The Big Think

Did you know this is the earliest Easter for the next 220 years? More cool Easter date info here.

… but take Him out of Easter:

The pastors at this church in Raleigh, North Carolina, were perplexed when they saw the Holy Week Sunday school lessons for preschoolers from “First Look,” the publisher of the one to five year-old Sunday school class materials. There wasn’t a mention of the resurrection of Jesus. Naturally, the pastors inquired about the oversight. It turns out it was no oversight…

“Easter is a special time in churches,” the letter from the publisher says. “It’s a time of celebration and thankfulness. But because of the graphic nature of the Easter story and the crucifixion specifically, we need to be careful as we choose what we tell preschoolers about Easter.”

So now the story ends with the Last Supper - and presumably afterwards Jesus and His friends watch Elmo and then go to bed. That the foundational event of your faith is now excessively “disturbing” is almost too parodic a reductio of the Wimp Christianity of the mainline churches.

article here.

If you were a lucky insomniac yesterday morning (wednesday about midnight am), and happened to be looking in the right place of the sky, you would have seen a mega-explosion that happened halfway across the universe (note: not “galaxy”). This super-explosion happened approximately 7.5 billion years ago and the light was just visible with the naked human eye wednesday for a few minutes.

“No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance,” says Swift science team member Stephen Holland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We don’t know yet if anyone was looking at the afterglow at the time it brightened to peak visibility. But if someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid.”

Scienceblog has more.

In five hundred years I believe the world will look back on early 21st century humanity and will see Dean Kaman much the same way that we now look back on Leonardo da Vinci. Kamen has done a lot of things in his long and eclectic career, but I think he’ll be remember most not for the crazy thing he invented a few years ago, but for something much more mundane and important.

Kamen was on the Colbert Report last night showing off his latest invention. Colbert sticks to his schtick, unfortunately, and tries to milk some comedy out of an invention that I believe is truly revolutionary and important. Check it out.

Kamen is one of those guys that I’d really, really like to meet. He seems to have a knack (Segway jokes aside), for picking one or two really intractable problems and then focusing on them (with his brilliant team) until he gets them licked.

I mean, how cool is it to invent a relatively cheap water purifier that can basically change the lives of 1,200,000,000 people? How’s that for a contribution?

Storme and Lee got interviewed on Churchy Media. Cool.

EETimes.com is reporting that a group of Canadian and German researchers have created a room temperature superconductor. This is huge news- really huge. Like, cure-for-cancer big in the energy world. I’m sure there are a myriad of details to work out, and it’ll probably be 10-15 years until we see this stuff commercially available, but if they could replace our entire electrical grid,including all of the wiring in our house (an admittedly non-trivial assumption), our energy usage would plummet significantly.

“If you put hydrogen compounds under enough pressure, you can get superconductivity,” said professor John Tse of the University of Saskatchewan. “These new superconductors can be operated at higher temperatures, perhaps without a refrigerant.”

He performed the theoretical work with doctoral candidate Yansun Yao. The experimental confirmation was performed by researcher Mikhail Eremets at the Max Plank Institute in Germany.

The new family of superconductors are based on a hydrogen compound called “silane,” which is the silicon analog of methane–combining a single silicon atom with four hydrogen atoms to form a molecular hydride. (Methane is a single carbon atom with four hydrogens).

Researchers have speculated for years that hydrogen under enough pressure would superconduct at room temperature, but have been unable to achieve the necessary conditions (hydrogen is the most difficult element to compress). The Canadian and German researchers attributed their success to adding hydrogen to a compound with silicon that reduced the amount of compression needed to achieve superconductivity.

So obviously now we need to deal with high-pressure here, but I’m sure they’re working on that. Room temp superconductors have been something of a holy grail in science for decades. If they really managed this feat then keep your eyes on this technology. Things are about to get really interesting.

Read more here.

This is, as my brother said in his email to me, creepy cool. Just don’t give these things AI and guns. Watch the thing right itself on the ice around 1:30. Wow.

Atheist sees image of Big Bang in a piece of toast.

Dangit! I just missed my 14,000th day! It was January 9th of 2008! I’ll have to wait another 3+ years for the next one! Shoot.

Calculate your own K-days.

This is what it’s like to be a nerd with X-10. Check out the first 2:40. Gets dumb after that.

I spent some time cleaning out the library this afternoon. Our “library” is really just the pretentiously named fourth bedroom in our house. Instead of an extra bed there are four bookshelves, a computer, and a lot of other stuff that needed to be sorted, tossed, or re-filed into other categories and locations to be tossed later.

I went through some of my books (they multiply, you know) and came to my Science Fiction section. Had a lot of Asimov books, naturally, a few Brin, Card, Sheffield, and a whole bunch of Arthur C. Clarke. 2001, 2010, 2069, 3001, The Rama series, on and on. I decided that his stuff passed the threshold of keepability (meaning: too good to toss. I chucked some old or outdated or duplicate stuff). So I re-shelved them and thought “gee, I’m going to have to read some of those again soon”. Clarke is one of those seminal, always-present writers in the SF world. His books were a big, big part of my life growing up. He was really the very first science fiction author of any standing that I read in my youth and I always appreciated how his style of writing was clear and complex at the same time. He could get across some pretty intricate ideas in a way that was easy to understand, without talking down to a 12 year old. In spite of his annoying tendency to kill his main characters at the end of his books in order to Make A Bigger Point, I’ve always liked his style of writing.

Clarke made his biggest contributions during the 60’s and 70’s and has been floating serenely on his fame ever since while living in, of all places, Sri Lanka.

I was surprised and saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke died in his home today at the age of 90. An era has ended.

Australian auctions his life to get a fresh start.

Matt has a good post on subjectivity and objective beauty over at Not-A-Pipe. We’ve had extensive conversations about this topic for a while. Most of my conversations with Matt fall in the “extensive” category, for which I’m pretty grateful.

Control is just a myth. Flexibility - now, that is something you can learn!

Seen online

Work is a privilege, the more so the older you get. It’s a privilege to be able to do what you love to do and be good at it. My hobby is my work, and my work is my hobby. Thats’s the secret. There’s no distinction.”

Les Paul (h/t Mom)

This is making the rounds among my musician friends. Great stuff by Garrison Keillor:

It’s all about manners and maintaining a sense of integrity in a selfless situation, and surviving in a body of neurotic perfectionists.

Read the whole thing: A Foot Soldier in God’s Floating Orchestra.

(h/t to Erin’s Aunt and Uncle, who play in the Cinci Orchestra, for sending this.)

The new Melodyne plugin can do magic. (h/t Scott)

There’s a bunch of pictures of Sing over at Baylor Proud (h/t Patrick)