Friday 26 February 2016

Science & Art: BBC Nature's Tree of Life Poster


Scout Kid has been very interested lately in the concept of ancestors and how old species are. Trying to explain the phylogenetic tree of life to a four-year-old isn't the easiest, but BBC Nature has this cool, free-download poster, which is a place to start. I think he might still be a little young for exploring the Tree of Life Web Project, but I have it waiting in the wings for when he's a little more literate.

Thursday 25 February 2016

Goodslove: Engraved Rolling Pins


My rolling pin is breaking (shedding tiny ball bearings into my dough every time I use it!) and I'm kind of tempted to get one of these laser-engraved beauties to replace it. Or should I go with marble?

Wednesday 24 February 2016

Dark Skies Follow-Up

Stumbled across a few more starry finds since posting about light pollution on Tuesday.

What Makes a Star Starry?



Gorgeous silk scarf printed from the Suomi NPP satellite's image of the US at night.

Tuesday 23 February 2016

Dark Skies

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html#.Vsu_fHQrK2y
Composite map of the world assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC
When we were on our honeymoon, the Partner in Crime and I visited a planetarium in Seattle one day. The show happened to be about light pollution, and it's been nagging at the back of my mind ever since. The fixes are so simple, yet the scale of the problem is so large that it seems unlikely it will ever be addressed. Yet think of what we could all gain! Aside from the positive effects on wildlife and energy usage, what a magic to once again be able to look up and see the Milky Way from inhabited areas.

Here is the Internation Dark-Sky Association's tips of minimizing light pollution: "To minimize the harmful effects of light pollution, lighting should:

  • Only be on when needed
  • Only light the area that needs it
  • Be no brighter than necessary
  • Minimize blue light emissions
  • Be fully shielded (pointing downward)."
That's it! If I ever become mayor of somewhere, we're definitely going to certify our town as an International Dark Sky Place. I can give out my campaign fliers on star maps...

Monday 22 February 2016

Food for Thought: Good and Cheap, Leanne Brown


Such a cool project (by a Canadian)! A PDF cookbook of seasonal, flexible recipes designed for food-insecure people. It's also available on Kindle or paperback on Amazon, and every copy bought includes one copy given to a family or person in need. I'd love to see this distributed at my local Food Bank. Going to muse a bit about what I can do to make that happen...

Food for Thought: The Harvard Healthy Eating Plate

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to eat more whole grains as a family (sorry, Partner in Crime, you're along for the ride!) Overall, I felt like we ate healthy enough to keep me from worrying and unhealthy enough not to look like weirdos when we had people over to dinner ;)

However, I knew there were some areas we could up our game. One of the things I wanted to avoid, though, was unscientific nutritional advice. There's so much advice floating around in the name of health that is unsupported or just plain wrong. *cough*GMOS*cough* I found Authority Nutrition, which links supporting studies through all it's articles, and that helped, but they still sometimes get off-track, and they also focus way more than I'm interested in on weight loss versus overall health.

When I happened on the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate, though, something just clicked. So much nutrition advice can feel conflicting, or burdening, or restricting, but this just feels easy. Although we pretty much ignore the advice about bacon and butter, everything else has been easy and enjoyable to incorporate without feeling like I have to buy all kinds of unusual/expensive specialty items or demonise all the ordinary food at the grocery store.

Simple to remember, research-based, and freeing-- our crisper drawers are full and we're happy campers.

Homeschooling: DIY.org


How cool does DIY.org look? Kids do challenges and master skills to earn badges. You can access this part of it for free, or for a subscription (that can cover multiple kids) you can access courses on learning how to do the different challenges. I can't wait to show this to the Scout Kid, and someday to the Feral Kid and their sister. What will we start with? Baker? Archer? Graphic Designer? I know Scout Kid will have some opinions once I show him the options. Our life just got way more fun.

 Download the app here and let me know if you sign your kids up so we can follow each other's progress!

Sunday 21 February 2016

Systems: Universal Packing List


In a lot of ways, I've grown up to be just like my mother. One way is our common love of systems. We both believe, somewhere deep in our hearts, that there is a perfect list for everything life throws at you. The schedules I draw for my kids, the chore and shopping lists I make, even my glorious but not-yet-complete bid to have a 365-day meal plan, are all rooted in the lists I saw my mother making as a kid.

So of course, when I stumbled across OneBag.com a few years back, I was hooked. Calling itself "a non-commercial Web site that teaches — in exhaustive (exhausting?) detail — the art and science of travelling light," it has a wealth of information on the best kind of bag to get, what to put in it, and how to make sure it's the only bag you bring on your trip. And while I certainly can't claim I managed (or even wanted!) to make eight weeks' worth of Georgia travel necessities fit in one bag, I do adore the universal packing list philosophy espoused on the site.

Basically, the idea is that you have a packing list that you pull out every time you go on a trip, and on that list is every single thing you might need to take. You don't take everything that's on the list, but you don't take anything that isn't on the list. And it works! Aside from the odd very trip-specific item (like, say, skis if you're going on a ski trip), everything you're going to need is on this list. I packed for a family of four's eight-week work trip, and the only thing that we need that didn't come with us is a DVD whose case I packed without checking whether it was still in the DVD player.

The site encourages you to personalise your own version of the list, and tweak it over time. So I did. And I'm including it here in the hopes that some of you might find it useful. I've made two versions, a PDF checklist which, if you're a real keener, can be printed double-sided, laminated, and used with a dry-erase marker. (I won't judge if you're a keener; I'm the girl who read the whole OneBag.com website to make this for you!) The second version is a Word document, which you could download if you'd like to edit and personalise your own version of the universal packing list.

OneBag.com has an extensive justification, as well as suggested brands, for every item on their list, and it's worth a read-through if you have a boatload of time on your hands (as I once did, before I had kids). If you're a little more pressed for time, though, you can always just check in on items of interest. After all, you may never need the kind of travel that requires you to have a compass, or paracord, or hot glue, and the point here is to find a list that makes things simple for you.

Do you have any go-to travel gurus or tips? I'd love to hear about them in the comments. I'm always looking for new and better life hacks.

Saturday 20 February 2016

Mesmerising: Dust Cloud Around Earth



via Adventure Journal

"Blue swirls show sea salt whipped off the ocean, red is dust, and white is pollution from volcanic eruptions and burning coal. The rod dots that cover the map represent forest fires burning from both natural and human causes."

Friday 19 February 2016

Lady Legends: Goodbye, Harper Lee


I'm not having another kid after this, but if I were, I'd want it to be a girl so I could name her after you. Thanks for your book. Thanks for Scout. Thanks for, "I’m the sheriff of Maycomb County and Bob Ewell fell on his knife."

Beautiful Things: NASA's Exoplanet Travel Posters

Experience the charm of gravity assists!
We're currently polishing up the rental house here in Georgia; you know, little things like putting laminate over the bare concrete floors and painting over an apparent lifetime of scuffs + the world's literal worst paint-edging job. The boys' room here is all fresh and lovely now, with a bright blue coat of paint of the smudged grey and pretty wood-look laminate floors, but it does still need a little something. Serendipitously, I stumbled across these travel posters from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab-- and they're free to print! We're probably going to grab The Grand Tour and Enceladus for the boys' room, but Skydiving a Super Earth and the Venus cloud observatory are also wonderful. 

Thursday 18 February 2016

Georgia Book Reviews: The Jesus We Missed


The Book: The Jesus We Missed, Father Patrick Reardon

Summary: A loving treatise on the way we should understand Jesus' humanity as presented in the four Gospels.

Recommended By: This review on the Gospel Coalition blog.

My Thoughts: Although at times I felt Reardon was descending into mere speculation-- offering lovely explanations for various actions of Jesus that may or may not have any actual basis in reality-- for the most part, I dearly loved reading this. Reardon's love for Christ shines through the pages, his translations of the original texts and his historical understanding both of the Gospels themselves, and the church history and tradition that built on them, were invaluable and insightful, and I came away from reading feeling my own love for my Saviour expanded and my desire to learn more about him deepened.

I especially loved the beginning chapters on Jesus' pre-ministry life. Since New Year's I've been memorizing Matthew, and am just now starting on the Sermon on the Mount, so for the last month, I've been saturated daily in those four simple chapters on Jesus' birth, flight to Egypt, baptism, and temptation in the wilderness. The richness of historical detail and insights from Reardon helped me feel even more intimate and helped by these four chapters.

I highly recommend this book to anybody who would like to better understand Jesus in his historical humanity, and I will definitely be seeking out Reardon's other works.

Georgia Book Reviews: The Secrets of Happy Families


The Book: The Secrets Of Happy Families, by Bruce Feiler

Summary: Hacks from everything from business to the military to reality TV on doing family life better.

Recommended By: This Cup of Jo blog post on keeping the spark alive in your marriage (it quotes from the book and is a good little read in and of itself.)

My Thoughts: I love this kind of book, which pulls together a wide range of research and experience to provide, not a step-by-step guide, but fresh inspiration and ideas on doing something better. (A similar title that I thoroughly enjoyed was How We Learn.)

Feiler writes in a light style and pulls together a couple of different sources for each of his chapters, some more scientific/academic, and some just people with good life experience or who have done something well and in an innovative way.

The broader scope of the book suggests that happy families are those who are adaptable, invested in each other, multigenerational, directional (or perhaps purposeful is a better word), and deal with conflict well. Some of the specific suggestions explored that I like and might want to incorporate into our family life(/am already incorporating but found affirmed) are:


  • Handing over routines to kids to be their own responsibility (via checklists) and gaining their feedback into ways they can do it better. My own kids are a bit on the young side for it, but only a bit, and I always think it’s better to start something a little early and have some growing pains…
  • The notion that people are more motivated by fear of losing a good thing than by the prospect of gaining a good thing, so a smarter way to motive your kids via reward is giving it up front but making keeping it conditional on their behaviour.
  • The value of building resilience and stability in children through telling them the ups and downs of your family’s history.
  • Taking time as a family to define your core goals and values, and talking about those to motivate your choices, i.e., "We are the kind of family who…"
  • The Harvard Negotiation Project’s five-step philosophy for handling the world’s toughest disagreements: 
    • Isolate your emotions
    • Go to the balcony (i.e. move away from the situation until you can objectively look at the big picture.)
    • Step to their side (try to understand how they’re thinking, listen, ask questions.)
    • Don’t reject, reframe (work to find alternative solutions that meet everyone’s needs by asking open-ended questions, moving the spotlight from two rigid opposing positions to new options you’ve come up with together, ‘expand the pie before dividing it’.)
    • Build the golden bridge (settle on a resolution that leaves neither party embittered; write down together a list of possible solutions, star the most promising and eliminate the others.)
  • Take off the training wheels in teaching your kids personal finance. Talk to them honestly about your money, hand over responsibility for good and poor decisions to them while they’re still dealing in pocket change, give them meaningful earning opportunities, and finally, consider the goal: that they be responsible, self-reliant, and creative with their money.
  • Play better with your kids by creating games for them that have challenges/failures as well as easy parts, 'levels', and rules that force creativity and strategic thinking.
  • This quote about being a sports parent: "The purpose of youth sports… is to create better competitors and better people." The first goal is the domain of the kids and their coaches. "Parents have a more important job… You focus on the second goal, helping your kids take what they learn from sports into the rest of their lives… Let’s say your kid strikes out, and his team loses the game… You can have a first-goal conversation about bailing out of the batter’s box, keeping your eye on the ball, etc. Or you can have a second-goal conversation about resilience, character, and perseverance."
At the end of the book, my take-away isn’t that we need to make a lot of changes to be a happy family, since I feel like we’re a happy family already. (It might, however, be more useful to a family that’s struggling in that regard.) My takeaway was more small ideas and hacks that I’d like to take on board to care for and enjoy each other better as husband and wife, parents and kids, and even as an extended family. It was a one-day read for me, and, while not groundbreaking, certainly helpful.

Disclaimer: Books linked through my Amazon Affiliates account. If you like the sound of this book, buy it through my link and help feed my reading habit!

Wednesday 10 February 2016

Women's Wednesdays: A Response to TGC's 'Will Women Be Forced to Register for the Military Draft?

Opening Note: This post is not intended to explore the morality on any level of the draft itself. It is intended to engage with the question of whether the draft should, if employed, be restricted to men only, or include both men and women equally.
I read the Gospel Coalition's blog, and am often very encouraged and edified by it. Equally, I also often disagree with their posts. Unsurprisingly, many of these posts tend to be on the subject of gender. Usually I just sort of move on, but a recent post by Joe Carter called 'Will Women Be Forced to Register for the Military Draft?' moved me to do more. Not only do I disagree with this particular post, I find it rather insulting, both as a thinker and as a woman. As such, I wanted to post a response to it.

Carter's argument, if it can be so called, boils down to this:
"A poll taken in 2013 found that nearly sixty percent of Americans believe women should be eligible for the draft. Women favor the draft at a much higher rate than men (61 percent to 35 percent), and Democrats favor the draft much more than Republicans (80 percent to 50 percent). Overall, 59 percent of those polled said women should be drafted.
A likely reason for the increased support is a foolish and historically ignorant belief that the military draft is an outdated institution and will never be used in the future. While the draft has indeed been dormant for forty-two years, it is likely to return during America’s next large-scale conflict. The reason the draft will be needed is obvious: relative to some other nations, the U.S. is woefully lacking in manpower... That is why many people have no qualms about supporting “gender equality” by allowing women to be drafted: It doesn’t affect them directly. They seem to have no concerns about forcing their granddaughters or great-granddaughter to be subjected to the horrors of war. As long as it doesn’t directly affect them, they are allowed to be seen as embracing 'equality.'"

To summarize, Carter argues that the more likely reason women (and men) support the draft is because we don't think it will ever be used. Carter can think of no other, perhaps more intellectually honest, reasons for supporting the draft for women than a desire "to be seen as embracing 'equality'" without consequence (in an anonymous survey, no less?)

For me, two reasons come immediately to mind, although there may certainly be others. The first is that women have thought through the implications of being registered in the draft, and concluded that they find laughable the idea that their sex somehow disqualifies them from wanting to defend-- to the death if necessary-- what they believe to be valuable and worthwhile. Certainly this is where my own feelings lie. Certainly I imagine I would struggle with many qualms and fears if faced with the harsh reality of defending my values in a contest of the magnitude of war-- but I don't doubt that many of the young men who have in the past been drafted to defend their country felt the exact same qualms and fears I would. Though the women-and-children-first, 'men at the front lines' mentality that has been the currency of the patriarchy for centuries upon centuries is deeply ingrained (it's a huge movie trope, for example), I categorically deny that there is something intrinsic in me that would rather be defended and sacrificed for than to defend and sacrifice. I feel a  jealous ferocity rise in me at the idea of my husband or children being attacked, for example, that I defy any man to exceed, and I am confident that my fellow women experience the same feelings.

A second explanation is the notion that women don't want to be conscripted and do hope that the draft is never employed in their lifetime or that of their daughters, but they nonetheless feel that it is just and necessary that the draft legally include both genders. Even if no noble fire of courage and self-sacrifice kindles in them at the notion of defending their home and country, they acknowledge that their feelings aren't a good gauge for what is legally just or morally ethical. Thus, while hoping that the draft need not be employed, they still conscientiously believe on an intellectual level that the draft should include both men and women.

However, even if we grant Carter his ill-defended premise that women self-evidently should not be included in the first line of a nation's defense, that all the men of a country should sacrifice themselves to defend their women, he provides in his own post a defeat of his conclusion that women should thus be excluded from the draft. This defeat lies in the numbers he provides.

Carter writes,
"Currently, the armed forces is comprised of about 2 million men and women, both on active duty and in the reserves. The potential pool of draft eligible young men (ages 18-25) on file with the Selective Service is approximately 16 million.
In contrast, China has an available manpower of 750 million—more than twice the entire population of the United States. They also have over 100 million draft eligible men, with nearly 20 million men in China reaching military age every year. Although it has less manpower than China, Russia also has about 45 million men of draft age.
If we were to face either or both of those countries in violent conflict, the draft would need to be implemented in the U.S. on a broad scale. Having already shown that drafting women has popular support and having no legal basis to exclude anyone based on gender, young women would be drafted in numbers equal to young men."

What Carter is saying here is that the United States currently has an eligible pool of 18 million people, tops, in the event of a war. If that war were with China or Russia, they would be colossally outnumbered. This 'first line of defense' of American manpower a jest, then! Refusing to double your available forces is a foolish way of defending your women even if defending your women is acknowledged to be the goal. It strikes me not as noble and self-sacrificing to tell women to stay at home hoping that a military of 18 million will stand up against a military of 850 million, but as blind and self-aggrandizing. If you truly want us to be defended, let us stand beside you. Not all of us will live, but at least we won't have sat at home watching you be slaughtered in a foolish and misguided attempt at chivalry that ultimately does us no practical good at all.


Friday 5 February 2016

Georgia Book Reviews: Partners in Christ


Book: Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism, by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.*

Summary: A case for being an evangelical who believes in the authority of Scripture and isn't complementarian.

Recommended By: A rather mixed review on the Gospel Coalition blog. You might not be surprised to learn that I agreed with a lot more of Stackhouse's points than the TGC blogger...

My Thoughts: I think what I most appreciated about this book was the 'middle way' approach Stackhouse takes. He critiques flaws and too-glib arguments in both complementarian and feminist readings of Scripture, and his approach provoked me to take more honest looks at the 'sticky' passages regarding the roles of women in Scripture. Although I didn't always agree with his interpretations-- for example, I find a plain reading of Ephesians 5 to be much less supportive of male leadership roles than Stackhouse does even within it's historical context (a blog subject for another day!)-- I appreciate the chance to think critically and consider new perspectives on these passages.

Stackhouse presents the argument that New Testament norms in gender were adapted to their historical context, much in the way the sexual transgression laws of the Old Testament represented not God's ultimate best standards, but his patience to meet hard-hearted humanity where they were at in their cultural surroundings. This isn't a particularly ground-breaking argument, but Stackhouse's approach to it is unique and moderate. His 'model' for best synthesizing and understanding the Scripture's teaching on gender is as follows:
- Principle #1: "That men and women are equal in dignity before God."
- Principle #2: "Since some things matter more than others, lesser things sometimes must be sacrificed in the interest of the greater. What matters most to God, it seems, is the furtherance of the gospel message."
-Principle #3: We have "the Christian liberty to give up precisely some of the freedoms won for us in Christ-- again, for the sake of a higher good."
Stackhouse argues that Scripture presents a model of doubleness-- affirming certain patriarchal practices and attitudes of the day, while at the same time-- sometimes in the same breath-- offering a taste, a breath, a reminder of the equality and unity of men and women. Although I don't always agree with his interpretations or the broader framework he proposes, I think his approach to the task of forming a coherent interpretation from a widely varied body of Scriptural teaching on gender is wise and can be learned from: he is committed to not using 'pet' texts from murky passages to support his preconceived views, but instead trying to form a theology that most nearly agrees with the most clear teachings from the broadest passages on the subject. As I work to form a Biblical theology of gender, a task for which I most certainly find myself in flux and often in deep water, I appreciate this wise approach to interpreting, and I pray I can humbly and wisely approach Scripture in a similar way as I work to understand the sometimes-thorny issues surrounding gender and the word of God.

A final point I find very worth considering comes in this quote: "Indeed, as Howard Marhsall pointedly suggests, the very term complementarian may be nonsense: two classes of people are equally capable, but certain leadership roles are reserved to just one of those classes, yet everything else can be done by members of either class-- what is 'complementary' about that arrangement?" I read this put another way on a blog post (which I've unfortunately lost track of since so will have to paraphrase from a very rough memory): "If the positions of pastor and church leader are closed to women by nature of their God-given roles, what positions within the church are correspondingly closed to men? Should men not serve in the nursery? Help with the dishes after a potluck? Offer support and advice to someone making a decision? In what sense do complementarians understand women's 'ezer' role to be distinct from an man offering their gifts of service and help within the church, such that we could say that man was 'usurping' a woman's role?" Without a coherent answer to this, we are not really discussing women as 'complementary', but merely restricted.

*Book linked through my Amazon Affiliates account.