Yearly Archives: 2010

D’Souza Defends Christianity at OU

Staff Report

New York Times bestselling author, conservative scholar, college president, Christian apologist, and public intellectual Dinesh D’Souza will speak in a free public lecture at the University of Oklahoma this Wednesday evening, December 1, 2010. The title of D’Souza’s address is: The God Decision: Delusion, Confusion or Truth?

D’Souza, who earlier this year was named president of The King’s
College, a Christian college located in the Empire State Building in New
York City, will make a reasoned and thoughtful defense of orthodox
Christianity and challenge the so-called “New Atheism” in the general
culture and on the O.U. campus.

The “New Atheism” is an increasingly popular worldview promoted by well-known intellectuals including, Sir Richard Dawkins (who spoke at O.U. in March 2009), Christopher Hitchens, Dr. Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris — the so-called “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.” This belief system is essentially an embrace of scientific and philosophical Naturalism and a rejection of widespread Christian thought and theism that has existed in North America for 400 years.

D’Souza will speak to students, adults, and faculty at 8 p.m. in the Oklahoma Memorial Union Ballroom, 900 Asp Avenue, on the Norman campus. Following his remarks, he will engage in a Q & A session with audience members. This is a free public event. Earlier that afternoon, at 3 p.m., D’Souza will also visit the Credo House of Theology, 109 N.W. 142nd Street (west of Santa Fe), Suite B, in Edmond.

“We’re hoping that lots of people will come hear Dinesh D’Souza on Dec. 1,” said Mike Jestes, executive director of the Oklahoma Family Policy Council, one of the sponsors of D’Souza’s appearance. “Whether one is committed religious, strongly nonreligious, or undecided — a D’Souza fan or critic — all Oklahomans will benefit by a night of exposure to Dinesh’s keen mind, razor-sharp wit and entertaining style,” Jestes said.

Prior to his recent appointment, D’Souza, a native of India, had a distinguished 25-year career as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. A former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, D’Souza also served as John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Over the past 20 years, he has also appeared as a speaker or debater at hundreds of colleges and universities.

Among D’Souza’s many best-selling and controversial books are Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, The Virtue of Prosperity, What’s So Great About America, What’s So Great About Christianity, Life After Death: The Evidence, and his most recent work, The Roots of Obama’s Rage. (Previous Tulsa Today story click here.)

D’Souza’s appearance at O.U. is sponsored by an ad hoc coalition of private individuals and state-based organizations, including Bott Radio Network Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Family Policy Council, The Wilberforce Initiative and the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

Unstoppable runs away with it.

Human error. We’re all guilty of it. Why? Well, we’re human, but it’s one thing to not tie your kid’s kites string correctly to see it blow away in the breeze, and it’s quite another when innocent lives are at stake.

Such is the premise of Unstoppable, a new movie starring Academy Award Winner Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, who was last featured in 2009’s Star Trek as the legendary Captain James T. Kirk. The movie focuses on two railroad workers, an experienced engineer named Frank Barnes (Washington) and a rookie conductor named Will Colson (Pine).

Little information is given about the main character except for the fact that Colson is in a battle with an ex-wife, who has filed a protective order against him, preventing him from seeing her or his son. Barnes is the wizened old veteran of the railroad, who takes Colson under his wing and is the mentor despite Colson being ostracized by his co-workers who don’t respect him because he allegedly got his job because of his family connections in the railroad workers union.

While that is going on, rail yard workers are preparing to get a line of cars ready to hook up to Barnes’ locomotive for the days run. In the process of doing so, a worker fails to connect an air hose, which evidently allows the engineer to applied the air brakes not only to the locomotive, but the cars as well. The yard bird is distracted by a moving car on another track and he hops off the locomotive and accidentally trips the throttle, staring the engine down the track, unmanned. So begins the impending catastrophe, and the main characters efforts to stop it.

The movie is directed by Tony Scott, who’s most famous film is 1986’s Top Gun and other blockbusters from the Jerry Bruckheimer stable. Scott knows how to film an action movie and moreover, is really good at developing his main characters. The relationship between Washington and Pine is much in the vein of Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies with the back and forth banter between them, along with the obligatory action elements as well.

The movie is billed that it was inspired from a true story. That story is about an engineer who in 2001 hopped off a train in Ohio after thinking he had set the locomotive’s brakes and it went off on a 60+ mile journey across the state at a low speed. In Unstoppable to make it more entertaining it stands to reason that those elements were exaggerated which makes sense. Still the thought of it happening was a tad unnerving.

Visually this movie is filled with the car-crunching collisions and explosions, and as exciting as that was for the guy in me, since 1993’s The Fugitive they lacked a certain realism to me. Luckily though, it is but a small drawback to an otherwise excellent action thriller motion picture and a good opening movie for the coming holiday movie season.

Milky Way gas bubbles discovered

NASA Report

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don’t fully understand their nature or origin."

The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old. A paper about the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Finkbeiner and his team discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT is the most sensitive and highest-resolution gamma-ray detector ever launched. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light.

Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn’t detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky. The fog happens when particles moving near the speed of light interact with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. The LAT team constantly refines models to uncover new gamma-ray sources obscured by this so-called diffuse emission. By using various estimates of the fog, Finkbeiner and his colleagues were able to isolate it from the LAT data and unveil the giant bubbles.

Scientists now are conducting more analyses to better understand how the never-before-seen structure was formed. The bubble emissions are much more energetic than the gamma-ray fog seen elsewhere in the Milky Way. The bubbles also appear to have well-defined edges. The structure’s shape and emissions suggest it was formed as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release – the source of which remains a mystery.

One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way’s black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way’s center several million years ago.

"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."

Hints of the bubbles appear in earlier spacecraft data. X-ray observations from the German-led Roentgen Satellite suggested subtle evidence for bubble edges close to the galactic center, or in the same orientation as the Milky Way. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe detected an excess of radio signals at the position of the gamma-ray bubbles.

The Fermi LAT team also revealed Tuesday the instrument’s best picture of the gamma-ray sky, the result of two years of data collection.

"Fermi scans the entire sky every three hours, and as the mission continues and our exposure deepens, we see the extreme universe in progressively greater detail," said Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA’s Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

"Since its launch in June 2008, Fermi repeatedly has proven itself to be a frontier facility, giving us new insights ranging from the nature of space-time to the first observations of a gamma-ray nova," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These latest discoveries continue to demonstrate Fermi’s outstanding performance.”

For more information about Fermi, click here.

Tulsa chills the Icemen 6-3

Rich Lohman

Exceptional special teams help the Oilers win big in Indiana.

EVANSVILLE, IN.– The Tulsa Oilers know how to win again.

For weeks, the comments from head coach Bruce Ramsay have leaned toward how good his teams were, but it seemed that with all their talent they had found a way to lose games and seeing several decent leads turn into multiple goal losses reinforced that statement.

Then, just like that, recently they managed to win a game. Then two in a row. They stumbled short of a third in a row last night against the Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs, and then it was on the bus for the long trip to Evansville, Indiana to meet one of the former IHL teams, the Evansville Icemen.

The Icemen came into the game with an 8-7-1 record in the CHL’s Turner Conference. Their leading scorer is center Nicklas Lindberg, he has 5 goals and 18 assists for 23 points in 17 games for Evansville. The Icemen inhabit the low middle of the Berry Conference, in a tie for 5^th place with the Bloomington Prairie Thunder. They lost on Friday to the Fort Wayne Komets and in the last five games they have 3 wins and 2 losses.

The Oilers opened the scoring at 6:04 of the first with Harrison Reed scoring off assists from Jack Combs and Chad Costello. Evansville would answer at 11:27 on a goal by John Dipace assisted by Damien Surma and Joe Grimaldi.

In the second period, the Reed-Combs-Costello combination would strike again, this time Jack Combs would do the lamp lighting behind Icemen goalie Matt Lundin at 4:31. Sean Erickson would add to Tulsa’s lead with a goal assisted by Combs and Reed at 12:35. Lee Zalansky would solve Oilers goalie Ian Keserich for the second time with a goal at 15:44 assisted by Mark Cody and Chris Capanale. Derek Eastman added a power play goal for the Oilers to close the period at 19:20 assisted by Erickson and Mike Beausoleil.

The Icemen chimed in with a power play goal 4:26 into the third period assisted by Dipace and Lindberg, then the Oilers would respond with a power play goal by Gary Steffes at 10:18 assisted by Gordon Bell and Derek Hulak, and a shorthanded goal by Harrison Reed, his second goal of the night, at 19:42 assisted by Bell and RJ Linder.

It was a decent recovery game for Tulsa, who had a major dose of reality in the BOK Center the night before in losing to the Mudbugs 6-2. In all the Oilers posted three special teams marks against Evansville, two goals on the power play and the Reed shorthander to close the game. The Oilers posted 39 shots and went 2-for-5 on the power play. Ian Keserich battled back after being pulled in the middle of the game at home in Tulsa on Saturday to post 35 saves of 38 shots. Evansville goalie Lundin recorded 32 saves of 38 shots and the Icemen went 1-for-8 on the power play.

The win lifts the Oilers to 6-12-1 and 13 points in 19 games, good enough to pull even with the Odessa Jackalopes who have a 6-10-1 record but have played two fewer games that Tulsa has.

The Oilers are back in action at home next Friday, December 3^rd at 7:35pm against the Mississippi Riverkings in the BOK Center, then on Saturday the 4^th , they will face the Missouri Mavericks. Tickets for all Oiler games are available a the BOK Box Office, Tickets.com, Tulsa area Reasor’s stores, and by calling 1-866-7BOK-CTR (866-725-5287). More information is available by calling the Oilers office at 918-632-PUCK (7825).

66ers drop home opener to Energy, 123-111

alt The Tulsa 66ers were in control for most of the first half, but the Iowa Energy capitalized on 67-point second half to spoil Tulsa’s home opener during a high-scoring contest before 2,871 fans on Friday night at the Tulsa Convention Center. Iowa’s Othyus Jeffers poured in 32 points to lead all scorers as the Energy improved to 4-0. Larry Owens and Zabian Dowdell paced Tulsa with 22 points each as the 66ers fell to 1-2.

Former 66er Kyle Weaver added 20 points in his return to Tulsa as the Energy saw five players score in double figures. New Orleans Hornets first-round draft pick Cole Aldrich had eight points and four rebounds for Tulsa in 25-minutes of playing time. Aldrich, a standout at the University of Kansas, was acquired by the Oklahoma City Thunder in a draft night trade. He was assigned to the 66ers by the Thunder earlier this week.

Tulsa, trailing by five with less than three minutes remaining in the opening quarter, used a 10-2 run to take a 29-26 lead into the first break. Owens was on fire early, as he led Tulsa with eight first quarter points.

Robert Vaden took over in the second quarter, as his 10 points helped the 66ers open up an 11-point lead before the Energy pulled back within six at the half. Tulsa’s 62-points were the most the team has scored in a half this season. The 66ers boasted four double-digit scorers at the half.

The tables would turn in the second half of the game, as the veteran-heavy Energy chipped away at the 66ers lead, using an 11-2 run through the middle of the third to take a five-point lead at the 6:22 mark. The two squads then traded the lead six times before the quarter ended with Iowa on top 92-89.

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Photos by: Kevin Pyle

A 7-2 run to open the final quarter would prove to be all the distance the Energy would need to secure the win. The 66ers would pull back within six on a pair of Tweety Carter free throws at the 9:33 mark of the fourth, but that would be as close as they could get as Iowa went on to out-score Tulsa 31-22 to remain undefeated.

The 66ers will play host to the Energy again tonight at the Convention Center with tip-off scheduled for 7 p.m.