Sunspots 30

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Rebekah has linked to an answer to a question that may be important to some of you: "Can you quote from the ESV Bible in your postings?" The answer is "yes," but, understandably, the ESV people would like to be acknowledged. It shouldn't be difficult to do so. I, personally, am saving this post by the ESV Bible Blog to my computer for future reference. For anyone who doesn't know, the English Standard Version is a modern translation, available on-line. I use one of their RSS feeds for my daily Bible reading. No translation is perfect, but this one is pretty good, and uses modern language. Thanks to Rebekah and the ESV people.

Mice not only squeak, they can sing. This is a report in Nature News, this is the original article.

Carl Zimmer writes about current speculations on the function of color change in leaves.

Physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg on previous Nobel laureate Albert Einstein's mistakes in physics. (This one's a little heavy on the physics, but non-physicists should be able to understand it.)

Post on The Panda's Thumb, on the discussion of Haeckel's photos of embryos by Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution, claiming that Wells has distorted the facts.

Katherine is in France, and things, especially the healthcare system, are different than that in the U. S.

Here's a post on white stags in literature, including literature by Rowling, Lewis, and others.

Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis on how the ubiquity of images, and our ability to produce and manipulate them, is now, and may, affect our culture. Sample:

Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture: First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture, broadly speaking, and its institutions? What will art, literature, and music look like in the age of the image?

Warning: This is not a short posting, but a lengthy article. Rosen considers the effects of Photoshop and PowerPoint, and the "MTV effect," and historical precedents for current digital imaging and manipulation.

A proposal for a new vision or focus for the space program, which sounds suspiciously like that of the bad guys, which sounded so ridiculous when Ransom translated it in Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis.

This week's Christian Carnival is here. (The link is to the blog, not the post. If you go to the link, you may not see the Christian Carnival, unless you click on the Archives.)

Image source (public domain)