The actor, who starred in 1993’s Jurassic Park, died Monday in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 78.

Many Christian parents struggle with the use of magic in literature. Some feel uncomfortable with any magical elements, while others object only to those associated with witchcraft. I’ve had many online conversations with parents who struggle to articulate exactly “how much” magic they’re willing to allow in their kids’ books. I myself have wrestled with this issue, seeking a biblical approach and landing in various places at different times. My goal here is to provide you with an introduction to this topic, and to equip you with perspectives to approach it biblically and practically. Although I love literature, I love the word of God far more. I know I will have to give an account to the Lord for everything, and I deeply desire to represent his word well, despite my fallibility. Having said this, I realize you may come to different conclusions than I have. //

When I approach fantasy literature that includes magical elements, I try to look through a similar lens and ask the questions “Where does this power originate?” and “What are the practitioner’s intentions?” Remember that when an author writes in the genre of fantasy, his or her intent is (usually) not to encourage belief in fantastical events but rather to help the reader recognize the deeper truths that the imaginative elements of the story convey. Oftentimes, the author points to spiritual truths more effectively illustrated outside the bounds of our own reality. Well-written fantasy won’t focus on the magical elements themselves; rather, any magic will simply be a creative vehicle to highlight good versus evil and to reveal the truth that spiritual forces are at work in the world. ////

invocation vs. incantation -- calling on powers or using "unknown technology that is indistinguishable from magic for illiterates in it"

Jesus confronted the disciples’ distorted belief system: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3, ESV).

This poor blind beggar had suffered greatly throughout his life. We don’t know if he heard the disciples’ question to Jesus or not, but here’s what we do know: Jesus immediately defended him. Had this man sinned? Of course he had. And so had his parents. But Jesus clarified this wasn’t the cause of his suffering. Not only did Jesus challenge their simplistic view of suffering and ultimately point them to the greater purpose of his glory; he also fiercely defended a help­less man. Jesus was like a father stepping in front of a child: To get to him, you’ll first have to go through me.

What a Savior we have—forgiver of the sinner, helper of the helpless, defender of the defenseless. Yes, he came to expose the darkness of hearts, but he also came to shine the light of his hope and glory into the dark places of our pain (v. 5). It’s tempting to as­sume God looks at our pain and wonders, Why are you struggling? Don’t you see that I’m doing something through it?

But Jesus’ heart is empathetic, not critical. His life on earth shows us how much he still em­pathizes and grieves with us over the brokenness of the world. And everything he does brings him the greatest glory and us the greatest good (Rom. 8:28).

If we question that truth, we’ll constantly question his heart for us when we can’t understand his ways. But Psalm 56 assures us, “This I know, that God is for me” (v. 9, ESV). Our faith will be bolstered when it’s founded on the knowledge that God is undeniably, without a doubt, for us. //

Friend, your suffering isn’t God’s punishment, and it’s never pointless. Jesus is always at work in ways we can’t see in the mo­ment. And it’s always for the purpose of showing the goodness and glory of God to us, in us, and through us.

Still, we think, If I just knew why, then I could endure. But what we ultimately need more than anything else is not the light that shines on the answers we want but the light of Jesus himself.

Jesus could have explained the man’s blindness, but he didn’t. That wasn’t what the man really needed. Yes, it would have been God’s undeserved grace to spare him from a gene mutation, disease, or whatever caused his blindness. His life would have been easier. Had that been the case, though, would he have come face to face with Jesus? Maybe not. He would have been content with his physical sight, despite walking in spiritual darkness. But in the hands of a powerful God, it was also an undeserved grace for the blind beggar’s life to become a remarkable story of redemption that led him (and those around him) to spiritual sight.

You may not see it now, but answers to your pain won’t bring ultimate comfort. Only nearness to Jesus will. Jesus wants what is best for you and has the power to bring it about.

EtherMesh

EtherMesh is a feature-rich Android application that transforms peer-to-peer file synchronization into a powerful decentralized communication platform. Built upon the robust Syncthing engine, EtherMesh introduces the LinkThing framework, enabling serverless, peer-to-peer applications through a unique "Everything is a File" philosophy.

Open Book Touch
A pocketable, front-lit, open source e-reader — for every book, in every language //

Open Book Touch
Open Book Touch e-book reader with included LiPo battery and MicroSD card

$149 Free US Shipping / $12 Worldwide
Orders placed now ship Apr 21, 2027.

The Trump administration on Monday barred US citizens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from returning home amid an Ebola outbreak that continues to outpace response efforts.

Reuters first reported late Monday that Americans currently in the DRC or those who have recently traveled to the Ebola-stricken country have been put on a “do-not-board” list. They cannot travel back to the US until they have spent 21 days in a third country. The order, taken under a transportation authority known as Title 49, was independently confirmed by Politico on Tuesday.

Both outlets noted that roughly two dozen Americans who had been set to board flights home on Tuesday have already been blocked by the new rule. It remains unclear if the bar also applies to government workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has at least two dozen employees working in the DRC.

The move adds to the already extremely stringent and controversial travel restrictions imposed by the Trump administration in an effort to wall itself off from the outbreak. Health experts continue to be critical of such restrictions, as they have historically been unsuccessful and harmful. Specifically, they discourage countries and people from being transparent about outbreaks and disease risks, hurt economies, and create stigma. There is also concern that such restrictions will limit humanitarian aid workers. //

The US has built an elite network of medical facilities that can safely isolate Ebola patients while offering high-quality care.

In past Ebola outbreaks, no such stringent travel restrictions were implemented, and the US repatriated eight cases for high-level care. None of the repatriated patients transmitted the virus.

New study confirms 2024 “momentum flux theory” on how angular momentum of water flows drives rotation.

A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That’s the essence of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they’ve cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters—and the answer challenges conventional wisdom on the matter. //

Mach proposed that there would be no rotation with a reverse sprinkler: the reaction force on the nozzle as it sucks in water pulls the nozzle counter-clockwise, while the water flowing into the inside of the nozzle pushes it clockwise. The two forces cancel each other out in this steady-state scenario. Feynman’s own experiment showed a slight tremor when pressure was first applied to pump water through the nozzle, and then the sprinkler returned to its original position and remained still.

But others suggested that if the friction was low enough and the inflow rate high enough, a reverse sprinkler will start to turn in the opposite direction of an ordinary sprinkler, thanks to the formation of a vortex inside.

The Making of the Voyager Golden Record

The following is a listing of sounds electronically placed onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

The following is a partial listing of pictures electronically placed on the golden records which are carried onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

Why Johnny Can’t Read: Not Enough Phonics
Reading scores have been bad for thirty years.

Why? Because teachers stopped pushing phonics and replaced it with something called “Balanced Literacy.”

Greetings! We are husband and wife photographers and filmmakers, Darrin and Sharon Henry, from the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, and more recently spending extended time in the wonderful City of Hull, in the north of England.

A grammar book walks into a bar

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intents and purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Courier New and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony .
  – Jill Thomas Doyle

Rocket Alerts in Israel 23-26

Now it’s an arms race between OEMs locking down chips and tuners trying to crack them.

The Earth may not be that massive, but it still distorts space-time. //

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that a rotating mass like the Earth pulls the fabric of space and time around with it in a perpetual swirl. This phenomenon is known as frame dragging or the Lense-Thirring effect, after the two physicists who modeled it back in 1918. Frame dragging becomes more significant with larger masses and faster rotation, so we’ve mainly observed it around huge black holes.

Measuring how much the Earth twists spacetime as it rotates has been much more challenging because our pale blue dot of a planet is millions of times lighter than a typical black hole and rotates rather slowly.

But now, a team of astronomers led by Ignazio Ciufolini, a physicist at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics in China, reports the most accurate measurement of the terrestrial Lense-Thirring effect to date. Their work brings our uncertainty down from a few percentage points to just 0.2 percent. And they did it with a satellite that looks like a cross between a golf ball and a disco globe. //

The disco globe satellite that Ciufolini and his colleagues use in their experiment is called LARES-2 (Laser Relativity Satellite 2) and has been developed by the Italian Space Agency. It’s a solid sphere of Inconel 718, a dense nickel-chromium alloy, covered with 303 corner-cube retroreflectors and measuring a bit over 40 centimeters across. It has no thrusters, no solar panels, and no electronics of any kind. It weighs 294.8 kilos. That combination of small size and large mass gives it the lowest area-to-mass ratio of any satellite in medium-Earth orbit.

This was exactly what the scientists needed, since it helped them minimize the impact of other forces.

“The idea is that we want to measure gravitation,” Ciufolini said. “We have non-gravitational effects like photons impinging on the satellite and pushing it. So, the mass must be very large and the cross-section of the satellite very small, so the acceleration induced by photons is very, very small.” In theoretical physics, satellites of this kind are called test particles, meaning an object whose motion is governed almost entirely by the gravitational field. LARES-2 was placed in orbit at an altitude of roughly 12,265 kilometers by a Vega-C rocket in July 2022. //

The measurement confirmed general relativity once more, but Ciufolini thinks its true value lies in what it rules out. General relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics, despite our best efforts to reconcile the two, and does not explain dark energy. The Chern-Simons theory, one of the leading alternatives that emerged from quantum gravity frameworks, modifies Einstein’s equations and introduces mathematical corrections expected to make them work at ultra-small scales where quantum mechanics and gravity must coexist.

While it does not fully reconcile Einstein’s physics with quantum mechanics and does not offer a universally accepted solution to the dark energy issue, many physicists think Chern-Simons brings us one step closer to the complete Theory of Everything. The problem, though, is that it predicts a different magnitude for frame dragging. //

“These laser-ranged satellites have a peculiar characteristic: They last for hundreds of years,” Ciufolini said. “The more you wait, the more data you accumulate, and the better the results of frame dragging measurements will be. So, we can wait maybe 100 years, and they’ll become even more useful for theoretical physics.”

The state’s energy policy went off the rails last decade, when Albany set unreachable climate goals, then forced electric utilities to implement them. //

Mamdani has fiercely defended that 2019 climate law at every turn, even as the negative consequences have piled up.

When Mamdani entered the Assembly in early 2021, Con Edison and others were tearing up a century-old playbook that had successfully balanced reliability and cost.

Suddenly the utility companies had to pull double-duty as climate crusaders — and as Albany’s bagmen to pay for their multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle.

That distracted utilities from their near-term maintenance obligations on the geriatric grid, as they spent ratepayer cash and untold attention on an abstract push toward economy-wide electrification. //

Assemblyman Mamdani was among the most extreme voices pressing energy policy even further in the wrong direction, particularly when it came to the actual generation of electricity.

He fiercely opposed allowing private companies to upgrade their power plants — something that could have reduced greenhouse emissions and trimmed electricity costs, if Albany hadn’t blocked the way.

Instead, the air in New York City is dirtier, electricity prices are higher and the grid is more fragile because of green policies Mamdani himself championed.

Prepare to be befuddled and bamboozled – and probably bewitched //

There are no fewer than 22 winning entries this year, including a hat-trick of hat-tricks: three entrants, Yusuke Endoh, Nick Craig-Wood, and Don Yang, all had three winning entries each. We have room for only a few of our personal highlights, but we highly recommend reading all the winners – they are well worth your time.

Reinventing Nixie tubes through design, research, and craftsmanship.

We are a small team dedicated to restoring historical nixie tube-making techniques and crafting modern timepieces —by hand, in our Czech workshop.