Stevie M

So the homophobic religious right has Chick-Fil-A, while the gay rights crowd has Oreos.

Is this even a contest?

I'm reading Bliss's "Calculus of Variations," where he gives the function

I(a) = ∫ f(y' + aη') dx

where y and η are continuous and piecewise differentiable functions of x, y'=dy/dx and η'=dη/dx. Limits of integration are x_1 and x_2.

The task is to differentiate I(a) with respect to a then set a=0. Bliss says the result is "readily seen to be"

I'(0) = ∫ f_(y') η' dx

where f_(y') is the derivative of f(y') with respect to y'. Limits of integration are again x_1 and x_2.

I know I'm going to kick myself when I see the answer, but it's been several years since Multivariable Calculus and I'm just not seeing it on my own.

My wife (who is Black) answered the door last week to a couple of Mormon missionaries. They asked her whether the owner of the house was home.

She said yes.

They asked to speak to the owner.

"You're looking at her," she said.

They apologized and left without offering her their testimony.

I was a little surprised to hear my wife's story since I thought that Mormons -- like most other faiths -- had gotten over racism sometime last century. Are there still branches of LDS that deny salvation to ethnic minorities?

Another poster recently quoted a creationist argument that the earth spins "the wrong way."

This is a new one to me. Does anybody know:

(1) how the creationists think the earth ought to spin,

(2) why they think their creator did it wrong, and

(3) what the argument has to do with evolution anyway?

I'd ask this in one of the science forums except, you know, no science.

I'm planning to build a deck. I like to have friends over from time to time, so Muslims may occasionally sit on my deck. It's my property, and local ordinances are cool with it.

But it just occurred to me: my Muslim-friendly deck may offend some people, particularly service members who lost loved ones in 9/11. I certainly don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. To whom should I write in order to get permission?

Is there an organization for granting permission to Muslim-friendly building projects, say, the Friends and Family of 9/11 Victims who Love Religious Freedom but Aren't Too Fond of Muslims?

I'm taking a mathematics course, and one of the questions on the last exam was a "take-home" question, for which we're given almost a week to compose an answer. But the question is also an odd-numbered exercise in the textbook, so there's a solution in the back of the book. My wife tells me it's unethical to use this answer. I say it's not.

My wife's argument is that the professor gave us a week, so he clearly wants us to find an independent solution, and using someone else's answer -- even the textbook's -- is unethical. My counterargument is that take-home questions are understood to be "open book" unless otherwise stated, so anything in the textbook is fair game.

What do you say?

I heard an interview on NPR this weekend with an author who had written a book about his canoe trip down the Rio Grande. I was driving & couldn't jot down the author and title and now I can't remember either.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

I'm trying to remember a particular album. It was from a seventies rock band, and showed a family sitting around a table staring at an unidentifiable object.

It's really the cover image I remember, not the songs (don't ask why). Does this ring a bell with anybody?

Okay, this may be a long shot ....

The question about God's favorite board game reminded me of a German pop song about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost meeting in Heaven for a game of cards. Jesus deals but doesn't need to shuffle because everyone always receives the same cards. But it turns out the three can't agree what game they're playing -- the Holy Ghost thinks they're playing twenty-one, the father thinks it's Skat, but finally Jesus says that they're playing poker because it's such a great bluffing game.

I heard this years ago when I was a Christian and was offended. Now I'd love to track it down. Does this ring a bell for anybody?

I've been puzzled about this since my college days, when I met several women who said they felt "called" to be a pastor's wife. The obvious answer is culturally-ingrained sexism, but most evangelical denominations ordain women pastors, so it's not overtly about keeping women out of power.

Naively, I'd assumed that such "calls" were dying out. But some recent questions here challenge that assumption.

So I'm curious:

Is it still common among evangelicals for young women to feel "called to be a pastor's wife"?

And: If God calls men and women to the ministry; and if He calls some women to be pastors' wives; why does He never call any man to be a pastor's husband?

In "Why evolution is true," Jerry Coyne claims that one evidence of evolution is the presence of retroviruses in the human genome.

I appreciate the power of that argument, but Coyne doesn't explain how we know that a particular piece of the human genome originated as a retrovirus. What tips us off?

I'm reading Jerry Coyne's "Why evolution is true," and in the first chapter he claims that plate tectonic theory, together with the fact that the continents were once connected, contradicts young-earth creationism because plates move at a rate of just 2-4 inches a year, so if the earth were only 10K years old, you could see the NYC skyline from the coast of Spain.

I'm not a young earth creationist, but I wonder about the validity of this argument. Is there any reason to believe that plate movements have been a steady 2-4 in/yr for the last 10,000 years?