I can always tell when I’ve been a bit more House-like than usual, because I’ll come back to my office and find that a passive-aggressive co-worker such as Crazy Cat Lady (aka CCL) has put this on my keyboard where I’m sure to not miss it. I’m 99% certain she did it because of her look of innocence rather than confusion when I said “That was you that put that on my desk, right? Well done. Well done.”
I’ve known CCL for something like… oh… 12-13 years now, probably, so I’m not too worried that she’ll pour cat urine all over my office chair. Yet.
****
Yes, I’m still obsessing about inertia. Wouldn’t warpage of space be a nice tidy way to look at it?
This sort of thing is pretty far out there and approaching Tin Foil Hat Technology, but I want to believe that warp travel is possible because otherwise getting to other stars is pretty prohibitively expensive. Fuel, mass, cost, lifespans, etc.
Here’s how I look at it: Humanity is due for something new. We’ve been stuck on E-M for some time now what with Maxwell and Faraday (and many others) doing their mad magic with magnetism and electricity. Nothing really new has been done in terms of manipulating stuff. Sure, recently they’ve realized a fourth fundamental circuit elemnent, the memristor… but there’s not been any real new physics.
Jeez, I can see the debates over that last sentence… work with me here, people. I’m talking about new fundamental models and applications that alter fields or space. Give me some sci-fi, ok? Stasis fields, gravity manipulation, inertial dampers/exciters, etc. Yes, that is all BS, but I’d like some BS that didn’t involve a politician or some zealot or some lunatic.
****
The fringe folks sure want to believe that Jesus was tempted, married, or farted in church, don’t they? Jesus was married, and we know that because someone wrote it on a papyrus, so it must be true, right?
Karen King, a professor of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, announced the finding Tuesday at an international congress on Coptic studies in Rome. The text, written in Coptic and probably translated from a 2nd century Greek text, contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to “my wife,”whom he identifies as Mary.
In just about any other accounting, there are independent sources that parallel other accounts, and I challenge someone to show records elsewhere that list Jesus as being married.
She stressed that the text, assuming it’s authentic, doesn’t provide any historical evidence that Jesus was actually married, only that some two centuries after he died, some early Christians believed he had a wife. [ emphasis mine – lk ]
Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was unmarried, although there is no reliable historical evidence to support that, King said. Any evidence pointing to whether Jesus was married or had a female disciple could have ripple effects in current debates over the role of women in the church.
And THAT folks, out of the entire article presents the sole reason for all Prof. King’s efforts.
“There are all sorts of really dodgy things about this,” said David Gill, professor of archaeological heritage at University Campus Suffolk and author of the Looting Matters blog, which closely follows the illicit trade in antiquities. “This looks to me as if any sensible, responsible academic would keep their distance from it.”
Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti said he encountered the woman in the street while on his way to the mosque in the town of Shahmirzad, and asked her to cover herself up, to which she replied “you, cover your eyes,” according to Mehr. The cleric repeated his warning, which he said prompted her to insult and push him.“I fell on my back on the floor,” Beheshti said in the report. “I don’t know what happened after that, all I could feel was the kicks of this woman who was insulting me and attacking me.”
Beheshti said he was hospitalized for three days. The Iranian cleric said it was his religious duty to apply the principle of “commanding right and forbidding wrong,” and that he would continue to do so even after living through what he called “the worst day of my life.”