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I wouldn't normally use this blog for something like this, but google has failed me. When I was in New Zealand, I saw a video on the 1995-96 eruptions at Ruapehu titled Witness to Eruption made in, I believe, 1999. It had some excellent footage of the eruptions in the 1990s as well as the 1950s ...
Nevado del Huila continues to cause problems in Colombia. Over 4,000 people had to be evacuated today from the Belalcazar area after the volcano showed new signs of eruption. No description is given to exactly what those signs were/are, however after the lahars in November (2008), it sounds like ...
Among the band of philosophers who hold that free will is supernatural, one of the reigning ideas is called agent causation. This hypothesis states that volitional acts are a special category of event, one that is caused not by any other event but - in some deeply mysterious way - by the agent ...
One of the more impressive areas I visited while in New Zealand was the Waimangu Valley near Mt. Tarawera (above). The valley itself was created by blast explosions (phreatic explosions) during the 1886 eruption of Mt. Tarawera. These eruptions cut right down the axis of the rhyolite domes (most ...
West Virginia is the state that seceded where others failed. When in 1861 the South broke away from the US to form the Confederacy, the Mountain State in its turn left Virginia to remain within the Union. The electoral process by which it did this was highly irregular, and its accession to the ...
Slacktivist, a progressive Christian blogger whom I read regularly, has some words of advice for the new atheists on how best to win converts. You'd wonder why a Christian would want to give advice to atheists about how to do this - indeed, such "advice" is usually just concern trolling when it ...
I made it back from New Zealand yesterday after spending the last two weeks looking at some of the most remarkable volcanic landscapes you could imagine. I'll add more detail soon for those of you interested in the volcanism of the North Island, but I'll leave you with a picture of yours truly ...
In 1938, Germany was not a good place to be a Jew. While some German Jews might still have hoped the anti-semitism of the Nazi regime would somehow blow over, those who had the means to flee the country did so – if they found a place that would have them. The Freudenheims did, and managed to ...
The US goes by the motto In God We Trust (but only since 1956, when it replaced the ‘unofficial’ motto, E pluribus unum). A motto (from the Italian word for pledge, plural mottos or mottoes) describes a quality or intention that a group of people aim to live up to – a mission statement of sorts ...
Although the success of the feminist movement has secured equal legal rights for women virtually everywhere in the West - a guarantee de jure, if not always de facto - there are still pockets of institutionalized sexism that survive. The Catholic church is the most obvious example, but other ...
Following up on my earlier post about Obama's choice of the disgraceful bigot Rick Warren to preside at the inauguration, this news: In a response to progressive anger, the transition team has announced that V. Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop, has agreed to appear as well. (Obama's ...
Clive Crook wrote a brief piece for The Atlantic, entitled “The Long Road to Healthcare.” It ends with paraphrasing Tom Daschle that the main problem with the Clinton health reform proposal (“HillaryCare” circa 1993) was the partisan and exclusive way it was built. There are many similarities ...
With the American presidential inauguration soon to arrive, this seems like an opportune time to say some words on patriotism. Is love of country an emotion that can be felt by a freethinker? Is this an allegiance as irrational as the tribalisms of human prehistory, or can there be something about ...
For today's Poetry Sunday, I'm featuring the American poet A.R. Ammons, who was first showcased last year for his poem "Gravelly Run". Born in North Carolina in 1926, Ammons grew up on his family's farm during the Great Depression and attended a Pentecostal church, whose hellfire sermons ...
A much-heralded study in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics has concluded that the premarital "abstinence pledges" so beloved by evangelical Christians are ineffective. Teenagers who sign up for religious programs such as True Love Waits or Silver Ring Thing, in which participants pledge ...