I'm not going to be around much in August, its the annual pilgrimage to find a dark enough part of this island to get a decent view of the Northern Hemisphere's prized meteor shower, the Perseids.
This year the tent is going up in North Devon which has dark sky status which almost guarantee's a decent viewing of the meteor's if the clouds play along.
Last year we were lucky enough to get 2 perfectly crystal clear nights out of the three when the Perseids were at their peak although our campsite wasn't as far out from the light pollution of cities as we had first thought so we have high hopes that going to the middle of a 267 square mile forest will do the trick this year.
Got the usual problem of what to do with the blog for 31 days but i recently discovered the pending option on blogger so may make use of that or i may just hang a 'on holiday' sign in the window.
17 comments:
No cell coverage... I'm surprised. Remember to thank luck for creating the vast and beautiful universe ;-p
Q
My Blackberry is no good for writing a blog post and the netbook is staying here.
Who else is there to thank for the vast and beautiful universe??
You are the one that used "who". But I'd say GAWWWWD!
So would several billion Jews Christians and Muslims.
Q
It's not luck though, it's our old friend the Flying Spaghetti Monster who created all of this pastaferous magnificence.
You prove it's not. Go on. Prove it.
I was trying to get you to say god but instead you made the sort of noise that would follow some sort of explosion or i don't know, big bang maybe.
Ok, God.
Yep, God used a Big Bang to start it all. In Genesis it is written something like this: "God said let there be light", then bang there was light, then it says "and God saw that it was good". Then God put evolution into play... That took him 6 God days, billions of years to us puny humans.
Q
Didn't he make light before making the Sun (Holy lightbulbs?) and i'm sure he made man from a pile of dust and woman from a rib which i'm sure isn't Evolution.
Right, the sun clearly came after the Big Bang. Humans supposedly evolved from lesser components. A good analogy for people that did not yet know about atoms molecules etc
Q
I have heard that before, that the Genesis story is a simplification of actual events because they would not have understood the proper explanation of events. Interesting spin on things.
The bit where it falls down is that the Bible does seem quite explicit in God making man in his own image though unless Evolution was set in motion to get us to this point.
That would mean we either have stopped evolving (as we are Gods Image) or we still have some evolving to do so we become Gods image.
There is also the talking serpent bit which the whole man thing swings on.
Even if you like to rationalise the whole 'time' thing by saying that billions of human years is a 'God day', it gets so many other things wrong anyway...
One example: The Genesis account holds that land-based vegetation were the first living things, and it wasn't until afterwards that he said 'let the water teem with living creatures'... That's arse about face. For at least the first 3 billion years of its existence, the land was entirely sterile and the only living things were in the 'primordial soup'.
The people who wrote the Bible had no way of knowing this, of course.
Your confidence in us knowing with 100% certainty what happened billions of years ago by gathering soil samples and using "logic" is misplaced. Even if it is the best info we have, it is based on many assumptions and limited data. Not the conditions that allow certainty.
Q
So you're saying we should favour an explanation that elsewhere posits, for example, the sun and the moon being created at the same time (both comprising a 'firmament' for the earth, which was at the centre of the universe) rather than the scientific explanation that has categorically proven - yep, with absolute certainty - they were created during quite stupendously different periods of time?
"Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds" is the first mention in Genesis of any living thing. Yet we know that they were pre-dated by micro-organisms called archaea, and the first seeding plants did not appear until the Devonian period (comparatively recently).
Lucy: "That would mean we either have stopped evolving (as we are Gods Image) or we still have some evolving to do so we become Gods image."
And I'm sure you'll agree that both possibilities are essentially ludicrous. The whole 'point' of evolution is... well... that there is no point to evolution! It's a process.
Utterly ludicrous, just expanding on q's theme.
I was just watching a tv show with credible physicists on both sides of the God argument. Even the scientists on the "luck" side can't say with 100% certainty that we aren't in a giant ant farm.
Q
Yep, you'll find people who believe in a deity from all walks of life and levels of intellect. But you'll struggle to find a true scientist who doubts evolution. That one's purely for the peanut gallery.
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