Have you noticed that films these days don't say  The End  at the the end?  This  turnover happened  in the 1970's.  Now, there is a rolling credit list for grips, gaffers, etc.  One annoyance I have, though, is that all those production companies want to feature themselves at the beginning, taking up so much time.  Also, have you noticed how many producers there are on each movie? Then there is the end to your life.  For many, this termination is just the beginning of a better existence in Heaven, or the equivalent.  And, boy, do Muslim male martyrs have a surprise coming:   not 72 virgins, but 72 sweet white raisins .  Not to say that other religions also will not be disappointed.  What you are promised has not actually been verified. For me, the end will be nothingness or total blackness or utter gloom.  Now and then I convince myself that it will be eternal peace.  The plus side going for people of faith...

First, from the  New York Times  this morning: President Biden will meet with King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London tomorrow. Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby is also tomorrow, followed by the All-Star game on Tuesday. NATO leaders are scheduled to meet for a summit in Lithuania starting Tuesday. Friday is Bastille Day in France. The Wimbledon women’s singles final will be on Saturday, and the men’s final is on Sunday.  The surprise so far is 16-year old  Mirra Andreeva  of Russia, playing here for the first time, earning a spot in the fourth round. The conventional Christian view of evolution can be found in the  King James version of  The Bible , where  Genesis  says (y ou can refer to the first link to view missing elements ): [ 1 ] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [ 3 ] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. [ 8 ] And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and ...

My posting today is all about those three grand miracles that led to us,  Homo sapiens  today.   You either believe in religious creationism or science, for how we humans came to be.  This posting will focus on the latter. The history of guessing the age of Planet Earth and the Universe  goes back to the beginning of our species, and in the early 18th century, was only speculated to be on the order of millions of years old. The first scientific theories began to appear around the time of the U.S. Civil War. Until as recently as 1999, astronomers thought the age of our universe was between 7 and 20 billion years old In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was expanding.  So the thinking was, if space is expanding, what if we trace backwards to the beginning.   It was a Catholic priest and Belgian cosmologist,  Georges Lemaitre , who in 1931 published an original paper on this subject. But  Miracle #1, the Big Bang , was coine...

Before I go into my Wednesday science topic, one note about COVID-19.  Of course, with so many tests now taken at home and not reported, surely the 100,000 or so new cases/day in the U.S. must be higher.   Here is one estimate by the University Columbia's Jeffrey Shaman : Shaman's research group turned to using models to estimate the "ascertainment rate" — the portion of real infections that were being captured in official case counts. That rate has fluctuated — at the end of 2020, they estimated one in four cases were being counted. During the omicron surge it was closer to one in six.   Now with the widespread availability of at-home rapid tests that aren't reported to health departments, Shaman thinks the true number of cases may be in the ballpark of eight times higher than case counts. In other words, instead of 100,000 new cases a day, the true number may be 800,000 cases per day. As terrible as that may sound, I think there is a silver lining.   So m...