Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The Six States of Matter?
Last week, we held a medieval-style disputation in my theology classes to introduce Thomas Aquinas and the Summa Theologia [NOTE TO STUDENTS READING THIS POST: do not cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source!]. To keep the assignment fun, we debated the shape of the earth. One group who presented arguments in favor of a flat earth surprised me by referring to "the six states of matter." I say "surprised" because I thought I'd done rather well keeping up with developments in the sciences since I changed majors many years ago, and I could only name four. The students told me that the other two states are "Bose-Einstein condensates" and "solar filament." I did a little (very lazy) online research, and found out that these substances--as well as several others--have been proposed as additional states of matter (actually, I couldn't find anything that referred to a solar filament as a state of matter). Who knew? I guess I'm a little further out of the loop than I thought...
Friday, March 26, 2010
The What?
I've said for over a year now that if I ever started a blog, I would call it "The Anglo-Saxon Anonymous." Now that I've gone and done it, I probably need to explain my choice of title. =)
I'm studying church history at The Catholic University of America, with a focus on the church in the British Isles from about the late 4th century through the early 8th century. That's the period in which the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms predominated. One of the academic societies I've been involved with is the Charles Homer Haskins Society (http://www.haskins.cornell.edu/), which focuses on Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Viking, and Angevin history. Their newsletter is The Norman Anonymous, named for a famous and prolific but otherwise unidentified chronicler of Norman history. So it's a "history geek" joke. There were many anonymous Anglo-Saxon authors, too, so I thought, "Why not keep the tradition alive and name my blog for them?" Well, why not?
I have many interests, a warped sense of humor, and a generally cynical way of looking at the world, so expect anything!
I'm studying church history at The Catholic University of America, with a focus on the church in the British Isles from about the late 4th century through the early 8th century. That's the period in which the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms predominated. One of the academic societies I've been involved with is the Charles Homer Haskins Society (http://www.haskins.cornell.edu/), which focuses on Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Viking, and Angevin history. Their newsletter is The Norman Anonymous, named for a famous and prolific but otherwise unidentified chronicler of Norman history. So it's a "history geek" joke. There were many anonymous Anglo-Saxon authors, too, so I thought, "Why not keep the tradition alive and name my blog for them?" Well, why not?
I have many interests, a warped sense of humor, and a generally cynical way of looking at the world, so expect anything!
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