Sometimes I feel like I'm becoming a senior citizen of the internet. I was there pretty early on, when I purposefully set off for the computer lab in Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame, to teach myself to use a program called Mosaic to access the "internet," which at that time was only just beginning to be understood to actually be the "information superhighway" that was being predicted in those years. It was the development of the web browser program that turned the internet into the popular public system it has since become, after being the abode of military and university computer types since its invention in 1970s. I got online with the express purpose of finding my way into NASA's databases so that I could look at high-quality photographs of the Levy-Schumaker (back when it was called that) impact for longer than the second that they were being shown on CNN. I started making webpages within a year, first one for me with little purpose behind it, where the ancestor of this journal first appeared in 1997 (internet senior citizen), as practice for my fulfilling Steve Warner's request to design the first webpage for the Notre Dame Folk Choir.

So why am I feeling like an internet senior citizen? (Besides my early entry into the internet?) Because a year-and-a-half after its discontinuation, I am in the process of giving up using Netscape as my web browser.

Yes. Shocking. It's like I've insisted on driving an Edsel or a Fiero for years. And I know lots of you web-savvy friends reamed me out back then for still being on Netscape. What can I say? I'm a creature of habit, comfortable because I knew exactly where everything was? I have an overly-developed sense of loyalty, and have never quite gotten over the bliss of when Netscape became the first browser to dream up tabs, so that I didn't have to keep multiple windows open? All true. I have been part of the 0.56% global usage share of Netscape as a web browser in the second quarter of 2009 (which rather surprised me to discover, as I figured I might be the only one left at this point), down from about 90% usage share back in early 1996. But it's time for me to evolve whether I want to or not. And that's why I feel like an internet senior citizen (gross, ageist stereotypes of senior citizens aside).

Sophie, who is at the height of her two-and-a-quarter cuteness, is wonderfully chatty when she's not sleepy/grumpy. When I pack up and head home, I often would ask her, like her sisters before her, if she wants to come back to Milwaukee with me and live at my place, just so I can watch her yelp and hold on to Mom, or to laugh once she realizes I'm teasing her. Today the joke was on me when she seemed to think that that was a perfectly delightful idea and happily mentioned it all the way to the airport, where I was catching my bus back north. When I tried to tease her a bit more with how different an arrangement that might be, she declined both options of sleeping in the bathtub or on the couch once she arrived, being apparently confident that she rated the best part of the apartment and that I would find the couch perfectly comfortable, myself. Leslie picked up on the fact that Sophie perhaps thought I lived at the airport, and Sophie managed to keep her eyes open almost all the way there, despite having skipped her nap earlier this afternoon. So I told Leslie to tell her when she woke up that I didn't bring her with me because I didn't want to wake her up. I hope she handled the disappointment.

I found that, to my slight surprise, or perhaps a feeling of of some obligatory disappointment with myself that I couldn't quite conjure up, that I haven't managed to get too interested in the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, other than mentioning it in passing this weekend to Joe or to the nieces. I'm pleased, though, to see how many people have been noting it, and taking advantage of the internet's sudden availability of recordings and real-time replays of the transmissions between Apollo 11 and Houston. I owned a set of LPs along with a huge coffeetable book on the subject – still do, I guess, over under the TV in the next room – that had me so saturated with those recordings in grade school and junior high that I could recite the dialogue along with the astronauts, but at the time that just made me a geeky kid. I'm relieved everyone else has tipped their hand and revealed their own inner geek. It really is that fabulous an epic.

Instead, since getting home around dinnertime, I've been more distracted by such rarities as this poem I tripped across in the Internet Archive (the attempt at making a copy of the whole internet if you've never found this site and lost time to it) when I was trying to find some old information on Over The Rhine's website.

Grace Asked A Question

The bottom line is the spilled wine
The ruby lake on the table
Dripping on my knees
Like the tears of the blind man
Who newly sees

The bottom line is the familiar ache
Too real to shake
Too hard to explain
Too easy
Like a prism of colors in the rain

The bottom line is the warm blood
That seeps its way out of my cold heart
To the beat of a drum
Always carried
All the time
Always a rhythm rhyming inside
Making of me a tall awkward song

The bottom line is the sometimes welling up in the eyes
That the noisy world
All too eagerly dries
With whatever it happens to be selling
At the time

Or is the bottom line this?
Beauty and terror on a blind date
Moving each other close
Dancing a slow motion universe bending down sarabande
Locked staring each into the others eyes
As if for the first
Or the last
Time

The bottom line is some unknown unspoken word
I need another word
For that which comes out of nowhere
So good
Like a smiling child
Glimpsed in a room full of strangers
A room full of good things to eat
As if it has all been somehow prearranged:
She's smiling at me
Even though we both know
We'll never meet

copyright 2001, Linford Detweiler

Still flattened by the flu. The Most Miserable Christmas Ever. Blech.

Just jotting down a couple news stories of interest that I noticed in the last few days. John Allen's list of the "Top 10 neglected Catholic stories of 2008" is a smart list of some of the most interesting things going on in the Catholic world, but which aren't on the short list of items that the U.S. news media gets worked up about. The second one is another story of what's turning into a longer-term interest of mine, and that's on the public use of the story of "the Galileo Affair." What grabs my interest there is just the way the incident with Galileo has become this killer propaganda item for those who want to perpetuate the idea of "science versus religion." The nonsense that's repeated as historical facts "that everyone knows" regarding the case has been so repeated and drummed into public consciousness that it has become the singlemost prominent Enlightenment anti-Christian parable. The sheer fact of how often this is cited and made a big deal of shows that its importance for people today is about today, and not about one, long-corrected historical mistake centuries past. I'm beginning to think that it would make for a pretty good popular history to write a book that traced the changes in the use of the story: as far as I can tell from the original documents, our version of "what everyone knows" today owes more to Bertolt Brecht's play Galileo than to history.

Top 10 neglected Catholic stories of 2008
Good heavens: Vatican rehabilitating Galileo

( Read more... )

About half an hour ago, walking over to Raynor Library, I saw what very well might have been the brightest, largest-to-the-eye meteor I have ever seen. I think it broke of a section toward the end, before disappearing. I think it was quite close. I was walking down the south side of Wisconsin Avenue, and from in front of the Engineering building it appeared over the Jesuit residence. And here's the thing: I was walking toward the city center, less than a mile away. Significant light pollution. And the sky seems to be that sort of flat, grey, higher-altitude overcast. Which would mean that I saw the meteor in the few miles below the cloud cover. Whatever my unverifiable details, it was spectacular. I looked around in vain for anyone else who saw it, but everyone near me was walking the other way.

Now back to the dissertating. Oh, I already got short-listed at one of schools I interviewed at when I was at AAR. Flying over for an interview in a few weeks. And the drama builds....

Talking with Saint Thomas University in Miami and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT tomorrow. This was a day with a bit of a different beat – less taken up with the Job Center and a chance to take in a bit of the conference itself. I joined a group listening to David Tracy work through an in-progress chapter, if I understood correctly (I arrived a minute or two late) about notions of the infinite and God, and tied into recent phenomenological notions of "the impossible." This took us on an interesting walk through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, along with intersections with modern authors including Derrida, Nietzsche, a bit of Heidegger, and a few others whose names escape me now. It would have been easier-going on paper rather than verbally, and I'm hard-pressed to sum it up as I want to got to bed now, but maybe I'll come back to it later. I've only read a bit of Tracy, and that some while ago, and this was my first time actually encountering him.

2008 Templeton Prize winner Michal Heller, a Polish priest and physicist, gave a Templeton-sponsored address entitled something like "Human Time and the Time of the Universe." I went to that one with Aaron S., whose dissertation hits on some similar themes, and Mark Ch. from our department, and, other than the difficulty of hearing Heller when he let the microphone drift from his face, was quite interesting, in a basic-science-for-the-masses way. I was personally struck by the timeline for the process of creating carbon in the universe through the element, which makes up the bulk of our living matter, being distilled over multiple generations of stars: the whole "we are stardust" bit. It hit me in kind of a pedagogical way. While the medievals knew from their astronomy that the Earth was a point so small in the universe that it could only be registered mathematically, they took this as a fact illustrative of the infinite love of God and of human worthiness over something so minute. Moderns, on the other hand, took the same fact (which they believed themselves to be more intelligent and informed for, forgetting medieval theology and assuming that such things cannot be known without Hubble telescopes and the like), and argued that there could not be a God, because why would an infinite God bother with something so minute and therefore meaningless? (While an overstatement, of course, that contrast, in and of itself, might serve as a basic summary of the difference between Medieval and Modern Western philosophies of humanity.) What struck me was the realization, after hearing Heller describe that multiple generations of stars seem to have been necessary to build the carbon from which organic life is made, is that this vast, vast universe was necessary to create the cosmically tiny seed of life that is Planet Earth. That scientific necessity, it seemed to me, would be an interesting point of contemplation to offer the next student who gives me the poorly-thought-out "giant universe means no God" argument.

Ran into Crip and Lisa at the Marquette party tonight and got a chance to catch up at some length with them, while also chatting some more with Aaron, Professor Wood, and a prospective doctoral student from Duke named Silas who stopped by. During the afternoon I got an hour or two in with Kari-Shane, ate some wonderful Cream of Potato and Leek at Kitty O'Sheas with her, Jeff W., and a gazillion rowdy Bears fans in from the game (in more of that wonderfully mild weather), and also ran into Gavril from Marquette in the hall and talked for a bit. I spotted Michelle Peterson from Masters time at Notre Dame in one of the Hilton lounges and caught up with her, comparing doctoral programs and exam, and hearing her cool philosophical approach to theology from her department at Iowa. All in all, another object lesson in why people are really excited to come to this monster national conference each year!

Something I had been forgetting to post.... I've kept an eye on the Templeton Prizes over the years, particularly in its frequent tendency to highlight work in combining theology and the physicial sciences, particularly cosmology. (And since someone once credited me with winning this spiritual equivalent to the Nobel Prize: the most grandiose confusion of me with the other Michael Novak.)

Templeton dies at 95; billionaire invested in science, religion

By Chaz Muth
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Sir John Marks Templeton, a pioneer global investor and founder of the religious equivalent to the Nobel Prizes, died July 8 of pneumonia at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, according to the John Templeton Foundation Web site. He was 95.

Presented annually since 1973 by the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Prize for Progress or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities has a value of 1 million British pounds, or more than $1.98 million in U.S. currency at the current exchange rate, making it the world's largest annual monetary award to an individual.

The billionaire established the award in 1972. It's open to living individuals of any major world faith whose achievements have stirred others to deepen their relationship with God.

The first Templeton Prize was awarded to Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 1973, and during the last 35 years many Catholics have followed, including the 2007 winner, Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, and the 2008 winner, Msgr. Michal Heller, a Polish priest-cosmologist.

When Templeton announced that he was establishing the award in 1972, the Presbyterian layman told National Catholic News Service -- a precursor to Catholic News Service -- he wanted to give a positive thrust to faith.

"This is not a prize for saintliness, or for material help to God's children," he said in 1972. In years past, he suggested, although "examples could be misleading," men such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas or Gen. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, could have been in the running for such a prize.

When Mother Teresa received her prize, it was then $85,000 in U.S. currency. Though the monetary award has changed over the years, Templeton always kept it higher than the Nobel Prize award to underscore "his belief that advances in the spiritual domain are no less important than those in other areas of human endeavor," the foundation Web site said.

In accepting her prize in London in 1973, Mother Teresa called the award "an act of love," and vowed to use the money to continue spreading love and peace in a world of continuing poverty and loneliness.

Born Nov. 29, 1912, in Winchester, Tenn., Templeton graduated from Yale University in 1934. He was named a Rhodes scholar to Balliol College at Oxford University and graduated with a master's degree in law; he became a pioneering global investor and a billionaire. He founded the Templeton Mutual Funds in 1940, renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1968 and moved to the Bahamas. He was knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for his many philanthropic accomplishments.

With a lifelong interest in science and business, Templeton vehemently believed that finance and faith could not only commingle, but were strengthened when applied together, he told Insight magazine.

"For one thing, it (finance) enriches the poor more than any other system humanity ever has had," he said. "Competitive business has reduced costs, has increased variety, has improved quality." Businesses that don't operate in an ethical fashion, he added, "will fail, perhaps not right away, but eventually."

Templeton also believed that people of all faiths could learn from one another.

"I have no quarrel with what I learned in the Presbyterian church -- I am still an enthusiastic Christian," he said. "But why shouldn't I try to learn more? Why shouldn't I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn't I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more."

Twice widowed, he is survived by two sons, a stepdaughter, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and is preceded in death by a daughter and a stepson.

Pointing out that billions are spent in the U.S. annually on forward-looking research in natural sciences, Templeton urged philanthropists to put more resources into spiritual research.

"If churches and other people would spend even a fraction of that on spiritual research," he said in 1972, "we might find that God is ready to reveal a little more about himself."

( Templeton Foundation and New York Times obituaries )

Secrets of 1957 Sputnik Launch Revealed
Oct 1, 1:48 AM (ET)
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

MOSCOW (AP) - When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.

But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age.

And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket, according to Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program.

In a series of interviews in recent days with The Associated Press, Chertok and other veterans told the little-known story of how Sputnik was launched, and what an unlikely achievement it turned out to be.

( Read more... )

Unusual Eclipse to Start Thursday, End Wednesday

A partial solar eclipse will begin tomorrow but end today due to the International Date Line. In the US it will be visible only from parts of Alaska and Hawaii.