Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Holiday Greetings!

Best wishes to you for a safe, peaceful, and happy holiday season.

Blog!

A friend of mine at work, Bob Piercy, commented that Educators' News looked more like a blog than anything else. I'm not sure that's what I'd intended when I started making occasional posts to this site after it officially closed April 18, 2003. Since Bob meant it to be a compliment, I guess that's a good thing. It's probably just as well that I think of this site as a blog, as many of the sources I once used for education news have dropped behind the veil of subscription services!

No Conflict Between Science and Religion

I've been reading Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values recently. President Carter devotes a short chapter (Ch. 5), No Conflict Between Science and Religion, to the subject of intelligent design. I was pleased to read:

It seems obvious to me that, in its totality, the Bible presented God's spiritual message, but that the ancient authors of the Holy Scriptures were not experts on geology, biology, or cosmology, and were not blessed with the use of electron microscopes, carbon-dating techniques, or the Hubble telescope...The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.

Throughout this excellent book, President Carter decries the litmus tests of Christianity placed upon others by the religious right. Science teachers bear the brunt of the right's demands that they accept teaching intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

Video Podcasts for Schools

I recently ran across the Ask an Astronomer (RSS feed) series of video podcasts. So far, the series produced at CalTech includes:

• What Causes an Eclipse of the Moon
• Why Do We See Spiral Arms in Some Galaxies
• What Is a Brown Dwarf
• Are Other Solar Systems Like Our Own
• How Do Stars Live and Die
• Why Doesn't the Moon Fall Down
• Why Does the Moon Look Like It Changes
• Why Are Solar Eclipses Only Visible in Some Parts of the World
• Can You Feel a Solar Wind
• Do the Stars Really Move
• Why Is Spitzer Painted Black
• Do Other Solar Systems Exist

While this series seemed to be the only video science podcast on iTunes, there were a number of audio podcast also available, including the Science@NASA series.

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