Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, by James M. McPherson
Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God: The Life Story of the Author of My Utmost for His Highest, by David McCasland
Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew, by Alex Kershaw
I Am America (And So Can You!), by Stephen Colbert
Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship, by John Baldwin & Ron Powers
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, by Donald S. Whitney
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the
This is Your Brain on Joy, by Dr. Earl Henslin (review still in process for Thomas Nelson)
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, by Tony Horwitz
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick
Truman, by David McCullough.
Since I’m already on #12, I thought why not go for 24 books in a year. Here’s a list of books that I’m wanting to read.
His Excellency: George Washington, by Joseph J. Ellis
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris
Finding an Unseen God: Reflections of a Former Atheist, by Alicia Britt Chole (reviewing for Bethany House)
Family Driven Faith: Doing What it Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk With God, by Voddie T. Baucham, Jr.
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, by Eugene Peterson
The
God’s Passion for His Glory, by John Piper and Jonathan Edwards
The Cross of Christ, by John Stott
Outrageous Mercy: Rediscover the Radical Nature of Christianity, by William P. Farley
Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand
Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of
The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, by David O. Stewart
Some of these I'm hoping to review, so stay tuned. Here's to a bookwormish remainder of the year!
The headline "Scientists track unusual earthquake swarm beneath Yellowstone" only means one thing to fans of the Discovery channel like myself: supervolcano. Here is what the earthquake center at the University of Utah had to say yesterday afternoon:
The University of Utah Seismograph Stations reports that a notable swarm of earthquakes has been underway since December 26 beneath Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park, three to six miles south-southeast of Fishing Bridge, Wyoming. This energetic sequence of events was most intense on December 27, when the largest number of events of magnitude 3 and larger occurred.
The largest of the earthquakes was a magnitude 3.9 (revised from magnitude 3.8) at 10:15 pm MST on Dec. 27. The sequence has included nine events of magnitude 3 to 3.9 and approximately 24 of magnitude 2 to 3 at the time of this release. A total of more than 250 events large enough to be located have occurred in this swarm. Reliable depths of the larger events are up to a few miles. Visitors and National Park Service (NPS) employees in the Yellowstone Lake area reported feeling the largest of these earthquakes.
Earthquakes are a common occurrence in the Yellowstone National Park area, an active volcanic-tectonic area averaging 1,000 to 2,000 earthquakes a year. Yellowstone's 10,000 geysers and hot springs are the result of this geologic activity. A summary of the Yellowstone's volcanic history is available on the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory web site (listed below).
This December 2008 earthquake sequence is the most intense in this area for some years and is centered on the east side of the Yellowstone caldera. Scientists can not identify any causative fault or other feature without further analysis. Seismologists continue to monitor and analyze the data and will issue new information if the situation warrants it.
The University of Utah operates a seismic network in Yellowstone National Park in conjunction with the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). These three institutions are partners in the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
And what if the supervolcano blew? Kind of like if a giant rock hit the Earth. A planet killer. An extinction-level event. Let me quote the words of President Tom Beck (Morgan Freeman) in the comet-hitting-earth film Deep Impact:
Within a week, the skies will be dark with dust from the impact and they will stay dark for years. All plant life will be dead within weeks. Animal life within a few months. So that's it. Good luck to us all.
Such a scenario would be very bad for equity values and the outlook for the labor market.
HT: Google Trends
I was asked to view a couple of programs and to write my thoughts on them. The first is Fox TV’s “Conspiracy: Did we Land on the Moon?” The other is “The Great Conspiracy” – a documentary focusing on the events surrounding the 9/11 tragedy. This review will focus on the first and at some time later I’ll try to review the second.
To begin with and to be fair, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t own a tin foil hat. So I am already biased against any “factual” evidence or information that was presented in these documentaries. Also, there are many, many websites that have reviewed this program and conspiracy theory. One of which is of course, Snopes. Another site is Bad Astronomy (BA), which reviews the program in detail and which I have cited a couple of times.
The “Conspiracy: Did We Land on the Moon?” program examines whether or not NASA’s Apollo space program actually succeeded in putting a man on the moon. The program attempts to question the validity of the government’s claim that we did indeed land on the moon by presenting a number of “factual problems” that conspiracy theorists have with the evidence. The difficulty that I have with conspiracy theories such as these is that each claims to have an inside scoop on what really happened. They supposedly say that they simply want the viewer to decide for themselves, yet only show one side of the argument – theirs. There are so many factually incorrect statements or faulty assumptions made that to go over each of them would take too long and probably bore the reader. I’ll only touch on a few of them, but if you are interested further, I would highly recommend visiting the Bad Astronomy site above.
The main protagonist is a skeptical analyst and engineer named Bill Kaysing, who worked for Rocketdyne, the designing company of the Apollo rockets. His first comment arises from the many issues of the Apollo program “that led people to believe that we’re never going to make it to the moon.” Right off the bat, there are a couple of things worth noting. First, Kaysing is “regarded as the instigator of the moon hoax movement.” (Wikipedia) As such, the program cites him heavily. Second, although he is presented as an authority on the Apollo rockets, Kaysing was not actually employed by Rocketdyne during any of the Apollo space program’s manned flights. (He resigned in 1963 and the first manned flight was not until 1968.) Third, while he claims to have knowledge of this and other space programs by way of documents he was privy to, this was apparently not even sufficient concrete evidence for him because all he could lay claim to was “a hunch, an intuition, … a true conviction.” In my opinion, if someone has seen documented evidence that a hoax was being perpetrated, as Kaysing claims, that person shouldn’t have to rely on “a hunch.” Later in the program, Kaysing says (with dramatic music cueing in the background!) “What actually happened in my mind, during the 60’s, is they said if you can’t make it, fake it (emphasis added).” So Fox TV is here quoting a guy who relies heavily on hunches and his own interpretation (“What actually [?] happened in my mind [!]) of what may have happened.
Kaysing’s first real issues come when he’s watching video footage of the Apollo landing and realizes that there are no stars in any of the photographs, that the U.S. flag is waving in an atmosphere without air (i.e., a vacuum), and there is no blast crater underneath the Lunar Landing Module (LLM). I’ll only mention the bit about the stars by copying a quote from the BA site:
"So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars!"
Perhaps the silliest part of the program is where similarities are drawn between the movie Capricorn One and the Apollo landings. Capricorn One was a movie about how NASA had to fake a landing on Mars. Fox TV’s program says “The Apollo footage is strikingly similar to the scenes in Capricorn One” even down to some of the dialogue (“the surface is fine and powdery…”) Wow, so the Apollo hoaxers copied the movie to make their fake moon landings, right? Well, um, no. See, Capricorn One wasn’t made until 1978, almost 10 years after the Apollo 11 landings. So is it any surprise that a movie being made about a hoax landing be patterned after a real landing to offer authenticity? That this correlation between the movie and the Apollo landing was even mentioned in the program is incredibly sensationalizing at best. Once again, a Kaysing interview is shown where his reasoning for claiming that the whole thing was a hoax was that NASA had the budget to pull it off (since their budget is obviously so much greater than a film producer), but didn’t have the technology for the real thing. However, even then, no factual evidence is even presented.
Coming a close second in silliness is the association with, you guessed it, Area 51. Did you know that Area 51 has hangers that look like movie studios? Never mind the fact that movie studios look like hangers. Did you know that in the desert around Area 51, there is sand very similar in texture to moon dust/sand? And (and I know this is hard to imagine), the desert is barren just like the moon, complete with craters! Why, even astronauts see the similarities! Yes, this is the kind of ridiculous associations made by these conspiracy theorists.
Unfortunately, the program along with the conspiracy theory is chock full of these astounding assumptions, all of which are necessary to uphold the absurd claims made by those who believe them. As noted by a NASA spokesman in the program, every single piece of evidence showing a moon landing must be refuted in order to allow the conspiracy theorists their day in the spotlight. However, all the theorists have is conjecture, presupposition, and a whole rocket load full of faulty assumptions. They even go so far as to claim that NASA purposefully murdered astronauts in order to keep the hoax a secret. As pointed out earlier, they “have a hunch” or present what happened “in their mind” or what "could/may have happened"– all this without one shred of evidence to support these hunches. Overall, this program, like the theory it is about, can have holes poked in it as easy as, well, as tin foil.
I’ve discovered Google Hot Trends recently and must confess I’ve become a little addicted to it. Google Hot Trends allows you to see what people are searching for on any given day. How does it work? According to the “About Google Trends” page, “Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like 'weather,' Hot Trends highlights searches that experience sudden surges in popularity, and updates that information hourly.”
With a listing of the 100 top searches on Google, you can get a rough idea of what’s going on in the news or what the hot topic is for the day. It’s really quite interesting to see what catches peoples’ curiosity (an ironic statement, I guess). For instance, let’s take a look at yesterday. I like to look at the previous day in order to have a full day’s worth of search data to peruse.
Any guesses on what the hot search item for Dec. 2, 2008 was? Perhaps some celebrities’ new hairdo (a la Katie Couric)? Nope. How about Obama’s cabinet member choices? Nope again.
Try Horatio Magellan.
Next question, who in the world is Horatio Magellan?!? And more importantly (at least, to an analyst like myself), what in the world would cause people to search for him? Ready for this?
Horatio Magellan is none other than the full name of that beloved, nautical commander of the sugar-laden seas, Cap’n Crunch. If his mother ever got angry with, she would apparently call out “Horatio Magellan Crunch!!” (he wasn’t Cap’n yet) Pretty cool name, if you ask me.
That brings us to the next question of what would cause people to search for the Cap’n’s full identity. Was it parents preparing to bring a lawsuit over nervous breakdowns due to cereal-induced, hyper active kids and needing to know who to cite? Give the answer in the form of a question and you’ll be spot on. What is Jeopardy? Correct! The answer on last night’s Final Jeopardy round quizzed the contestants on the full identity of the good Cap’n: “What cereal box spokesman has the first and middle names Horatio Magellan?"
Last night, we were treated to a fly-by of the International Space Station, along with the space shuttle Endeavour docked to it (although we couldn’t really distinguish the two). I had read in the paper that it could be seen around 6:10 p.m. So right after dinner, I took Carlos out on the deck behind our house and told him that we should be able to see the space station go overhead. Sure enough, off to the southwest, we saw the fairly bright object making its way at approximately 17,200 mph through the sky toward the northeast. To add to the coolness factor, it appeared right between Jupiter and Venus. And I just found out today that yesterday was the ISS’s 10th birthday. Had I known that, perhaps we could have sung Happy Birthday to it. Of course, Carlos was all full of questions. What is the space station? How did it get up there? How big is it? Who drives it (that one was my favorite)? So we spent a little while watching youtube videos of a space shuttle launch and finding pictures of the space station. It was pretty cool and Carlos seemed really interested in learning more.
Here’s a few fascinating facts about the ISS:
-The ISS is the largest man-made object ever to orbit the Earth
-It has completed 57,309 orbits of the Earth or a distance of 1,432,725,000 miles (that's billion - it gets good gas mileage). As a comparison, that's roughly twice the distance from the Earth to Saturn.
-The space shuttle Endeavour, currently docked to the ISS, was the delivery vehicle of the first
“If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will immediately try to get out. But if you put him in a pot of cold water, the frog will be comfortable. Raise the water’s temperature ever so slowly and eventually the comfortable frog will be boiled to death.”
