Does anybody know what's become of The Mighty Geek? It's been about a week that DNS has been returning "no such address."

You know how some people disappear from your social landscape when they hook up with a boy- or girlfriend? All of a sudden they just don't have time for anyone else? So ~ I guess ~ he proposes marriage, gets accepted, and is now no longer sufficiently geeky to keep up his website. What's up with that?

[Update: With a heavy heart, I have removed the Mighty Geek link from my blogroll. No DNS entry for more than two weeks... it had to be done.]

9:22:34 PM    please comment []

Happily, we just don't know.

This article from the NY Times reprises what we think we know about Toumai, and adds a Georgian mystery to the mix. Added to the challenge of sorting out the various lineages are questions like: how do we know that this particular individual wasn't an outlier? are we sure we've put the pieces together the right way, and the extrapolations we've made for the rest are accurate?

Paleoanthropology: not for sissies.

8:59:06 PM    please comment []

I went to a small private high school. The headmaster of the school was a really interesting man (I refer to him in the Wayback Journal as Mr. M). He came from a background of great privilege and single-handedly founded and kept the school financially afloat for thirty years before moving to have it become self-supporting through fundraising.

He taught only one subject, Bible class. It was not a religious class, but he felt that every educated person in Western civilization should be familiar with the Bible, both as literature and as a primary philosophical and cultural influence. I have no idea what his own religious beliefs, if any, were or are.

In this entry, you'll see me worried about being taken for a "Jesus freak." I was truly a creature of my time.

I wish I could find some of the papers I wrote for Bible class. I think I threw them out in the great Pack Rat Purge several years ago (before my involvement with the church). It's too bad. At the end of one of them, I distinctly remember, Mr. M wrote:

Put down your flute, Pascale, and ascend to the pulpit, where the future awaits you!

Can you imagine?! I was flummoxed. (Now, I'm just flattered.)

12:49:49 AM    please comment []