The UmBlog

My blog has plenty of evidence to demonstrate I am a pro-life person. My twitter account will also show I am not anti-choice, acknowledging that the mother's circumstances and decision does not need to be explained or justified to me or any other man. I'm also pro-life in that I am against the death penalty. I'm also pro-life in that I think government should offer enough aid for the flourishing of children long after they are born medically, educationally, food security, and healthy living conditions ...sort of like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Certainly getting rid of lead paint had a tremendous positive impact in the lives of a generation and likely led to the dramatic drop in crime in the 90's instead of the racially biased stop and frisk. But now we have a greater risk, climate change. The build up of CO2 in our atmosphere is directly correlated to the burning of hydrocarbons , basically compressed forests from ages past, and slash an...

Today is April 2nd and 5 inches of snow fell in my yard today. At least half of it has melted away this afternoon. An April snow storm does not mean that global warming is a hoax, played by mean scientists on poor Americans. But I think an analogy would be helpful for dubious Americans. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is used as a representative gauge of the economy over many decades. Today the DJIA fell 458 points. However, that is only a 2% drop. In ten years the stock market index has grown over 300%. The impact of 2% on one day is massive for someone just starting out, but for someone who has been invested over 10 years, it's merely a hiccup. Today's spring snowfall is like today's drop in the stock market. The temperature of both fell, but the upward trend is undeniable. A heated up stock market can be a good thing for most people. A heated up planet can be a good thing for a few people. But for most people a hotter planet will be a bad thing. And it's n...

From Inhabitat As a younger person encountering the bible story of Noah and the great flood I always wondered at all the neighbors who ignored his warnings for decades and only mocked him. Naively I asked myself, "how come no one listened to him?" Now I am watching a similar sociological event. Oil company scientists recognized decades ago that the rapid release of CO2 from fossil fuel emissions would overload the natural carbon cycle the planet has been used to for a billion years. Their bosses told them to shut up and prepared an alternate, non-scientific propaganda campaign. Most of the humans in the world live near the oceans. Because of our inability to agree on preventing this, the oceans will inundate great cities and poor countries around the world . Conservative groups, who by definition of conservatism resist change, refuse to believe scientific warnings and label them alarmists and "chicken littles." They prefer the oil company propaganda. Now I...

Summer time is normally a time for lighter reading, books that finish quickly. For many people, these books are usually fiction. For me, however, I am interested in historical narratives of natural disasters. Here are the four I've read so far. Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938 by R. A. Scotti is fast paced and well written. Scotti is a fomer journalist for the Providence Journal and is intimately familiar with the coastline and people of Rhode Island which lost the greatest number of lives. My section of southeastern Connecticut was also hit hard in 1938, and I appreciated her local perspective. Her collection of anecdotes helps us remember this event changed the lives of families and not just impersonal towns. Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's most violent hurricane by Judith A. Howard and Prof. Ernest Zebrowski, Jr. includes some more science behind these storms. It was published soon after Katrina repeated it's path of de...

David Montgomery is a geomorphologist at the University of Washington and has written a great historical explanation that any honest young earth creationists should read. Angry atheists should read this as well since Montgomery is a great model of irenic persuasion. He surveys throughout the book several flood myths , and notes their connections to historical events. He also notes how the myths change depending on the location around the world. For example, China does not have a world flooding story with a character like Noah who saves the animals. China's floods come from it's great rivers in deep valleys, not like Mesopotamia's great rivers through broad plains. Nor did China experience a great sea rising like the Black Sea's . He also goes into the development of the science of geology. It's an historical development that developed in the West alongside the influence of the rising Protestant church. As different hypotheses formed about how rocks formed ...

Not really. Sorry. I'm a swinger when it comes to these positions. I'm really grateful that the church fathers never decided that this topic was at creedal level, like that of God's triunity and Jesus's simultaneous full humanity and full divinity. I'm glad I'm saved by grace through faith and not by my ability to discern the debates in evolutionary science.

As a UConn alumnus, there is much to be proud of. Multiple basketball championships in both men's and women's teams. A degree program that got me into a career related to my major. And a sociology professor who has written a second winner, Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of Our World , by Brad Wright has proven once again that this particular field of study is not for those students who can't pick a major. I really enjoyed his first book, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media , which came out last year. Not only did I feel better as I read the first book but I learned a great deal. This new book does all that but allows more of Wright's voice, sardonic and self-deprecating, in the presentation of the data. This new book also presents vignettes of individuals and groups acting altruistically, as Christians, to make the world a better place. I love data, ...

I wrote... As the scientist in the family, my job is to teach math and science to the kids. When science experiments fail, i get excited because that's my reality at work. God is good jpu at When Experiments Fail on the Sonlight blog. We buy our home school curricula from them.

John Cleese, in this video, explains why I believe in God. HT: WWWtW

Thanks to Uncommon Descent with many more links on this topic.

the nice cat is nursing some puppies...blood tests show they are 100% dog...sorry folks. let's move it along. Blood tests refute a Brazilian woman's claim that her cat had given birth to three puppies, geneticist Adil Pacheco said Tuesday. Cassia Aparecida de Souza, 18, from a poor neighborhood of Passo Fundo in southern Brazil, said last Friday that her cat Mimi had given birth to the three puppies as well as three kittens, which did not survive. "People who aren't experts often imagine things," said Pacheco, director of the Institute of Biological Sciences of the University of Passo Fundo. "All the facts contradict her." Pacheco, who was asked by a local newspaper to conduct a chromosome test to check the spectacular claim which gained wide media attention, said mammals sometimes nursed the young from another species. i would like to thank this hoax for all the traffic is brought to my blog...but now, back to the church, homosexuality, abortion, hum...

forget labradoodles, how about cogs and dats and kuppies and pittens? click the title for the article... Brazilian student Cassia Aparecida de Souza, 18, claims her cat's offspring has been born with dog traits last Friday, three months after mating with a neighbour's dog in the Brazilian city of Passo Fundo. so if this isn't a hoax...who benefits more from this genetics violation? the creationists or the evolutionists? IT IS A HOAX!

Free Creation Science Videos is a great source of Young Earth video presentations.

A Physicist's Perspective: Michael Behe: "The Argument for Intelligent Design in Biology" I guess if you don't want to read Behe's Darwin's Black Box then you could read this short blog report on a recent Behe lecture. Behe posts here.

Who doesn’t like the underdog? The fans of the overdog I guess. My concentration in UConn's biology program was Ecology and Evolutionary biology. I have been reading creationist stuff, young earth and old earth stuff since elementary school. So this well preserved soft tissue from a T. rex femur sure make the Young Earth creationists look good, and they know it. Pictures. However, not even all Christians can cheer for the Young Earth guys on this one. Rich Deem has an excellent Old Earth Christian site in which he attempts to explain how this isn’t a victory for the Young Earth crew. How old is my earth? I don’t know. It seems pretty young to me today.