Results of Ruminations

At the time of this writing, Hurricane Irma is venting its fury on Florida . The hurricane pummeled Key West, then swung up, smashing into Florida's Gulf coast. With Hurricane Harvey hardly in the rear view mirror, and Hurricane Jose on the way, it's pretty clear that there's some catastrophic weather happening at the time. Florida--southeast Florida, to be exact--has a special place in my heart: I served my two-year long mission in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. While I never personally went farther south than the Kendall/Hammocks area, my mission boundaries included everyone in Key West up to West Palm Beach, with the Everglades on the east and the Bahamas out in the west. So though the hurricane is currently pummeling the western part of the peninsula, the areas where I served thirteen to fifteen years ago are in rough shape. So, even though Hurricane Harvey's deluge of Houston was in my country, and my heart, thoughts, and prayers went out to them, seeing my o...

Brigham Young: The gospel of Jesus Christ embraces all truth. All truth is for the salvation of the children of men—for the benefit and learning—for their furtherance in the principles of divine knowledge; and divine knowledge is any matter of fact—truth; and all truth pertains to divinity (DBY, 11). Be willing to receive the truth, let it come from whom it may; no difference, not a particle. Just as soon receive the Gospel from Joseph Smith as from Peter, who lived in the days of Jesus. Receive it from one man as soon as another. If God has called an individual and sent him to preach the Gospel that is enough for me to know; it is no matter who it is, all I want is to know the truth (DBY, 11). “Mormonism,” so-called, embraces every principle pertaining to life and salvation, for time and eternity. No matter who has it. If the infidel has got truth it belongs to “Mormonism.” The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong t...

Amid the perpetual noise of the internet and the jockeying for additional outrage over the latest political scandal--an almost daily occurrence these days--there's been a lot of clicks baited through headlines (which I'm quoting, not linking to, because I don't want to give them the satisfaction of having another visitor to their websites) such as "A 130-Year-Old Fact About Dinosaurs Might Be Wrong" and "Astonishing Discovery About Dinosaurs Shocks Scientists"* and my personal favorite, "A new theory could overturn one of the most central 'facts' about dinosaurs". Curious about this, I followed the link provided by one of the many paleontologists I follow on Twitter, which pointed me to a blog post by Dr. Paul Barrett. In his post " Shaking the tree ...", he explains the basic thesis of what he's conceived of, though the full article is behind a paywall from Nature  magazine**. It's not particularly technical, and...

Where I live, there's just enough light pollution to keep most stars at bay. How interesting it is to consider that technology can push away the ancient photograph of celestial bodies that nightly parades, moving so predictably that we long assumed the stars more permanent than kings, more powerful than rulers. Were a civilization 65 million light years away to look through its telescope at our pale blue dot, they would see the light reflected off of dinosaur hides and feathers. Maybe that's why aliens haven't visited our planet: They're afraid of our teeth. The vastness of space is so mind-boggling big that it's sometimes easier to entrench than explore, to recoil instead of redouble our efforts to learn more. That emptiness--the same sky that almost everyone I know sleeps beneath--means something different to each person. How interesting it is to consider that the immensity of the galaxy in which we live, despite its ubiquity, can mean something so separate fr...

There's been some hubbub about seven Earth-like planets being discovered nearby (read: 40 lightyears away). Having just finished the Life, the Universe and Everything Symposium--and being a Mormon--this is really interesting to me. The LTUE conference is geared towards aficionados and writers of science fiction and fantasy. The name, of course, comes from the late Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of the panels were geared toward the "science" part of "science fiction." I attended panels about time travel, evolutionary diversity, dinosaurs, and the theory of relativity, to name a few. So alien life, alien worlds, and basically the idea of being in the stars has always been appealing to me. Sure, I love Earth. All my stuff's here. But there's something magical and yearnful (that's not a word, but it ought to be) in the stars. My pining for the extraterrestrial definitely come...