I enjoy listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Skeptical investigation is necessary to find truth. But because we can’t personally investigate everything, we may be misled when we have to rely on what appear to be skeptical investigations by others. This seems to have happened to Steve Novella in episode #806 of the Skeptics Guide.

Last year, I researched the origins of Christmas and Christmas trees. I had heard claims about the pre-Christian origins of Christmas so much that I expected to have no trouble finding actual evidence for them. In fact, the claims were rumors that began centuries after the traditions had become established in Christianity. There was no evidence of pre-Christian origins for Christmas or Christmas trees.

As soon as Justice Ginsburg died, the same Republican senators who promised in 2016 that they would never vote on a Supreme Court justice in an election year said they would vote on a new justice in 2020. It would be tempting to say I never believed Republicans anyway, but I do remember a time when I believed Republicans.

Today I attended a class on mentoring and empowerment in youth ministry. It left me with some thoughts that apply to all of us. I hope that you will think about how they apply to you.

The twelve disciples who followed Jesus had no question what their mission was. His wisdom and His love exceeded anything they had ever imagined. They loved and trusted Him completely. They chose to follow Jesus to establish a kingdom of love that would abolish all other kingdoms.

The Views XML Backend module allows data from XML documents to be rendered in Drupal views. It uses XPath queries to select rows and fields from XML data. Given
<rss>
  <channel>
    <item/>
  </channel>
</rss>
the XPath query to get all the items within a channel would be /rss/channel/item.

Yesterday I had my fears confirmed about the Drupal Automatic Updates initiative. It requires sites to be able to modify core Drupal files. While this makes it easier to fix vulnerabilities, it is not something you want when your site is actually being attacked. The best way to protect against someone exploiting a vulnerability to modify your Drupal core files is to change the file permissions so that your site cannot modify them.

I have been hearing warnings for a while now that distributed services and JavaScript running in the browser are about to reach the point where no one will want to work on Drupal any more. That would be true if no one cared about vendor independence and future-proof investment. If you’re building a disposable site or afraid that your client will run out of work for you, it may not pay to worry about those things. But if you would rather not do the same job over and over again, you want a platform under your own control that can be continuously reused and improved upon.

black lives have to matter.

I’m listening to an episode of the Science Talk podcast entitled, “Your Brain, Free Will and the Law.” In order to attack the idea of free will, Robert Sapolsky creates a meaningless definition of free will and claims it does not exist. According to his definition,

Free will is what we call the things that biology has not explained yet.

Several times he says that if his choice was determined by “biological luck,” then “it wasn’t me,” implying that our identities are independent of our biology. He goes on to say that because there is no evidence of choices that are not determined by biology, the idea of holding individuals responsible for their choices is unscientific. This sounds like nonsense to me.