Today begins Blaugust 2024, an annual blogging festival that is fun and challenging. Last year I made it halfway through August with a post every day—this year I'm aiming for 20 posts for the month. The festival aims to create and maintain a community, and so the main theme this year is for everyone to write an "introduction to me and my blog" post.

A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories. My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific reading every day, and my insatiable interest in biology meant that my recreational reading was almost exclusively about science. But I could remember how much I loved stories as a kid: Tom Sawyer , The Black Stallion , all the Roald Dahl things.

This week in the Blaugust 2023 blogging festival, the broad theme is "Introduce yourself." Yesterday I alluded to my bardolatry and its place in the cornerstone of Quintessence of Dust , but that's not really an introduction. So here is a bit more about me: I love the Star Wars universe and I'm into evolution, and both of those things are deeply connected to my main tendency—I'm a rebel.

March of 2020 seems a very long time ago. The coronavirus pandemic was roaring to life in the US, and it had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I lived and worked. I was leading an international team of editors, half of whom worked in the Cell Press office in Cambridge near the MIT campus. That month, the goal was to flatten the curve, so that our great hospitals and their heroic staffs would not be overwhelmed by COVID patients.

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

So, Quintessence of Dust is back in business. (A few days ago, I wrote about why.) Yay! Here are some soon-coming attractions. A couple are book-length projects at various stages of embryogenesis, but the rest are posts and series that represent ideas to dissect/develop and thoughts to get out in the world.

It's early January 2023, a little before sunset in Tucson. Live image below, showing the glorious Santa Catalina mountains (the snow on the upper reaches is more apparent earlier in the day) and my dinner preparations (shrimp and veggies on the grill). I've decided to start writing here at Quintessence of Dust , after another long hiatus. Here are some of my reasons.

Actually, my first post went up 3 August 2007, a little more than a year ago, but my first real article wasn't posted till 19 August, so I guess today is as good a day as any to celebrate. It's been a fun year, coinciding with my sabbatical, which ends [sniff] in 3 weeks. Once I'm back in my professor routine, I expect that my posting will be less erratic, especially since I requested a new office that's a bit removed from the beaten track.

Months ago, I was worrying about how to characterize creationist statements that are untrue or misleading. The claims in question are not merely false (mistakes of various kinds can generate falsehood) and are not statements of opinion with which I disagree. They are claims that are demonstrably false but have been asserted by people who are certain (or likely) to know this. In other words, they bear the marks of duplicity.

I'll soon post the first in a series of articles that will explain why I believe that Christians are unwise to turn to Reasons To Believe (RTB) or to other proponents of "intelligent design" for competent Christian commentary on evolutionary biology. I think it's important for Christians to reject folk science and the lack of integrity its presence implies, and my goal in creating Quintessence of Dust is to help Christians understand biology.