While out birding this past weekend, my wife and I stopped by a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. In winter, I like checking large juniper trees for owls. Rural West Texas cemeteries make great places since they often have the only trees as far as the eye can see. I’d especially like to find some Long-eared Owls, but so far no luck.

It’s also an incredible experience to walk around the grounds and look at the headstones. You’d be amazed at what you can learn, and what you can guess, by looking at only names and dates.

For example, one that especially stands out was a large headstone with a husband and wife’s name on it. Right by, was a headstone with the same last name. The baby was born October 31, 1947 and died around the end of November, 1947. We noticed a fresh wreath on the headstone, and wondered who might have placed it. The husband had passed away in the late ’90s, but the wife’s death was still an empty space on the headstone. Here’s a woman that came out, probably (just guessing) on the day her baby died, almost 60 years ago now, to place wreaths at the headstones of her lost child and husband. What’s her life like now? Lonely? Sad? Waiting?

We also noticed a man buried next to a wife that died young. It’s always a little scary to look at that and think, that could be my wife. We noticed that his headstone said something about being buried with “his two loved ones” and on the other side, he had another wife he’d married after the first passed away. He even outlived her by a few years.

There was a headstone with a star of David, a veteran who’d fought in World War II. Next to his grave, someone had stuck a white cross in the ground. Was he a Jewish Christian or did someone try a little proselytizing after the fact?

There was a man born in 1830, the earliest we could find. You sit there and think about it and you realize his granddad and America might share the same birthday.

There were many husbands and wives, with the date of their marriage between their names. I realized that we usually think of people who die as being old. Yet being old is just one part of their life and not the only part. Here, lying in the grave, they seem young again. They were once my age. They had a new wife. They became parents. They went to school or started careers. Yet we seem to think of them only as old. (Perhaps this is a greater fallacy of younger generations.)

One thing that really got me thinking was the common statement Gone But Not Forgotten. Written on the tombstone of a man who died in 1925, it’s a lie! It’s something that we defiantly proclaim, for those who are living, in spite of what we know will inevitably happen. Gone for over 80 years now, I’m guessing that man is forgotten. Even if his own family remembers him, it’s likely only by name.

And the great thing about walking a cemetery is the inescapable fact that you’re going to join them. It’s sobering, but I find it peaceful. In life, death seems so scary. It seems painful. Yet this weekend, there I was, surrounded by dozens of people who’ve passed through its door. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad. You realize it’s normal. Lots of people do this! And I too will be forgotten. Yet the lives I touch and the contributions I make can have a profound impact. And I think in this way, you’re not forgotten and life’s not meaningless.

The next time you’re out in the middle of nowhere and see a sign directing you to a cemetery, take the detour. Imagine the stories, imagine the people, and reflect on the story you hope is told about you when your time is up.

I blogged about the book with a talking elmo that asks, “who wants to die” on my weekly roundup (see the last point).

My wife found a video of this subversive toy in action. Perhaps the little ones would enjoy better reading material.

My wife is student teaching in kindergarten this semester. It’s great to hear her stories each day when she comes home. Kids cry when they get it trouble. They sulk off into corners and refuse to even eat lunch if they’re mad. They abruptly change course, apologize, and promise to be good the rest of the day (and sometimes even are!). It’s great.

The story the other day made me cringe though. The kids have vocabulary words each day. This day, the word was penguin. As the teacher explained what penguins were, she made connections with previous words of the day. The day before, the word was polar. And the day before that, the word was arctic.

Yes, the teacher described penguins by connecting them to the word arctic. My wife (the better half that she is) did what I surely would have been unable to do. She kept her mouth shut. But it did not escape her notice that a biological fallacy was passed on to the little ones. She intends to inform the teacher, gently.

Now just so we’re clear, penguins are totally confined to the southern hemisphere. This is not the place where Santa Claus resides, nor is it the home of large, white, unusually acquatic Ursids.

Penguins and polar bears inhabit different ends of the world. Don’t let Coca Cola, your kindergarden teacher, or anyone else pull the fur over your eyes.

Scientists have discovered the world’s smallest species of fish.

Mature females of the Paedocypris progenetica, a member of the carp family, only grow to 7.9 millimeters (0.31 inches) and the males have enlarged pelvic fins and exceptionally large muscles that may be used to grasp the females during copulation, researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, published Wednesday by the Royal Society in London.

The fulltext of the journal article where this discovery was published is available online for a limited time.

(Via Pharyngula).

In any given week, I come across more stories and things work looking at than I have time (or desire) to write about. I’ve decided to briefly mention stories that I find of interest and provide links. I can’t promise a Weekly Roundup every week, but when I do, it’ll be on Fridays.

Here’s what I found noteworthy this week.

• Seems Utah has a strong itching for a lawsuit. Rep. Chris Buttars has introduced a bill to undermine evolution and teach the controversy. As the Salt Lake Tribune and Dispatches from the Culture Wars note, lengthy discussion on religious motivations will doom this bill to failure if it’s passed.
• L’Osservatore, the official newspaper of the Vatican, had a piece on the debate over intelligent design and evolution. It saw ID for what it is — bad metaphysics — and suggested “if the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another… But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science.”
• For all you physics nerds out there, space.com has a story on a black hole putting a dent in space time. (And people complain that biologist’s don’t know what we’re talking about. Bah.)
• Carl Zimmer has a review on the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Wish things this cool could even get as close as Dallas or Houston. Then maybe I could go.
• A little terrorist organization we call Hamas just swept Palestinian elections. World leaders are shocked. Israel refuses to negotiate with any government that includes Hamas members. Anyone else kind of terrified at what these democratic elections have produced?
• Rabbi Marc Gellman has an article on how our obsession with winning really has us all losing. It’s an excellent piece, which should bring much to reflect on.
• National Geographic has an article on two Irishmen murdered over 2,000 years ago. One used hair gel. The other had manicured nails. The contents of their stomachs were still present, and police initially didn’t realize how old they were due to how well they were preserved. Their killings were also quite grisly.
• The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has been invoked in a lawsuit over water resources in Arkansas.
• Space around Earth is filling up with junk, and we need to find a way to clean it up, according to a National Geographic story.
• Need proof that sin sells? Sex.com has just sold for $12 million dollars. That’s the highest price ever paid for a domain name.
• A Florida man who was sentenced to 130 years in prison for robbery and rape walked free after serving 24 years, when DNA evidence proved his innocence.
• Seem those crazy physicists have discovered yet another planet out in space. This time though, it’s not a gas giant but a smaller, more earth-like planet.
• Anyone have strong partisan political feelings? A recent study shows that the brains of strong democrats and republicans are wired to ignore contradictions from members of their favored party. Perhaps we need to strive to actually listen and think, before coming to our conclusions?
• A talking Elmo book asks children, “Who wants to die?”

In very broad, non taxonomic terms, can you name this animal?

Read the rest of this entry »

At least that’s my hypothesis. How else can you explain this picture?

I pass by this sign everyday coming and going from school, and from the moment I first saw it, I’ve found it bizarre. Why would a shoe company, as it’s main advertisement, proclaim itself drug free? Are drugs so rampant in San Angelo that its desperate citizens will seek out any business, if it promises to have drug free employees? Perhaps Redwing Shoes has a particularly bad reputation for selling more than just shoes?

Whatever the reason, I’d love to know who thought up this little jewel of advertising prowess.

When you get married, you bank, as my generation says. To an older generation who has no idea what that ridiculous word means in this context, it means you get lots and lots and lots of gifts. And cash. I imagine that the degree to which you bank depends heavily upon the socioeconomic levels of the peers your parents hang with. So yeah, we banked.

At times it was so humbling to see people being so nice. At other times, I felt bad by how much stuff I was getting that I really didn’t need. One of the most special gifts we received though isn’t something you can buy in a store. My eighth grade English teacher, who I hadn’t really kept up with from 9th grade through 5th year of college, happened to belong to the church where I started going, and where my girlfriend/fiancé/wife joined me not long after we met. He’s quite the whittler. When I finished eighth grade, he gave a bunch of people in the class Easter Island type faces, carved out of wood.

At one of our wedding showers, he gave us these Norwegian wedding spoons. It’s a solid piece of wood that he carved with two spoons on either end, and a linked chain in the middle. Each spoon has the first letter of our names on it.

(Click the smaller pictures for a bigger image.)

He included with the spoons the following note.

Spoons seem to be a symbol for love and the home the world over. There are examples of spoons as love tokens from societies throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. Some are quite plain and others are extremely decorative. These spoons are the Norwegian Wedding Spoons.

Supposedly, when a young man went to court a young lady, he and she would desire some private time together. In the northern latitudes it was much too cold to be wandering about outside in the wintertime, so an unwarmed room was provided for the young people to use in their get acquainted mode. The father of the girl, aware of the possibilities of the situation, would require that the suitor show that he kept his hands busy at some task other than fondling the girl. By requiring a certain amount of work done by theend of each visit, the father was able to somewhat monitor the two young people.

Tradition was that the suitor made the spoons for the young lady, and at the wedding the bride and groom gave each other a bite of the wedding cake using the spoons. The spoons were then hung over the door of their new home. Some say that the wife wore them around her neck when her husband was away from home.

Because of commercialism the tradition died out almost two hundred years ago. I hope these spoons will be for you a symbol of life together and a memory that begins a lifetime of happiness.

What does this have to do with science or faith? Hmmmm. Nothing?

Just thought it was too cool not to share.

I noticed something very bizarre this morning. I’ve gotten a little more traffic to the site than usual, and I quickly discovered why. Google was sending traffic to my site for the search phrase “aochan gohan“. I blogged about this two days ago. You know what’s interesting? As of right now, my website comes up as the number one result for that phrase, ahead of MSNBC, which was my source for the story!

Yet when I Google the phrase “Ocellated“, as I do from time to time, I consistently come up number two, behind that wretched bird (Ocellated Turkey) that a certain federation promotes conservation of.

Go figure.

Here’s a good laugh that appeared in The Onion last October. Just a little something to brighten up your Friday morning. The cover is just perfect satire on the way some in our culture are acting towards science. I still keep laughing at the picture, even months after seeing it for the first time.

Also, be sure to note the tiny print at the bottom of the cover by Donald Trump. Funny indeed.