A few links to get the Friday morning rolling:
- News: Copernicus’s grave and remains are identified, and he is reburied in Frombork Cathedral with honors. Not news: Media accounts breathlessly declare that the Vatican is “rehabilitating” the “heretical” scientist, in “repentance for its treatment of [him] over his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun.” Even though the Church never declared him a heretic, actually encouraged him to publish his research, and gave him a Catholic burial suited to a canon at the time. Mark Shea has a full fisking of the story here.
- Want your kids to be budding Copernicuses? Let them play in the dirt.
- Forty women who identify themselves as mistresses of priests write a letter to the Vatican urging them to drop the celibacy rule.
- ‘Choose your own Jesus’: Ross Douthat points out the fatal flaw in the “historical Jesus” campaigns.
- The winners of the 2010 “Best Illusion of the Year” contest. The grand-prize winner, below, still blows my mind; no tricks here, other than the trick of perspective. You can read an explanation for how it works at the link.