Great Lecture by Dr. Kenneth Miller

I attended his lecture, entitled “Darwin, God, and Design: America’s Continuing Problem with Evolution". His basic premise was that science and religion need not be at odds - a feeling I share. He expressed himself very well and was entertaining to boot! He has even been on the Colbert Report - twice! I had ordered two of his books and had hoped to have him sign them but they didn't come in. His books sound as if they are nearly identical to my masters thesis idea which I thought was pretty unique up until recently. Of course, I'm sure he's covered the ground much better than I ever will but my thesis is not just focused on cosmology and religion and really has more to do with my personal spiritual journey.

I was impressed with his gracious handling of a presumed fundamentalist who asked basically [paraphrased] "who he thought he was trying to use his finite mind to understand the infinite." He answered he was just a fallible human being trying to answer the same questions everyone was trying to answer while being well aware of his limitations.

I couldn't possibly do his lecture justice in a blog entry so please click the links.

I came across this Google ad in my mail: http://www.byki.com/

So, I gave them my junk mail email address and they started sending me lessons.  I started with the flash cards - easy!  "I know these!"  Then they started presenting them backwards, giving me English and asking for  Russian in multiple choice (I think).  Neat.  "I can do this."  Then
came the hard part: Type your answer in Russian.  I thought I had it right but left off the soft sign - WRONG!  Man!  Some of these Russian words are hard to spell!  (They give you a little Russian keyboard on the screen).  By the time you learn to spell these - you ought to have them down cold!

So I bought it.  I haven't used Rosetta Stone but this was a fraction of the cost so I'm going to say it's a pretty good value.  You can really manipulate the lessons and they way they are presented.  Incidentally, I also recently purchased Berlitz Ear Worms (I know - ewww!) and moved to my MP3 player.  Byki had podcasts too.  Tons of them!  I was shocked at how many podcasts there were!!  They already had a lot more content than most beginner language series.  It's an amazing value - and very portable.  I wish this was one of those sites I could profit off of sharing ideas like that!  :-)