well, both my cousin and my grandfather drove buses, so yes, I would get angry if I read a news report that reported all were safe and ignored the bus driver was killed... Like the busdriver, the Sherpas do this to make a living, because they love their families, not to get into the headlines. And this makes the death even sadder.

Well, I always attended lectures for the reasons you state. But our medical school yearbook had a photo of the class stenographer sitting alone in a huge lecture hall, with the caption: A typical class. That was 40 years ago... and in the modern "youtube" era, the advantage of a video is that you can repeat it if you miss a point. Maybe mixing video lectures with smaller discussion classes is the way of the future.

Well, it could be worse: here in the Philippines, the Europeans, especially the Italians, routinely pay ransom for kidnapped aid workers. But in the long run, if the Taliban knows you will search and rescue the worker, the aid workers will be safer. As for aid workers: it is a fine line between your work and your safety. Misjudge, and you can get killed/kidnapped etc. but leave too early and locals die. Been there, done that (and one of my friends in Africa died because she waited too long).

ah, but Professor: if you don't podcast it, those of us who like to listen to your wisdom won't get a chance to hear you speak. I live in the rural Philippines and as my aging eyes tire easily I tend to listen to podcasts to learn new things. This includes entire university level courses from some public universities (USCSD, UCLA, Stanford). Of course, eventually our cable TV will show your Rome series so not all is lost (we don't get the BBC but usually such shows are picked up by Nat Geo or DiscoveryAsia).

the Enneagram is also scientific nonsense. There is no hard evidence of it being ancient, nor is there any scientific evidence that it has scientific validity. That is why we doctors don't use it or refer to those who use it. Where is James Randi when we need him?

My medical school Diploma is in Latin, and I studied it in high school, but few schools teach it nowadays. An interesting "trivia" on the quote: The speech never delivered by President Kennedy in Dallas ended with a quote from that psalm. http://smu.edu/smunews/jfk/speechtext.asp

so will it be posted on Youtube, like the silk Road Symposium at UPennMuseum?

ironically, she is much more sympathetic to the Saudis:LINK...

I argue the same thing here...and added a quote from you as an addendum. If you object I'll remove it.

Re my previous post: I couldn't find the Mellon lectures on the Smithsonian youtube channels, but The website for the NGA is http://www.nga.gov/podcasts/index.shtm#audio not on youtube. My error.

If the lecture is being paid for by my hard earned tax dollars, then might I kindly ask if it's on line? Will it be posted on their youtube site, for example?

one of the joys of reading the daily prayer of the church was discovering Gregory's down to earth advice.

linked...and I borrowed the photo (my bandwidth), if you object let me know.

depends. Traditionally, tyrants and robber barons funded universities and other charities in their old age to persuade the deity to let them into heaven, or to make up for their bad deeds in the history books. Paying professors to be defenders of their bad deeds in public forums is not quite the same thing.

now, if they only would post it on iTunes U, or another podcast site for those of us who can't attend to learn. I am retired and live in the rural Philippines, and one of my joys is finding lectures from Berkeley, USCSD or Stanford etc. on line for free.

The answer could be on line education courses to keep these ideas on line. I download and listen to many that are on line (Itunes U etc) some very very good, and some PC which I just don't listen to. There are also good courses at the Teaching company that are too expensive for most of us who are now retired, but worth it if you can afford it.

Opus Dei does have some scary members, but the Knights of Malta aid a lot of hospitals etc. in poor countries. I ran into them when I was working as a doctor in Liberia.

and her petsmart page sells sequined skull decorated coats for your puppy.

Gee, they do have a lot of uses. I'm a doctor, and you really don't want to know why we use them.

For an estimate of what the van is worth, check the BlueBook. http://www.kbb.com/ in the US there are local papers that sell cheap stuff like used vans, or used furniture, or puppies, usually called "pennysaver" or a similar name. They are full of ads and gossip stuff (church bazaars, high school reunions) and given out free at our supermarkets. True, the people who read it tend to be blue collar workers, not the same group who buy on the internet. as for "test drive", just ask a local teenager to go along with him, preferably a football or rugby player.

ah, but how many of these children were stillborn, or died shortly after birth? Many deformed kids don't suck or live long without modern medicine. Anthropological data suggests that as starvation becomes less common, so too does infanticide, at least among those who care. For example, where I worked in Africa, often in the past the grandmothers would kill twins, (mom wouldn't have milk to feed them, so twins wasted away). Yet with better nutrition, they lived, and infanticide became rare. And one cannot assume all deformed kids were killed. Jesus "cured" a Syrophonecian woman whose child was "possessed by a devil" (probably mentally retarded with autistic behavior). Her pagan husband didn't kill her, although the feisty woman, who even told off Jesus, might have been the one to protect her kid.

Alzheimers is more than simple "aging": people with Down's get it at age 40...and often other dementias (e.g. multiinfarct dementia from hypertension) are pegged as Alzheimer's in the public's mind. But until there is a cheap and effective treatment, diagnosing it earlier seems more a way to make folks depressed. Yes, there are expensive medicines with side effects that slow down the progression of Alzheimers, but are they suggesting we docs start it early and make the drug company rich?

These scholars also portray a culture that could never be...the "original" gospels resonate with village life in today's third world, but their fantasies mirror only a Chomsky fantasy of how folks think and act. (I base this on years working in poor areas on three continents). Two: Anne Rice, who researched her books on Jesus commented that she was astonished to find most of these scholars seemed to hate Jesus...because how could you spend your life researching someone you loathed?

Hitler used to have schools promote kids to calculate the cost of caring for the retarded, brain damaged, and mentally ill. in contrast, Mother Teresa and her nuns risked death rescuing brain damaged kids when they were stranded in the midst of a battle in Lebanon we now see whose side is being pushed in the USA, and personally I am glad I live in the Philippines.

you don't have to look at the UK...the US has "socialized" medicine for the American Indians: JUst look how we had weekly panels to decide if you can get checked by a specialist or get a medicine not on our list.