South Park on the History Channel, Ancient Aliens, and the Public Understanding of History

South Park spoofed the History Channel’s series Ancient Aliens and I have to say, it was both hilarious and scary.  South Park has always been on the front lines (so to speak) of social commentary and satire.  Spoofing silly beliefs is nothing new for the show.  A few years ago it spoofed Scientology and before [...]

Evolution: The Threat to Christianity

I can understand this journalist’s perspective.  I thought this was a very astute observation: So-called “reality TV” has done the world a grave disservice. I don’t just mean because the vast majority of such programs are mind-numbingly tedious, but because they have given people the idea that reality is something that can be decided by [...]

Quake in Virginia Rocks East Coast

Crazy…we felt it in PA too… A 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered northwest of Richmond, Va., shook much of Washington, D.C., and was felt as far north as Rhode Island and New York City. The quake sent hundreds of people spilling into the street a block from the White House, with other buildings evacuated in North [...]

New Galaxy Pictures and a Thought

Just amazing.  This should be completely normal now; we’ve found tons of galaxies.  It’s not atypical to get great shots like this.  But it still boggles my mind that we, us humans, have the capacity to recognize not only that we are a part of this large, vast universe but that we have the drive [...]

Archaeologists Hack Kinect to Produce New 3-D Tool

Pretty awesome!  I can only imagine the applications this sort of tool could be used for! The hacked “ArKinect” casts a pattern of infrared dots on people and objects so that it can map them in 3-D, just as it typically captures the full-body motions of gamers playing on the Xbox 360. It can already [...]

Emanuel Pfoh – Anthropology and the Bible: Critical Perspectives (Introduction)

While I am on vacation this weekend, and since we recently sent our imprimatur to the publisher for our own book project (so I no longer have any pressing matters or deadlines), I thought I should catch up on book reviews (since muses never sleep nor do they take vacations, it seems).  Emanuel Pfoh was [...]

Noah and the Flood: The Historical Impossibility

Noah’s Ark/Flood Story: Recently there has been an aggressive push by the media to include stories in their coverage about the flood and the Ark.  Here are a few stories from the past few months: Man ‘re-creates’ Ark Ark Builder Says World Much Different Now than During the Period of the Flood Kentucky Tax-Payers to [...]

“Religion Created Civilization?” A Response to Brad Hirschfield on Göbekli Tepe

It’s an interesting concept.  Brad Hirschfield writes: For years, historians, archeologists, anthropologists and pretty much all of the other “ologists” have agreed that agriculture created civilization, including religion, as we have known it for the past 12,000 to 15,000 years. The assumption was that settling down to lives of farming, people built cities, created art [...]

Four Planets in Night-Sky Summit

This month will see a fascinating display of four planets–Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter–’dancing’ around each other to be connected with a crescent moon at the end of the May.  The article is quite interesting and makes note of this: What might ancient sky watchers from 500 or 1,000 years ago have ascribed to such [...]

New Technology, Books, and the Future of Education

This video here, with the first ever fully-interactive book, is by far the coolest thing I’ve seen with the application of books to a digital media.  It makes the Nook and other eReaders look terribly low-tech. When I see tech like this, see how it is transforming old media into new media, into a new [...]