Todd's Blog

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to a large audience at Granger Community Church and present my views on creation and evolution.  What made this particular event interesting is that I had only 15 minutes to do all that.  Faced with this impressive time limit, which normally would be quite difficult for academics like me, I opted to forego trying to make a detailed argument and just go with a visceral, passionate plea for being a young-age creationist like me.  Personally, I think it worked out just fine.  The audience laughed and applauded and seemed to appreciate what I said.  I just hope the little taste I gave them inspired some of them to check out some of my other work, where they can learn about all those details I had to leave out. So what does that have to do with that weird mushroom-looking thingy up at the top of this post?  That is Dendrogramma , and that is a big reason people get into science in the first place.  Ultimately scientists are curious folks, and

I've recently been enduring "encouragement" (that's a nice word) to revive and resuscitate my blog, mostly from one person who continues to suggest articles I ought to write and even tells me what he thinks I could say.  It's kind of like the persistent widow and the unjust judge, which makes me the unjust judge.  In the face of his relentless enthusiasm for my opinion (which I admit is a little odd), I have decided to try posting something once a week.  That's a schedule that might be too ambitious, but hopefully I can come up with something every week that's worth writing about and the time to write about it. The past few weeks have had some interesting science stories, from alleged genetic testing on Jack the Ripper (which Smithsonian mag finds legitimately doubt-worthy ), to the world's largest sauropod (behold Dreadnoughtus ), to a 24-year old woman born without a cerebellum (How is that possible!?   Check it out. ), but being the odd bird that