely certain, fairly certain, not too certain, or not at all certain.” While 71 percent replied “absolutely certain,” a sizable portion (17 percent) fell into the “fairly certain” category.

What if one explored this latter group’s answers to other survey questions? How important, for example, was religion in their lives? How often did they pray or attend worship services? How convinced were they that there would be life after death?

From the start, one could suppose that the fairly certain would prove less devout or observant on such measures than the absolutely certain. At least some of the fairly certain, it can be assumed, are people in transit, shifting toward disbelief and already distancing themselves from traditional religious life.

Nonetheless, if it turned out that the answers of the fairly certain came even close to those of the absolutely certain, it would confirm the idea of a stable strata of deeply committed, actively practicing religious believers who have also integrated a significant degree of doubt and uncertainty into their faith.

And it seems that the transition hypothesis comes out stronger from the dats:

In most cases the fairly certain believers were closer in attitude and observance to those saying they were not certain.

For example, 71 percent of absolutely certain believers considered religion “very important” in their lives; only 22 percent of the fairly certain did.

Strike 1 against the new steady-state hypothesis.

But the Pew survey also asked those who believed in God whether their view of God was more like “a person with whom people can have a relationship” or “an impersonal force.”

Obviously, religious practices like worship and prayer usually assume a God who has relationships with people. So what if one limited the comparisons between absolutely certain and fairly certain believers to ones who, in both cases, also described their view of God as “personal”?

In this case, the gap between the two groups closes — but only modestly. Strike 2 against the steady-state hypothesis.

Way to go transition hypothesis! Read the full article here.

P.S. Also check out the video of Hampshire College Science & Religion Lecture on Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

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This months challenge was hosted by Belita of Everyday Culinary Adventures and Lori.

When Lori and Temperance were asking for hosts, I knew just where to turn, and thank you to Lori, my fabulous co-host this month for agreeing to do this recipe!

It's summer where I'm from and one of my favorite things to do in the summer is spend some time on Cape Cod and the Islands [Martha's Vineyard (Amity Island for JAWS lovers!) and Nantucket]. I live close enough to do day trips. One "must do" when visiting the Vineyard is to stop at The Black Dog, a restaurant right on the beach in Vineyard Haven, near where the ferries drop you off. You can't go 5 minutes without seeing someone wearing Black Dog memorabilia when you're on the Cape or Islands!

I thought it would be fun to try a breakfast recipe...so I present to you "Thank George's Bank."

According to The Black Dog this recipe is to honor George’s Bank, a bank on the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Maine. For hundred’s of years, fishermen have gone there for cod, haddock, flounder, scallops, swordfish, tuna, etc… The fishing is now strictly controlled so the fish stocks can recover. “This recipe is not for the faint of heart.”

To prepare this dish, you will first need to prepare some fishcakes and hollandaise sauce.


Black Dog Fishcakes
(this says 4 patties, but even with wasting a lot on mistakes, I still got 6. I think this more closely yields 12)

These fishcakes are a popular Black Dog alternative to bacon or sausage. These are excellent for using up leftover potatoes!

2 cups cooked potatoes, mashed
1 pound skinless and boneless codfish
1 cup diced yellow onion
1 tablespoon fresh chopped thyme (1 teaspoon dried)
1 teaspoon white pepper
1-2 teaspoons salt
1 egg, beaten
½ cup cream
2 tablespoons butter

1. If you don’t have leftover mashed potatoes, peel and dice two large potatoes. Boil in salted water for about 20 minutes or until soft. Mash and set aside.
2. Place fish in a steamer, cover with diced onion and seasonings. Cover and steam for 10-15 minutes or until the onion is cooked.
3. In a medium bowl, combine cooked fish and seasoned onions with the mashed potatoes. Mix in the egg and cream, divide into four patties.
4. Sauté the fishcakes in a sauté pan in butter over medium heat until browned.


Easy Hollandaise Sauce
(yields ½ cup)

2 egg yolks
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
¼ pound (1 stick) butter, melted
splash Tabasco sauce
dash cayenne pepper
dash salt

1. Combine egg yolks and lemon juice in the bowl of a food processor.
2. Turn on the food processor and slowly add the melted butter.
3. Allow to run until the sauce emulsifies.
4. Add Tabasco, salt, and cayenne pepper.


Alternately, you may use this hollandaise sauce from The Joy of Cooking (yields 1 cup) (for those without a food processor):

10 tablespoons (1¼ sticks) butter
3 large egg yolks
1½ tbsp cold water
½-2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
dash of hot pepper sauce
salt and white pepper to taste

1. Over low heat, melt the butter.
2. Skim the foam off the top and keep warm.
3. In a double boiler (or a bowl on top of a saucepan), place the egg yolks and water.
4. Off the heat, beat the yolks with a whisk until they are light and frothy.
5. Place on top of saucepan or double boiler and whisk continuously until eggs are thickened, 3-5 minutes, making sure the eggs don't get too hot.
6. Pour into a separate bowl to cool, and while whisking continuously, slowly add the butter, omitting the milk solids.
7. Whisk in the lemon juice, hot pepper sauce, salt, and white pepper.
8. If sauce is too thick, add a few drops warm water.
9. Serve immediately or you can keep it warm up to 30 minutes by placing the bowl in warm water.

Thank George’s Bank
(serves 2)

4 Black Dog Fishcakes
2 teaspoons white vinegar
4 eggs for poaching
½ cup hollandaise sauce
toast or breakfast bread of choice

1. Prepare fishcakes and hollandaise sauce.
2. Fill a large saucepan with water and bring to a boil. Add white vinegar and reduce the heat to a simmer.
3. Crack and gently drop in the eggs.
4. Simmer about 3-5 minutes or until whites are firm and yolks are done to your likes.
5. To serve: place each poached egg on a fishcake, cover with hollandaise sauce. Serve with your favorite breakfast sides.

Quotes from the Forum:

I made it yesterday and it must be good 'cause I'm making the rest of the patties today
JMom of Cooked from The Heart

I didn't initially get how the combination of fish, poached egg and hollendaise would go together. But, when I ate it, it made sense.
Psychgrad of Equal Opportunity Kitchen

I wasn't to optimistic when it came time to put everything together but it was delicious! The poached egg and the sauce did it for me. The cod cake was good but in combo with the others, the dish was so tasty!
Heather B of Randomosity and the Girl

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So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?"Here’s what a number of successful bloggers with successful nonblogging careers say are the ways to think about getting into the business of blogging..."
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I must say that posting stories for this blog is really introducing me to much diverse examples of science & religion issues. Here is a case in point: What kind of products are ok for wrinkle treatments? Apparently, Botox is fine. However, there is now a new product called Evolence that is making things more complicated:

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved Evolence, from OrthoNeutrogena, a part of Johnson & Johnson, as an injectable material to treat facial wrinkles. Evolence, made in Israel, is made by extracting, purifying and stabilizing collagen from the tendons of food-grade pigs.
...
Evolence, unlike antiwrinkle shots made using cow collagen, does not require an allergy test. But here’s the wrinkle: are swine shots kosher?

A-ha! Good question. I guess as long as any of that material does not leak into your bloodstream, you are ok. It appears that it may be alright in any case:

Judaism prohibits eating pig products. But other uses of porcine material — like tossing around footballs — are permitted, said Rabbi Edward I. Reichman, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

Dr. Reichman added that porcine beauty shots per se would not violate Jewish dietary laws. But such injections could provide fodder for an ongoing debate about whether Jews are permitted to take health risks for cosmetic procedures.

What about for Muslims? After all, pig-related issues are one of those few things that Muslims and Jews usually agree about. So is Evolence halal?

Islam can sometimes be tolerant of cosmetic surgery but prohibitive when it comes to porcine products, said Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

“In the Middle East, even men go for the fixing of the nose,” he said. “That is allowed.”

But Shariah, Islamic law, forbids the use of any kind of porcine product, ingested or otherwise, unless it is medically necessary, he said.

The medical exception is/(will be) specially important for debates over xenotransplantation. And as for wrinkles, it is down to botox for Muslims. Read the full article here.

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