And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. Job 1:7
In a previous post, I counted the number of people that were killed by God in the Bible. I came up with 2,391,421, which, of course, greatly underestimates God's total death toll, since it only includes those killings for which specific numbers are given. No attempt was made to include the victims of Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the many plagues, famines, fiery serpents, etc., with which the good book is filled. Still, 2 million is a respectable number even for world class killers.
But how does this compare with Satan? How many did he kill in the Bible?
Well I can only find ten, and even these he shares with God, since God allowed him to do it as a part of a bet. I'm talking about the seven sons and three daughters of Job.
Arctic Lake Sediments Show Warming, Unique Ecological Changes In Recent Decades
ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2009) — An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The
adjacent foothills hold lakes that were not scoured by glaciers during
late Quaternary glaciations, and thus preserve exceptionally long
sedimentary records of climate change. (Credit: Jason Briner, Courtesy
Queen's University)
The information below began as a blog comment at Bad Astronomy, in an effort to address the common myths and misinformation spouted by those who are against vaccines (anti-vaxers), though the information can also be useful for some general vaccine questions that are not necessarily "anti-vax". At the urging of others and with the help of Eric TF Bat, this information now has a permanent home. It is intended as a resource for arguing the primary points made by anti-vaxers and is not offered as medical advice. I strongly encourage you to follow the links in the text and under the Additional Resources section. Finally, please feel free to send me feedback. Enjoy!
Lecture Series presented by KPMG - The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time
One of the most obvious facts about the universe is that the past is
different from the future. We can turn an egg into an omelet, but can't
turn an omelet into an egg. Physicists have codified this difference
into the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the entropy of a closed system
always increases with time. But why? The ultimate explanation is to be
found in cosmology: special conditions in the early universe are
responsible for the arrow of time. This talk will be about the nature
of time, the origin of entropy, and how what happened before the Big
Bang may be responsible for the arrow of time we observe today.
Speaker Information
About Sean M. Carroll
Author and Physicist
California Institute of Technology
Sean M.Carroll is Senior Research Associate in Physics at the
California Institute of Technology. His research includes a number of
topics in theoretical physics such as cosmology, field theory, particle
physics, and gravitation. He is the author of "From Eternity to Here,"
a book about cosmology and the arrow of time.
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have
finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour,
bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't
it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun,
to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up
in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly
often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other
way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why
you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed,
eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of
it?We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people
are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The
potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in
fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats,
scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of
possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of
actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I,
in our ordinariness, that are here.
Richard Dawkins People
frequently ask Richard Dawkins: "Why do you bother getting up in the
morning if the meaning of life boils down to such a cruel pitiless
fact, that we exist merely to help replicate a string of molecules?" As
he puts it: "They say to me, how can you bear to be alive if everything
is so cold and empty and pointless? Well, at an academic level I think
it is - but that doesn't mean you can live your life like that. One
answer is that I feel privileged to be allowed to understand why the
world exists, and why I exist, and I want to share it with other
people."
"It's about why I think science is one of the supreme
things that makes life worth living," he says. "We are fantastically
privileged to exist at all, but then we also have the privilege of
understanding this beautiful world in which we find ourselves. that
should make us all the more eager to soak up as much as we possibly can
of understanding our world and our place in it before we die." Or, as
the book puts it: "Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved.
Quite the contrary: the solution often turns out more beautiful than
the puzzle... " He brilliantly berates those of us (all of us,
probably) who succumb to the "anaesthetic of familiarity," by which he
means allowing yourself to stop noticing that the world around you is
coruscating with wonder. But he also shows how little he understands
common humanity: "Just think," he enthuses, "instead of reading the
football results you can read about distant galaxies!"
Can you imagine the outrage if a Christian group put pro-God ads in the New York City subways? What outrage.
I can imagine it, because as that link points out, there have been multitudes of pro-God ads there for years. I was also familiar with seeing them all over the place in the Philadelphia subways when I lived there, and I can describe perfectly the "outrage" they generated. Look in a mirror, roll your eyes, and sigh…that's it.
That link also points out that Sean Hannity doesn't know, because he never rides the NY subway system.
Here's the Arizona COR video. Watch that and imagine Sean Hannity's outrage.
I wanted to look at the pre-holiday portrait of the first family released by the White House today. And, though I know the Obamas love photography and quality photographers, and also know a thing or two about having their picture taken, you can't be overly naive in hiring the likes of rockstar and celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.
With Obama in shirt sleeves, there is a nice mix of formal and informal here, with the theme of black-and-white apparently the fashion of the season. (Note the BAZAAR Tina Fey cover posted yesterday.) One thing Leibovitz seems to be doing is playing up the identity of Barack as shiny; luminescent (the shirt's sort of blinding); pure; innocent (especially, with little Sasha as sidekick); and ever relaxed.
What is curious about the monochrome, though, is how Leibovitz unbalances the photo with the President and Sasha mostly in white, grouped together, and Michelle and Malia primarily in black (with Michelle almost disappearing by virtue of the contrast).
From looking at family photos, it's not unusual that Malia would be lovingly draped over her mother that way. It is interesting, however, that the ultimate selection would be one in which America's First Lady (by virtue of the dress color, Malia's overwhelming and intimate presence, and the difference between her highly posed look and Malia's highly relaxed one) would marginalize her be marginalized so much.
So, Mom downplayed and a more innocent skew to the left, huh? My take is that Leibovitz (Leibovitz being Leibovitz) was more than happy to compromise Michelle, along with the larger and safer themes of family and holiday (cute move with the Green Room and the red Christmasy tree, by the way) to subtlety feature Malia's legs, that curve of the body in the little girl dress and that intimate school-girl gaze.
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