The 5,300 year embrace

PZ Myers is off in the Galapagos for a while so he’s left a few “PZminions” in charge of his blog, Pharyngula.  Today’s entry from LisaJ is about an old human burial site found by paleontologists hunting dinosaur fossils in northern Niger.  One of the most striking pictures is a cast of a burial arrangement of a woman and two young children, holding hands.  The bodies were laid to rest on top of flowers, some 5,300 years ago.

I found this most moving.  In the comments, a mother of small children said that it moved her to tears.

Crackergate: now it’s your turn

On the storm-in-a-teacup that has become Crackergate, my opinion has been expressed volubly and at length in my comments on postings to other blogs and forums.  See the following for my most significant contributions:

• richarddawkins.net forums: PZ Myers, wafer biscuits, and intolerance
• JImmy Akin: PZ Myers must be fired
• Jimmy Akin: PZ Myers Won’t Like This
• Rod Dreher: P.Z. Myers Desecrates the Eucharist
• Rod Dreher: “It Is Finished”.  No, It’s Just Beginning.
• Rod Dreher: Should P.Z. Myers Be Fired?
• Rod Dreher: P.Z. Myers And The Future Of Democracy
• Rod Dreher: The Religion Of Science

So this is a chance for you to make your own comments.

The blogging impulse

Well it’s fun, isn’t it? Or maybe it saves the planet, or something. I comment a lot on forums and (very recently) other people’s blogs.  I enjoy discussing controversial matters and I can be quite assertive when I think the evidence is with me and the case is worth arguing (my dictum is that only truly trivial things are worth arguing about).I’ve run blogs in the past, but for some reason I  don’t understand they tend to be about kittens and butterflies and bunny rabbits, quite unlike the kind of discussion I enjoy getting involved in.  I don’t know whether this one is likely to be any different.  We’ll see. (Thanks to xkcd for the cartoon)