This Season, Heisenberg Wears a Red Sox Rally Cap
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times
I'm the biggest sports fan I know who hardly ever watches a game.
I was watching a dinosaur movie with my daughter last Wednesday while my Red Sox were completing the greatest comeback in the history of baseball and vanquishing the Yankees. Even as my wife, in the next room, relayed scores posted on the Internet suggesting that Boston was winning, I refused to turn on the game.
The reason is something I call quantum baseball. It caused me to lose the World Series for the Red Sox 18 years ago, when I realized that I seemed to have terrible powers, powers that could be used for good or evil - but mostly, it seems, evil.
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An X-Y Mystery Solved
With its amalgam of mammalian, reptilian and avian features, the duck-billed platypus looks like one of the oddest beasts around. The view is just as strange in the cell nucleus. The platypus has 10 sex chromosomes instead of the normal 2.
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Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores
By CORNELIA DEAN
Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, is hardly a practitioner of secular humanism.
Meals at his house begin with grace, and in a recent talk on environmental politics he chided his audience for not paying enough attention to the way the wonders of nature inspire wonder at their creator.
But when it comes to selling, in stores at a national park, a book propounding the idea that God created Grand Canyon in Noah's flood, he pauses. "If there were a person, which I doubt, qualified in geological science, who said it is perfectly plausible, that would be one thing," said Mr. Kennedy, who led the park service from 1993 to 1996. But, he said, such a book would have to have "a respectable scholarly basis."
( Read More... )
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times
I'm the biggest sports fan I know who hardly ever watches a game.
I was watching a dinosaur movie with my daughter last Wednesday while my Red Sox were completing the greatest comeback in the history of baseball and vanquishing the Yankees. Even as my wife, in the next room, relayed scores posted on the Internet suggesting that Boston was winning, I refused to turn on the game.
The reason is something I call quantum baseball. It caused me to lose the World Series for the Red Sox 18 years ago, when I realized that I seemed to have terrible powers, powers that could be used for good or evil - but mostly, it seems, evil.
( Read More... )
An X-Y Mystery Solved
With its amalgam of mammalian, reptilian and avian features, the duck-billed platypus looks like one of the oddest beasts around. The view is just as strange in the cell nucleus. The platypus has 10 sex chromosomes instead of the normal 2.
( Read More )
Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores
By CORNELIA DEAN
Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, is hardly a practitioner of secular humanism.
Meals at his house begin with grace, and in a recent talk on environmental politics he chided his audience for not paying enough attention to the way the wonders of nature inspire wonder at their creator.
But when it comes to selling, in stores at a national park, a book propounding the idea that God created Grand Canyon in Noah's flood, he pauses. "If there were a person, which I doubt, qualified in geological science, who said it is perfectly plausible, that would be one thing," said Mr. Kennedy, who led the park service from 1993 to 1996. But, he said, such a book would have to have "a respectable scholarly basis."
( Read More... )