Rain changing to snow. The afternoon and early evening here in north central Indiana.

Paradise Found.

Was splitting some firewood when I heard a basketball being bounced on the playground behind my house.

It seemed odd to me. There was a snow cover from November through most of February, but the court was never shoveled.

Not even at Christmas. When I was a kid (a memory that, if it were a car, would be classified an antique by the BMV) Christmas was when you got a new football, a new basketball.

Now, I'm guessing it's sit on your ass and amuse yourself stuff, electronics and such.

Got my first baseball mitt (glove) in an Easter basket. It was a Rawlings 3-fingered model, a true anachronism. It was autographed by some Phillies turd.

The Phillies played at Cincinnati's Crosley Field in the first MLB game I attended. Of course, I took my mitt. Richie Ashburn hit a foul ball while I was engrossed in the box score card. It damn near hit me.

The Phillies have always been about class. Dick Allen, who played first base, used to write "trade me" in the dirt with the toe of his cleat. This was before Curt Flood, and players who signed signed on for life.

There are no sure things in science. Which is why virtually everything is called a theory. This concept seems to confuse Creationists, who refer to "Darwin's Theory" as a theory. Never mind it is proven by everything from the fossil record to the thousands and thousands of mutations occurring every second.

What else explains the 14 or 15 different finch beaks found on isolated Galapagos Islands(largely ignored by Chuck himself)?

Or how about the development of resistance of various viruses to antibiotics?

There are eight classes of antibiotics known. Eight. Resistance is widespread, and multiplying.

A reason is overmedication. Doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics after a cursory examination.

But, far and away, the major threat is animal husbandry, particularly, feed lots. Confined animals cannot survive without an antibiotic regimen. The antibodies are passed up the foodchain to the macroconsumers. You know who. Which makes trillions more opportunities for resistant mutations. There is every reason to suspect that some, maybe all, antibiotics will become ineffective in your lifetime.

The most exact of the sciences is rocket science, a bit of a misnomer. It's mostly math. It's been briefly explained here previously.

It requires needle-point accuracy. Yet, unaccountable influences, sunspots, improper estimates of a target's gravitational field, inaccurate determination of a target's mass, can mean a crash. Or a miss. And the miss might mean millions of dollars, lost to space.

Geology is so packed with speculation and theory, it is more philosophy than science.

When I visited Mt. St. Helen's in 2000, I purchased "the bible", a documentation of the science conducted before, during, and after the eruption. A goodly chunk concerned prediction by analyzing the gases escaping the various vents in the caldera. Despite all the data and analyses, later eruptions at other sites, particularly in Mexico and the Andes, proved these hypotheses useless.

Last Sunday, a new pastor at St Francis at Ball State scared the shit out of all the children by talking about an impending eruption from the huge caldera at Yellowstone. This has been characterized by television as a supervolcano, capable of cleansing life from the planet. Not such a bad idea.

Faith-based functionaries should leave science to realists.

TV science is a show, like a movie. The data used on the show are dated. They present a fast-growing "bubble" on the caldera. In fact, the growth has slowed dramatically in the last few years. The caldera lies about 100 miles below the surface, and the growth in the first several years of the new millennium has been attributed to an influx of magma into the chamber, not an incipient push towards the surface.

Supervolcano? Not anytime soon. Not in your lifetime. Not in your children's children's children's.

Father, stick with the New Testament. This ain't about to happen, but most of that stuff didn't, either.

Heard a cardinal with that distinctive call going most of yesterday morning. Also, the last couple of days, honking Canada geese overhead. Now, the thermometer is plunging and it's snowing.

Shit.