Do you actually pay for a subscription to The Boston Globe, as I do?  When you read the Doonesbury Comic strip in your newspaper, do you think you are getting the whole comic strip.  Compare this image to what you saw in the newspaper today.

If you cannot trust them to publish the whole comic strip, how can you trust them to print all the news?

If you pay them good money, how can you trust them to give you all that you paid for?

I sent a letter to the editor complaining about this. If I get any response, I will add it to the bottom of this post. Maybe they will have an explanation of how they are going to regain my trust.

The television series Cosmos, A Space Time Odyssey on the National Geographic Channel, is on at 10PM Eastern on Monday nights.  It is also rerun at other times and days.

The National Geographic Channel schedule is available on the web.

This series in produced in conjunction with another television network that I will not name and which I will not watch.  I am sorry that I did not look up this alternative place to view the show until now.  If it as morally repugnant to watch this on the other channel, I hope you will find this alternative acceptable.  It is going to be hard for me to do, but I think I will try to watch the show on NatGeo.

I’ll make up some excuse to ease my mind about the morality of watching such a show that might in the slightest way benefit that other channel.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe | Moyers & Company is the second part of a three part series hosted by Bill Moyers.

I have not seen part 1 yet, let alone part 3, but this segment stands on it own so remarkably well, that I wanted to post it right away.

It should be no surprise to anyone who has watched or listened to Neil DeGrasse Tyson that he explains so eloquently why belief in a supreme being does not have to be part of a person who knows enough science.

Of course he says it much more eloquently than I ever could.  However, to put the feeling in my own words, I might say I  can understand why someone might want to attribute the unknown to the mysterious workings of a supreme being.  On the other hand, I am quite willing to look at a mystery of science, and accept the fact that we don’t know the answer yet.  I do not need to make up an answer that is outside of the realm of science for my own peace of mind.

Tyson has at the tips of his fingers, numerous examples of mysteries of science of the past that even the most brilliant scientists of those days were willing to attribute to a supreme being.  However, all of the examples he mentioned have been explained by science since then.  So, it is not impossible that there is some mystery that actually is the hand of a supreme being, but history has shown that the chances of any current day mystery being that hand of a supreme being is extremely low.

Mathematicians have proven that there are some things that are true in any self-consistent mathematical system that cannot be proved to be true using that system.  Not things we haven’t proved yet, but things that they can prove cannot be proved.  Keeping this in mind, it would not surprise me if there were mysteries of science that we will never figure out.

I have little doubt that most of the mysteries we know about now will be solved in the thousands or millions of years of intelligent life that will follow my own lifespan.  That means that I also know for sure that some of those mysteries will not be solved in my lifespan.  I can live with that idea.  If you cannot live with that idea, then feel free to make up any explanation you want that will give you peace of mind, if that is what you would prefer.  As Tyson says, just don’t insist that your idea be taught in our public schools as science.