New Series: God and Genes: How Religion and Science Can Coexist

Over the next week or two, I will interrupt my regularly scheduled programing to provide you with a special series: God and Genes: How Religion and Science Can Coexist.  My recent post about Theory vs theory was popular, so I just wanted to throw this out there for some intelligent discussion.  I hope everybody enjoys it.

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Soulful Sunday: A Bach Celebration

Today, I will be attending the first concert of a 15 concert series of all of J.S. Bach’s Organ works.  The concerts will be spread over 3 years.  The series will be performed by Jonathan Biggers in the Binghamton First Presbyterian Church.  I expect it to be a fantastic event: the first sign of higher culture so far.  I will post more about what I thought at a later time.

A Portrait of the great Johann Sebastian Bach

What a great show.  I really enjoyed it.  Here are the two feature pieces:

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor:

and “The Wedge:”

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Spacey Monday: Houston, We Do Not Have a Problem

A small unmanned spacecraft built and driven by NASA named the Phoenix landed on the icy northern pole of Mars at 4:53 PDT yesterday.  This is the first time that a spacecraft has landed on one of the poles.  This touchdown was particularly stressful as there were no cushioned landing gear on the craft unlike the previous Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers.

An Illustration of the Phoenix Landing

The craft, pulled by Mars’ gravity, screamed through space at somewhere around 12,700 mph before it hit the  atmosphere, allowing it to deploy a parachute to land safely on the ground.  Thus, the Phoenix ended its 10-month, 423 million-mile flight. 

NASA’s scientists discovered liquid water underneath the ice of the poles in 2002.  This mission was to sample the water and find out if life could be present in it.  NASA attempted a landing on Mars’ southern pole in 1999, but a problem (scientific calculations of distance are done with the metric meter, not feet NASA!) during the descent ended the mission with a bang.  The later Spirit and Opportunity rovers explored Mars’ equatorial region for signs of water existing in the past.  The Phoenix was built from parts of smashed up polar spacecraft.  Hopefully, we will finally find out if little green men (or bacterial life) can exist on Mars.

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