First Looks category archive

From the BBC:

The Methodist Church has become the first major denomination in Britain to launch its own application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Detailed description and picture at the link.

James Carroll, a one-time seminarian, had a long and thoughtful meditation on celibacy and the priesthood in the Roman Catholic church. It ranges from the institution of the celibate priesthood in the 12th century to the relationship amongst the doctrines of celibacy and the Roman Catholic Church’s hostility to birth control and abortion. He sees a common thread in all three positions: maintaining power.

I commend it to your attention. A nugget:

WHY HAD celibacy come to matter so much to those in charge of the church? The answer is familiar because celibacy, like other issues having to do with gender, reproduction, and sexual identity, is not really about sex — but power. The hierarchy found in the imposition of sexual abstinence a mode of control over the interior lives of clergy, since submission in radical abstinence required an extraordinary abandonment of the will. In theory, the abandonment was to God; in practice, it was to the “superior,’’ who always thought he was. The stakes were infinite, since sexual desire marked the threshold of hell. “Gravely sinful’’ defined every priestly deviance, including the minor and intensely personal matter of erotic fantasy. The normally human was, for priests, the occasion of bad faith.

Spring fever.

Addendum:

A great day for spring fever.

Sunny, clear skies, 71 Fahrenheits high temperature, soft breeze, long walk, blossoming flowers, and a Phillies game on the telly vision (Good Guys 4, Bad Guys 2, Phillies four games up).

Don’t get much Phillies here, so I take what I can get.

The local rag’s baseball horizon stops with Washington and Baltimore and the sports section is full of NASCAR and Redskins. It is NASCAR season, but it’s hardly Redskins season.

All the NASCAR makes me miss the Inky, where NASCAR was a thing for pages six and seven. Even back when my idea of a good time was driving fast and I subscribed to Motor Trend and Sports Car Graphic (SCG is long deceased and Motor Trend has become a tool of the auto industry), I never cared for races which involved only left turns–seems kind of one-dimensional to me.

Many years ago, I rooted for the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins, back when when men were men and ships were wood, when Earl Weaver was the manager of the Orioles and the owner of the Redskins (R. I. P. Jack Kent Cooke–you were a class act) knew something about football.

Normal abnormality resumes tomorrow.

Not necessarily very bright, but polite:

Mary Beth Harshbarger says she mistook her husband for an approaching bear and shot him during a hunting trip near Buchans Junction, Newfoundland.

Canadian officials charged Harshbarger because they say it was too dark for her to fire a gun safely.

BP and Transocean:

The device meant to stop oil leaking from a Gulf of Mexico well after last month’s rig explosion was faulty, US Congressional investigators have said.

The blowout preventer (BOP), a set of huge valves, had a hydraulic leak and a failed battery, they said after studying documents from BP and others.

Oil industry chiefs say it is too early to conclude what caused the disaster.

It may indeed be too early “to conclude what caused the disaster,” if, by “caused,” one means tracking the physical history of the blowout.

On a meta level, though, it’s not too early to conclude that managerial and technological incompetence, greed, and penny-pinching were significant factors, abetted by the Bushie take-down of the United States regulatory apparatus.

Video via Bob Cesca.

Listen here.

Radio Times looks at what BP’s wild well is doing to the “blue that gives us life.” From the website:

Dr. SYLVIA EARLE is one of the most famous ocean explorers – and explainers – of all time. The oceanographer was the former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and is one of the world’s leading advocates for marine conservation. Lately she’s been speaking up about the environmental toll of marine catastrophes like the Gulf oil spill, acidification caused by the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, overfishing and more. She’s in town to give a lecture tonight at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and she’s guest host TRACEY MATISAK’s guest on today’s Radio Times.

The damage done to the sea is not easily videotaped and does not pictures for television. Hear a detailed analysis of how much damage BP is doing to the sea and why the greatest damage is that done away to the sea from the camera.

Follow the link of click here to listen (mp3).

Not for the faint of heart.

The Virginia Beach Correctional Center starts a garden. Someone actually gave the jail a greenhouse:

“It’s just a win-win,” he (the sheriff–ed.) said. “The citizens of Virginia Beach will save some money and the inmates will get some vegetables.”

It costs the city about $4,000 a day to feed the jail’s roughly 1,300 inmates. Stolle, who took office Jan. 1, thinks he can do better. If the garden experiment works, he said he plans to expand the project to 2 acres. He’s also got land-use rights for 90 acres in Princess Anne, which could be used to grow even more food, like corn, beans and squash, he said.

And the inmates quoted in the story like getting out into the open air.

A threat to the air also:

The findings show that levels of airborne chemicals have far exceeded state standards and what’s considered safe for human exposure.

For instance, hydrogen sulfide has been detected at concentrations more than 100 times greater than the level known to cause physical reactions in people. Among the health effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure are eye and respiratory irritation as well as nausea, dizziness, confusion and headache.

The concentration threshold for people to experience physical symptoms from hydrogen sulfide is about 5 to 10 parts per billion. But as recently as last Thursday, the EPA measured levels at 1,000 ppb. The highest levels of airborne hydrogen sulfide measured so far were on May 3, at 1,192 ppb.

Follow the link for more.

BP = Bad Pollution.

Details here.

Now, why can’t you and the kids get along the rest of the year?

The Rugbyologist has a theory. Follow the link for the explication:

The source of this conflict is in your genes. As a parent, your fitness is primarily wrapped up in the success of your offspring, with whom you share half of your genes. Your child, however, only shares a quarter of its genes with each of its siblings. This means that your (child–sic) benefits much less from you giving your resources to its siblings than you do.

So, how do we resolve parent-offspring conflict? Canaries. That’s right. Canaries.

To quote Harry Shearer:

Radioactive water that leaked from the nation’s oldest nuclear power plant has reached an aquifer that supplies drinking water to much of southern New Jersey, the state’s environmental chief said Friday.

Bumbling Phools.

Via Eschaton.

Read this.

Scientific Blogging considers whose prediction of the end of the world is more likely correct: that of the Mayans or of the Norsemen.

We know some people believe that the Mayans predicted the end of the world because one of their calendars, based on precession, ends on the Winter Solstice in 2012 – and we have to give them credit for being able to even calculate the Winter Solstice in 2012 – but 13 was a magic number to Mayans so it seems more likely that instead of going beyond 13 they would just have started over.

The Norse were a lot more serious. They blew up stuff when Ages ended.

Read the whole thing, if only for the cool graphics of the constellations.

Patrick Lockerby at Scientific Blogging:

The Gulf disaster is not an oil spill – it’s a wild well. I hate weasel words.

Follow the link.

When summer is defined, not as an astronomical event (the solstice) but as a climate event, the beginning of reliably summer-like weather, this is what some British researches found:

To determine the onset of summer, they looked for the third day of each year when average temperatures reached 14C (about 54 Fahrenheits–ed.). That may sound distinctly chilly for summer, but comfortably allows for daytime temperatures above 20C (about 64 Fahrenheit; remember, this the UK–ed.).

Records show that in the period 1954-1963, the average date for the third such day was 25 May. By the 1990s, it had shifted forwards to 14 May. By 1998-2007, on average, summer arrived on 7 May. The shift is consistent with global warming, Bigg said. “It’s always very difficult to make direct attributions but scientists say global warming is very likely driven by human activity and I think we can say the same thing.” The researchers saw a similar, though smaller, pattern with summer plant flowering. On average, the first flowering date for 1954-1963 was 29 May. By 1991-2000 it was 26 May.

Lady’s foot slips off brake and hits gas pedal. Car runs into day care. No serious injuries.

What I don’t understand is that the story’s lead included this phrase:

a minivan driven by a pregnant woman

What does her being pregnant have to do with the story?

I can see including it in the body as a little human interest element, but putting it in the lead is weird, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with what happened.

From the Facing South blog:

Despite an army of reporters and officials investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, one item has curiously escaped much attention: Shell Oil is running a nearly identical “sister rig” in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, which may have the same design flaws that led to the current unfolding disaster.

Extremely detailed description and analysis at the link.

Lipton recycles. More at the link:

There are no paper towels in the bathrooms at Lipton Tea.

Or Styrofoam coffee cups in the cafeteria.

And, on the trash trucks that pull away from the building on West Washington Street – well, there aren’t many trash trucks.

There’s basically no trash.