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I understood it to be the part of Voldemort’s soul that he had put into Harry as a horcrux.

I think the implicit nods to Arthurian and Lord of the Rings imagery sort of cement for me the now explicit morality play and Christian allegorical style of the whole series.

As one who really came to faith by reading the Narnia books as a child, this new series will hopefully have a similar effect on new generations.

I was most taken by the explicit bible verses on the grave stones, the description of the sword as a silver cross in an icy pool of water (which then led into what I can only describe as a baptismal experience, complete with the starting of a process of sanctification.)

The clear Good Friday imagery as Harry went to his death was pretty overt.

But the most obvious Christian imagery to me was the whole “King’s Cross” Chapter (now there’s a title ‘eh?). The conversation between Harry and Dumbledore is basically the Patristic version of the Doctrine of the Atonement (ala Gregory of Nyssa).

Now that Rowling has tipped her hand to my mind as an explicit member of the Inklings, I think I understand the Pilgrim’s Progress flavor of the whole series. And why it was such an important thing that Harry played “Seeker” on the school team.

Amazing. Loved the book. Especially since it so clearly puts the whole series into the traditions of Lord of the Rings and Narnia.

Just saw this report on the NYTimes front page

BREAKING NEWS 7:27 AM ET: An Israeli government spokesman says its ground forces have entered southern Lebanon to attack Hezbollah bases.

Camino 1.0 was released today. You might see how that works for you. I tend to use it as my backup to Safari.

>>Betcha your 2.60 will be 3.00 by lunch hour.

It's 3.11 for regular in the Lehigh Valley of PA this morning - or at least it was this morning on the way in. Probably be more on my way home.

Strike that last line - should be
"The Bible says so"

(They were reading from a translation.)

According to NBC broadcast:

"The Grand Prix Priest
Israel is the Fulfillment of Prophecy
The Bible is True"
and
"The Second Coming is here"

If these planes took off minutes apart and crashed minutes apart, how come they were hundreds of miles apart?


They were probably flying in different directions when they took off.

when I see the truck stop and searches being done at the bridges and tunnels - that's high orange, I suspect I will start seeing that Monday.

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I came into NYC on a Monday afternoon about two weeks ago - every bus and truck going through the Holland tunnel was being stopped and inspected - so I'm guessing that's already been happening for a while now.

Over 65,300. Hobbit Hole II apparently is spun out to be the longest thread that the server can handle. It's up to the 4th generation of Hobbit Hole threads now - in total it's probably getting close to 100,000 posts.

Checking in from Bethlehem PA - we had lots of trees down, and large parts of the region are without power.

According to the police - the Utility company isn't even answering its phone at the moment.

My place came through pretty well - since we had only about two inches of rain and relatively low wind gusts (>50 mph). I did have a big tree in the back shear off and almost hit the power lines coming into the house. Luckily it just missed (though it was leaning against this morning when I pushed it off), and I've been able to clean up the yard enough so that nothing else is going bring down wires. Glad nothing hit the main power lines.

Other than that it's been pretty uneventful up this way.

Whoops - missed that. That's what comes of trying to read too many things at once and listen to the TV and scanner.

From the same weather web-board (storm2k.org):

Haven't been able to read the boards to see if this has made it up but there is basically catastrophic flooding from the storm in Pamlico, Craven, and Carteret Counties. The national guard is currently trying to rescue about 100 people near Harlow that are stranded and at least 40 homes in the area are either flooded, destroyed, or gone. Pamlico doesn't sound much better. In Carteret you really can't get to the eastern half of the county at the moment because of the water. In Atlantic there are currently 200 homes surrounded by water and rescue efforts are ongoing. Evidently the water is so high that the sub division on the other side of the highway where I live has been flooded by North River. Its only supposed to get worse tommorow because the waters not going anywhere. Just wanted to update you all because it didn't seem to make the national news.

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Sounds like people are still accessing the damage down in NC.

Here in NE PA we've got many trees down already and power crews doing triage on arcing lines. I'm listening to the local police scanner and hearing more and more reports of roads closed and lines down.

We still have power, but I don't expect to have it in the morning. Luckily there's been little rain. It looks like it's going to be a lot worse out in the middle of the state.

"Can anyone recommend a good radio to get for situations like this? I'll be stocking up on supplies this evening."

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I have one of the freeplay radios. The small ones are convenient and can be recharged by cranking them. Coleman makes a version for the US market. You might be able to find them at a camping store.

Radio shack sells small AM/FM/Weather band radios. Those are your best bet - because you'll really want the weather band info.

The only time I've ever seen the ground this saturated in PA was back in '72 just before Agnes hit. If this storm behaves anything like Agnes did - with huge amounts of rain falling into the Susquehanna Valley - we're going to be a lot of trouble again.

My parish is a Red Cross Disaster Center as well as running a Soup Kitchen that feeds 100-150 people a day. We're starting to make plans and double checking that we have all the supplies that we need.

"Our ground is so saturated it is unreal. As a result I'm sure downed trees and pretty good flooding will be major concerns even with mild wind and heavy rain."

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We've got the same situation here in Eastern PA. The ground is so wet that the rain overnight has caused running water to start flooding the streets in my development - something I've never seen before. If we get much more rain, we're likely to be in a world of hurt.

I splurged on a gas powered Chainsaw yesterday at HomeDepot. With the big mature tree I have in my backyard, and the wet ground, any wind and I'm going to be having problems.

Re: a preferred direction in spacetime...

That's the problem. According to Relativity, there can be no preferred frame of reference. My "up" is no more valid than your "up". If electrostatic charges were to setup some sort of spin - then that would have to be spin around an axis. But given the spherical symmetry of the situation, how would the charge be able to pick an axis out all the possible choices?

My argument is similar to a question once posed to me by my thesis advisor - "Why is it that the Laplace operator shows up so often in physics?" A: Because it's the simplest rotationaly invariant operator - the simplest way to ensure there's no prefered direction in the Universe.

For this result to be true (and it might be for all I know) we'll have to toss out most of our understanding of classical physics - but then replace it with something that gives exactly the same results in most cases, but now includes this unexpected result. You'd have to toss out most of classical physics (and Quantum mechanics as well since it has the Laplace operator in the Schroedinger equation as well.)

I guess it just seems to me that there's too much beauty in the symmetry arguments of classical physics to do such a thing.

(Of course I'll bet Ptolomey felt the same way about the geo-centric universe. Grin.)

On a quick read:

Basic understanding of the Electric force says that it simply has a radial component - no angular dependence. (It only pushes or pulls along the line separating the two charges.)

This result would seem to indictate that there is a (as yet unknown) component of electricity which causes things to want to rotate around some axis as well.

My gut feeling is to be pretty sceptical. My first objection is a symetry objection - how would the charge be able to decide which axis to rotate around? There would have to be some prefered directionality in space-time for this to be true, and that's not observed in other places.

On the other hand, we have no idea why electron's exhibit magnetic moments and have an associated "spin". If there is some effect like this - then the electron (and proton) spin might necessarily follow.

(Interesting side note - neutrons have spin and yet are electrically neutral. I've seen this attributed to the magnetic moments of the constituent quarks - I wonder if there's a way to test the new model via this mechanism?)

Ah well - I think I'll wait for other verification. If true this is certainly unexpected.

Well, I just heard on Fox that the Iraqis are claiming that the U.S. is stopping trucks of "aid" from Syria to Iraq. That's a hint.

Cool! Extra stuff for us! And they deliver too!

Seriously - I can't imagine they're foolish enough to actually be wasting material that way. It's a scheme designed to let their people think that Syria hasn't abandoned the people of Iraq.