ha, Perkins, I'm on to you!

Yes, still good!

Friend drama is a bummer.

Is anyone else having problems with Google Maps today?

I have nothing to say on the "History" Channel. But I think that, much like the "History" Book Club I joined in grad school, the fact that, as a professional historian, they still had nothing of interest to me is telling.

Friend drama is a bummer.

It's someone I really should have broken up with officially as a friend, I think. ugh.

The 10 Biggest Intellectual Fights Of All time

1. Socrates vs. The Gods: Triumph of Reason

Can't argue with that, I guess. 'Cept I don't know how much reason actually triumphed in practice....

Greek philosophy helped to shape the metaphysics of the civilized world in the last half of the first millennium b.c.e. There were many divergent schools of philosophy competing with one another by the time the Sophists came along maintaining that truth was entirely a matter of persuasion by argument rather than something absolute. Socrates rose from among Sophist ranks and became famous for walking the talk so well that he made some enemies in high places.

Socrates taught that ethics were not a matter of divine decree, but are best the result of human reason and individual conscience. Socrates was charged with impiety (disbelief in the state’s gods, corrupting the morals of the youth), convicted by a margin of 6 out of 50 votes, and committed suicide by drinking poison. Through his student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle, the intellectual tools of reason and logic lived on to become part of the guiding philosophy of the Enlightenment and science.

Heh. A blog, reporting on the Pope/HIV/condom kerfuffle, called the Pope "Pope Bareback XVI."

[link]

As opposed to Tars Tarkas stopping by for a visit.

Why does Tars Tarkas look like the name of a Division 3 NCAA Basketball coach?

I saw something similar on PBS. It was extremely speculative, with only the thinnest of evidence, accompanied by very selective reading of his texts.

It is an extremely speculative area of studies, but one which is currently relatively popular in some academic circles. There's not much evidence that there was a Catholic Conspiracy against the Tudors, but there was a lot of persecution of Catholics, including fines for not attending Anglican services etc. Shakespeare's father was fined for not attending services.

I think that Stephen Greenblatt makes a pretty interesting case for the idea that Shakespeare may have been a closeted Catholic.

(Not to defend the history channel!)

OK, time to start buying sharks, shark tanks, superglue, etc.

Military Laser Hits Battlefield Strength

Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time -- paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.

In recent test-blasts, Pentagon-researchers at Northrop Grumman managed to get its 105 kilowatts of power out of their laser -- past the "100kW threshold [that] has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for 'weapons grade' power levels for high-energy lasers," Northrop's vice president of directed energy systems, Dan Wildt, said in a statement.

That much power won't get you a Star Wars-style blaster. But it should be more than enough to zap the mortars and rockets that insurgents have used to pound American bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From tommy's intellectual fights link:

In 1912, just three years before Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity [GR], Vesto Slipher measured the Doppler shift of a spiral galaxy and determined that almost all of these celestial ‘nebulae’ were receding from the earth at great speed.

Vesto Slipher? Surely with a name like that he must have been a Bond villain.

Yeah, I've seen a UFO, but my assumption is it was some kind of helicopter with an unfamiliar light pattern. As opposed to Tars Tarkas stopping by for a visit.

Watch out for falling mutilated cows the next time you see one.