A petard is a small bomb used to blow up gates or walls of an enemy’s fortifications. William Shakespeare coined the phrase “Hoist with his own petard,” in his play Hamlet:
I’ve realized that the volume of content here on Sixteen Small Stones has been in stead decline for some time. As I’ve thought about the reasons, I’ve decided that my posts have become much too narrowly focused, and so I have been writing only when I have something to say regarding religion or politics and when I have the energy to distill my thoughts into an essay.
Originally, Sixteen Small Stones was meant to be a place for me to write about any of my many interests and starting now I am going to return to that objective. I will still be writing about politics and religion when I have something to say, but it will not be the only focus as it has been lately.
Back in October of 2009, Daniel Bartholomew and I announced our ScriptureLog project, an open source plugin that turns WordPress into a collaborative scripture study platform. At that time only we only had The Book of Mormon available.
Then in November, we released an update to add the Old Testament.
When we released the Book of Mormon, I had taken the time to develop a Book of Mormon outline, and I wanted to outline the Old Testament as well.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin. If you’ve followed this blog for a significant time you know that I have doubts about the compatibility of Darwinism and the belief in God as the Creator.
I remember as a high-school biology student, in addition to various other evolutionary facts, our teacher showed us the famous Heackel drawings of the developmental stages of embryos. He made us all memorize the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” And he insisted that it was a scientific “fact” that proved that Darwin’s theory was undeniably true. It was all very convincing and I believed him. As a faithful member of the LDS church I reasoned that “evolution” was simply the device which God employed to bring to pass the creation. This was in 1989 and little did I know that the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” hypothesis had, even then, been long discredited.
The Obama Administration has updated the White House website to include visitors logs. This is a wonderful development and even though I don’t generally agree with many of the things that the administration is doing, this kind of transparency should be applauded. We need more transparency.
However, I thought it was super funny that the service that they have chosen to use to publish the visitor log data on the web, Socrata, has a button right at the top of the display that says “Socialize This.” Almost every other service in the world uses the word “Share” on their links and buttons for posting information to social networks like twitter or facebook.
It’s a Freudian slip from the collective administration subconscious.
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