Found this photo today

from a while ago, with a very small girl number one peeking over my shoulder from her backpack perch.

25 Points to identify this protein

Hint: You'd die without it.

32 hours

32 hours 'til I see my loved ones.


This painting by Joel Pelletier, entitled "American Fundamentalists, (Christ's entry into Washington in 2008)" caught my eye today. Click on it to see a bigger version. It's from here. Your reaction?

Mandelbrot Set

This is extremely freaking kewl, and beautiful. Not that I begin to approach understanding the mathematics. The kewl thing is the mathematics is simple enough for me to have some remote clue what it means. Anyway, it's a fractal, and it never stops being complex no matter how far in you zoom. And if you have a good computer, you can zoom *way* in (like 60 billion times, if you start with a typical computer monitor, it's like zooming down to what you are seeing on a typical computer monitor is part of the original image blown up to 20 million kilometers wide). And if you click on the photo, or here, you can see a series of shot of such a zoom. Or click here for the actual wiki article, which has the same series, but with more explanation. This is featured on Wikipedia's featured pictures page, which has some other nice shots on it.

Here's the end of the zoom series at wiki--having zoomed in 60 billion times the original. Remember, it just keeps going.

update and change in date of Mark Driscoll protest

So the Mark Driscoll protest (mentioned in the post directly below this one) is now going to be on December 3. Please make a note of it.

Feel free to read about my visit to Mars Hill Church this morning here

And here's today's astonomy photo of the day--the cat's eye nebula

an image of mercury's recent transit of sol

On Wednesday this last week, things lined up in such a way that Mercury could be seen crossing the sun from over half of our planet! In the photo below, mercury is the tiny black circle (almost a speck!) to the left of center. You can see a bigger version of the image here This is today's Astronomy picture of the day, which you can have automatically downloaded to your desktop every day using this software These pictures are always amazing--makes me look forward to seeing my computer desktop every day.

Composite image of earth and sol

Isn't this kewl? It gives one some perspective. Of course it's a bit off, because we are also *much* further away than this from the sun!

Darkness Overcomes you

Darkness overcomes you is the title of this painting by shaun tan, from his book "The Red Tree", which is the most brilliant picture book I've ever seen. You can see lots of Shaun's artwork in the picture books section of his web site The Red Tree