Joseph and Mary in Time for Christmas

Sorry, but I lied to you. I don't think I'll finish a substantial post until after the weekend when I finish my final final. I'm too busy studying.

Just kidding. No studying. Instead I've been watching all of Doctor Who and learning a new method for the Rubik's cube. Before I leave Brown on Sunday I will have watched all of the new run of Doctor Who in about a week. Last weekend, the day after I started my Doctor Who marathon, I competed in Brown Cubing Day, becoming the 5519th best cuber in the world! I'm now trying to work my way down to a somewhat more respectable time (well, more respectable for speed cubing, my best was still 53.61 seconds). There have been a lot of interesting things this month that we've missed. Most recently, James Randi dropped the ball on anthropogenic global warming and then partially recovering.

By the way, I originally intended to write a post about the stolen emails of climate scientists from the CRU, but I don't think I'll waste my time. Sean Carroll's post on Cosmic Variance expresses my sentiment very nicely. Essentially, this was a theft of private information in an attempt to discredit perfectly reputable science ahead of the talks in Copenhagen. Despite what climate change deniers are say, the emails show no grand conspiracy, no creation of fraudulent data, and no suppression of data. Essentially the climate change deniers are misinterpreting what the scientists wrote to put a malicious twist on benign things. And yes, denier is the right term for people who are promoting such a demonstrably false interpretation of the stolen emails. I might be willing to give the few climate scientists who disagree with anthropogenic global warming the benefit of the doubt, but those who are not involved in the scientific process and go against the piles of evidence and the scientific consensus are no more deserving of the descriptor "skeptic" than any of the other deniers (Holocaust deniers, evolution deniers/creationists, &c.).

This post ended up being longer than I wanted it to be—I need to get back to Doctor Who. But I have finally gotten to what I originally wanted to show you. From BBC News comes a New Zealand billboard of Joseph and Mary put up by a local church for Christmas. Yes, it was actually put up by a honest-to-FSM church.