This atheist has run out of answers. And, the only hope I have is my faith in spiritual communities, such as Street Prophets, to come together to effect empathic change. The change required needs both the cold insights provided by the science as seen in the cut & paste diary above. And, it needs the warm and loving healing ceremonies as found in many of the diaries below.

Our spirituality, our empathy, must provide the context for the expression of our logic. We need both  to survive.

Hope all are well.

At last we have everything here in Arkansas except the house which remains to be sold in Austin.  

Hope to be more regular here soon.

I have a Masters Degree! (In Science!!!)

All the carbon based fossil fuels are releasing when burned is the original energy from the sun. When we realize that oil, coal, gas, all of these are simply an extremely indirrect use of the sun's energy, it certainly ought ot give emphasis to improving our solar power technology. In one hour the sun sends enough energy to earth to power New York City for a hundred years.

Then there's wind. We've not even begun to harness it's immediate energy seriously here in the United States but back home the family's been busy. Palin, however, is more impressed with the dikes in Holland than their windmills, but that's cool with me.

The wind turbines require motors with lots of magnets which use rare earths. The Prius, for example, also requires these kind of magnets in their engines. We have less rare earth supplies than we need although some mines have been abandoned because they are too pricey to operate. If we are going to get off fossil fuels there will be a price to pay. If we don't we will surely default.

China is the worlds largest exporter of rare earths although they have been making it known that they want to stop exporting entirely in the next few years as they anticipate having only enough for their growing economy.

In other news, I have been craving crab cakes ever since Joanne said she was cooking them for her anniversary dinner the other night so it looks like I'll have to break down and do some cooking soon if I wana satisfy my bodily temptation.

Peace to you all.

Prayers for our Mother.

but I did some serious cleaning today anyway--dusted, polished, washed, swept, vacuumed--and even washed the wood floors. Well, the living room looks nice now.

I have a sort of vague, sinus-y facial pain at the moment, so I'm a little low on energy. And it's hot and humid. I feel very whiny at the moment.

One of my co-workers has a problem--she snitches food. In a parish, there's often food left from some event, or awaiting another event, in the fridge. Sometimes there's not enough to do anything with, and it's fair game for the staff to munch or lunch on.

But other times, people are saving it for an upcoming function, or intend to take it to a soup kitchen, or runaway shelter, or Catholic Worker house of hospitality. In other words, none of us is starving, and there are people who could use this food.

But one co-worker keeps rigid track of what food is there--and she steals it. She parks on that side of the building so no one sees what she takes out, or she hides it in her lunch bag. Seriously, this woman and her husband live alone--and yet we've seen her take several dozen donuts, or half a sheet cake, home with her. More than one person has earmarked some food for an event, and gone into the kitchen to find it missing. It's getting ridiculous.

But what to do about it? She promises not to do it again, but then she does anyway. It's not like they need the food--they're pretty well off. How do we get her to realize she's got a problem?

across the way that got lots of comments and more recs (including some from some of you) than I/P diaries get in general.  I've gotten over 300 comments and only 5 or 6 recs on I/P before.  I first posted it at AC, and if you click on there, I can make money.  :)

http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...

Some of you may know ... I posted a diary very similar to this. You can read the Addiction to Oil Diary that I posted a while back. (I believe it was in 2007) Three years ago? shee!

Actually, our expensive foreign oil comes from Canada! I know what! Maybe Sara Palin can see Canada from her back yard too. Maybe we could invade Canada and take all their oil eh?

The list for our oil sources are as follows, (largest producer to lower producer)

1. USA

2. Canada

3. Mexico

4. Saudi Arabia

.
mebee Danish Brethern can smuggle us a few bbls  ... give or take a few?

Actually, I think natural gas is a better bet as a bridge fuel. In the long term, I believe the mix will be as follows:

1. Natural Gas

2. Oil

3. Coal

4. Renewable

5. noo-ku-lar

.
... or something like that!

I got the ones that are ready to bake as I haven't been up to making them from scratch but my brother likes them any way. I did chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin and peanut butter. As soon as I get some energy back I'll probably do the from scratch bit along with some chili.

Other then that watching the weather carefully and hoping we don't have any more early AM thunderstorms. The last one left both Merlin and I sitting in the hallway as that lightening was just too close to the window for our liking. It looked a lot like this.

For so long I have been frustrated with my closed heart, numbness and apparent lack of compassion. What I learned from several days away, days where I had very little need to interact with other people, is that I am always reflecting the people around me. Closing my heart is a feeble attempt at protecting myself from the thoughts and feelings the people around me are always projecting. Being an empathic sponge is really a challenge. Last week I literally had the experience of walking toward someone, experiencing unexplainable anger and having that same anger dissipate as we changed directions-it was impossible to ignore.  There was a similar experience this weekend in a restaurant, different feeling but still the same experiencing of a resistance that appeared to belong to someone else, which dissipated when I left the restaurant. In that case I didn't notice it was gone until I was a mile down the road. In any case, these have been very interesting, if unsettling, lessons in empathy.

Sheesh! I'm telling you, it is so much easier being with trees and flowers.

OK, your weirdness break has come to an end, back to your regularly scheduled Coffee Hour. :-)

from dinner with friends.  Didn't really want to go, but one is leaving for Boston and we were saying farewell.  Once I got there I was fine.  I hate to say good-bye.

Forgot where I found this. Certainly not from BP. They are not this forthcoming.

Sarah Palin To Be Featured At 2010 National Quartet Convention

That would be the Gospel Quartet Convention in Louisville, Kentucky.

In my idealistic youth, I wanted to be an astronomer.  Higher mathematics put an end to that dream. ;)  However, as an adult, I've channeled my interest in astronomy and space exploration into blogging about these two subjects.  I actually have two astronomy-related blogs, Areology and the Ministry of Space Exploration, with the former devoted to the planet Mars and MinSEx covering the rest of the universe.

The other day, at MinSEx, I posted a photo and caption about a Wolf-Rayet star called V385 Carinae.  Wolf-Rayet stars are interesting in that they blow off tremendous amounts of stellar matter every year, to the point where they frequently become enshrouded in their own gases, invisible to ordinary telescopes.  The image that I posted on my blog was taken by a NASA satellite called "WISE" (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) that sees using infrared light.

OK, so far, so good.  Normally that would be the end of the story.  But this morning, I started getting hundreds of hits for this one particular post, and almost all of the hits have come from the country of Taiwan.  I have no idea why; perhaps the blog post was picked up by a Taiwanese newspaper that included the link address.  Regardless, I've had over 800 hits so far (about 3 times my normal traffic), and there's still six hours left in the day.

Come visit if you want to see what all the fuss is about. ;)

  ...are the most common type found to fall to earth.

   Basically, they are 1 mm glass spheres and iron droplets bound together by road tar.

   In the planetary nebula, as the temperature dropped, it rained iron, then rock... hence the spheres.

   Then at about 1000 K, since 90% of everything is hydrogen, long chain tars are able to condense.

   The coat the glass spheres and iron droplets and make them sticky.

   Once past a kilometer in diameter, the gravity of the growing asteroid makes it 'larger' than its physical size, and growth goes exponential.

   And God made planets.

   There never was enough dinosaur poop to make oil, unlike coal.  But the earth was made out of this stuff.  Its a wonder there is so little actually left around.

   (Geologists don't like to talk to astronomers after the astronomers showed that the craters on the moon wern't volcanoes... )