Recently, I went to a local service organization to observe some kids with autistic spectrum disorders. For the most part, I didn't interact much with the kids; although in one instance, a little girl with bright eyes and a toothy smile stared at me from across the room. With a grin and unwavering eye contact, she maneuvered over to where I was sitting on the floor and then thrust her nose about an inch from mine. She grabbed my face with both her hands and exclaimed, "Aaaaahhhhh baaaaaaahhhhh!"

I was intrigued. I had no idea if this was typical behavior for her, if it was great that she was trying to initiate an interaction, or if it was inappropriate social behavior that she wasn't supposed to be engaging in. Nobody was telling her to stop, so I said, "Hi!" She repeated, more insistently this time, "Aaaaahhhhh baaaaaaahhhhh!!!" I didn't respond, and she let go of my face but continued to stare insistently into my eyes. When her mom finally dragged her away, I said "Bye!" To which she responded, "Aaaaahhhhh baaaaaaahhhhh?" I'll always wonder what she wanted.

As part of my duties at the university, I work for a few hours a week for a lab in the department. My lab is a pretty large one: it's run by a professor who is very interested in research, so we have lots of projects going on and lots of graduate students who are involved in running things. Every week, we all meet for an hour to discuss how things are going with our various projects. Lately, the professor has been assigning articles for us to read at home so that we can talk about them during the meetings and think about their implications for our experiments.

I take my duties pretty seriously, so I always take the time to do the assigned readings, ever so tedious as they may be. Most of my labmates do not necessarily have the same outlook. They usually ask me to summarize the articles for them before our meetings. And I do. Because if I don't, we'll have nothing to talk about during the meeting, and it will be super boring and awkward.

Last week when we were talking about the articles, the supervising professor was tiptoeing around things, acting as if he hadn't read them either. Later he said flat out, "I didn't actually get around to reading this article this week. I had a lot going on. Could someone summarize it for me?" As you might have guessed, all heads turned expectantly in my direction. As it turns out, one is the loneliest number.

I feel like I should be getting a bump in pay.

I was thinking the other day about 'supernatural' events. Scientists and those in the academic world have a real problem with some of the claims of Christianity, namely those that require a violation of a natural law. So for example, if I were to claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, they would say that such an event is impossible according to scientific laws and therefore didn't happen.

What I realized is that all natural laws are based entirely on observation of events. We know that objects on earth fall to the ground at 9.8 m/sec squared because every time we get out our measuring devices and start watching objects fall to the ground, they always seem to fall at that speed. In other words, a law is a law because we've never observed any violation of the law. If we were to reliably observe some violation, say an object that consistently falls at 100 m/sec squared, then we would have to rethink our law.

And this wouldn't be a problem; this happens in science with some regularity: new information leads to changes in laws or to changes in they way we think about the natural world. No one had observed bacteria in the time of Louis Pasteur, and some people ridiculed him for his insistence that 'invisible' creatures (he couldn't see the bacteria) were polluting things. However, once he found tangible evidence of microorganisms, his detractors had to rethink the nature of disease.

I think you can see the problem with claims against Christian belief in 'supernatural' events. Jesus was raised from the dead you say? We've never observed anything like that before. It must not have happened. There are germs contaminating our milk you say? We've never observed anything like that before. It must not be happening.

You can feel free to drink all the unpasteurized milk you want, but I'm going to go ahead and assert that, until we've been able to observe everything in the universe for all of time, scientific laws are always going to be subject to change, and it's always going to remain a scientific possibility that Christ was raised from the dead.

Bruce Springsteen is coming to town for an Obama rally, and students, faculty, and staff at my university are eligible for free tickets. The students don't seem very excited about it, but the *ahem* 'mature' ladies I work with at the counseling center are ridiculously giddy. On Thursday, a bunch of people left in the middle of work to go down to the box office to pick up their free tickets. I'm not going to the concert, but someone asked if I would come down as well--so she could have my ticket. We were waiting for the ticket window to open when I observed the following interaction between a 30-ish female cowoker and a young male student who happened to be walking through.

Student: What's with this line?
Coworker: The Boss is coming!
Student: The who?
Coworker: (Incredulous look) The Boss. Bruce Springsteen. He's giving a concert!
Student: Bruce who?
Coworker: (Dejected look) Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen.
Student: Oh! Is he that old guy who plays acoustic guitar?

Everyone gets old sometime. Today just happened to be her day.

I was prepping a class for a quiz yesterday, and I was just about to pass it out when I was interrupted in the middle of, "So if there are no more questions..."

Student: I wasn't here last week, what should I do?
Me: (dumbfounded silence)
Student: (dumbfounded silence)
Me: Well, you have two options: (a) take the quiz, or (b) don't take the quiz. Best case scenario, you get 100%. Worst case scenario you get 0%. If you don't take the quiz, you automatically get a zero, so taking the quiz would probably be helpful.
Student: (thinking about what to do)
Me: (dumbfounded silence)
Student: I guess I'll take the quiz.

Not everyone should go to college.