Thinking about a commenter on another blog I read, a fellow so aggressively obtuse he could piss off Mother Teresa. Rather than post this there, where he can whine that I’m being unfair to poor, poor him, I’m putting it here:
I think all of us know intuitively that every conversation (or relationship) contains an unstated agreement something like “Allow me some of your time and attention, and I’ll deal with you fairly.”
Do you know about this site? Lynda.com offers video tutorials on a LOT of different software. They have thousands of videos on just about everything I’ve wanted to know, and you get unlimited access to ALL of it for just $25 a month (less if you get a full year membership).
Over the past six months or so, I’ve been a subscriber and have worked through lessons on e-commerce and creating online shopping carts, lessons on Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, PHP, and more. They’ve been immensely helpful.
Maybe it seems odd that I’d be advertising this commercial service, but when I find something cool, I like to share it.
Lynda rocks.
Ben Stein, actor and, uh — I almost said comedian, but he’s not that funny — former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and former speechwriter for President Nixon, is turning out to be a serious nutcase.
And I don’t mean “lovable nutcase,” like dear old Aunt Clara from Bewitched who collected doorknobs. I mean malignant, nasty SOB nutcase, an enemy, in his own way, to core American values.
I know whenever you hear “American values” you automatically think of family-related stuff, like raising your kids right and staying married to the same woman (or man). Saying the Pledge and honoring the soldiers, eating watermelon at the county fair.
But science is a core American value too, one that stretches back to before the founding of the nation. Ben Franklin is known as a scientist, for instance. Thomas Jefferson is less known as an experimentalist but was no less a rigorous rationalist and scientific thinker. Wilbur and Orville Wright are quintessential American heroes.
I’m carrying on a mostly-cordial argument over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable with a fellow named Michael M, an Objectivist and admirer of Ayn Rand.
I’ve been an admirer of Ayn Rand too – I think she was brilliant in the extreme – but I don’t revere her, as some people surely do. Some things, in my opinion, she simply got wrong.
This is my most recent answer to one of Michael’s points, that humans have reason and free will whereas animals have nothing but instincts.
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Okay, this is absolutely, positively my last 2,000 words on the subject. 🙂
Seriously, one of the problems with replying to the arguments of a, for instance, anti-evolution type, is that they can pop out with a single sentence that contains three major mistakes, each of which can take pages to explain and correct.
So I’m focusing again on a single issue:
I’m curious about who reads here.
Outside the few regular commenters, mostly familiar to me, there seem to be a number of lurkers who read only, and the stats detail on my server identifies the places they’re from. Some of them seem distant and unexpected.
So: Who’s from Great Britain? Germany? Austria? France? Spain? Portugal? Belgium? Italy? Who’s here from the Emerald Isle?
Hungary? The Netherlands? Poland?
Sweden? Norway? Denmark? Finland?
G’day mate, and who’s here from Australia? And who’s from New Zealand?
South Africa? Hong Kong? Japan? India? Israel?
Canada? Brazil? Mexico? Chile?
South Korea? Latvia? United Arab Emirates? China?
The Russian Federation? Romania? Slovenia??
Love to hear from you. Take a minute to say hello!
And those of you in the States, give me a shout and tell me what state you’re in.
Everything is deep. Everything.
The simplest thing you can imagine – a grain of sand, or the fact that you have five toes on each foot – is filled with unimaginable complexities.
Even something as simple as sunlight, taken for granted for thousands of years by humans, turned out, once someone invented the prism, to be a mix of colored light. Strange to think that when you look into a bright white light, you’re also looking into a bright blue light. And a bright red light. A bright yellow light, and so on. But you are.
Light is deep, and so is everything else.
Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage. This is, after all, the origin-place of evangelist Billy Graham and the home of the globally evangelistic Billy Graham Center.
It’s also the place that made national headlines on Feb. 20, 2003, when it lifted its then 143 year-old ban on student dancing. (Whoa! Next thing you know, they’ll be apologizing to Galileo.)
It would be weird to work or go to school in such a place, don’t you think? And yet some choose it, you have to believe deliberately. It does have a pretty respectable academic history.
Here’s a young man (I guess; he kept his identity a secret) who became an atheist halfway through his college years at Wheaton (he just graduated in December), and chronicled the journey in a blog called “Leaving Eden.”
Nov. 29, 2007: “Now is the time when all of my final papers and projects are due, all of which must be from a Christian perspective. Before I started I thought, no big deal, I know what the Christian perspective is, and anyway it’ll be kind of fun using words that I haven’t used in a long time, like sanctification, eschatology, spiritual discipline– not to mention the whole language of Wheaton evangelicalism that I worked so hard to become fluent in. / But man, it sucks. It actually makes me feel a little bit ill to have to do this.”
[Afternote: I looked up the history of Crayola on Wikipedia, and I’ve misremembered some of this. The 96-box came along well after I was in first grade. It was the 64-box I recall. I’ll correct it in a day or so. Meanwhile, here’s the original piece.]
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You ever have the experience of finding something in your head you didn’t know was there?
I just had one of those moments. I’m not totally surprised to find it there — it’s based on a memory, after all. But it’s a leftover from, oh, about the age of 5 or so, and at my current age of 55, it’s just curious to find it still in there somewhere.
It has to do with how I felt about Crayola crayons. And the memory bubbled up at this bit on the ColourLovers site: All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts.
You remember when you were a kid how much you loved your Crayolas? You could do anything with those great colors. I wasn’t much of an artist when it came to creating original works on blank coloring paper, but I was pretty good at picking realistic colors to fill in pictures in coloring books.
A few years back, I tried to winkle out what it really means to apologize, and I worked out that – to me, at least – an apology has at least four parts.
1) You admit you did something wrong.
2) You show that you understand what it was.
Which means, you explain to the person injured just how you think you injured them. Ideally, you attempt to understand and describe how THEY feel you injured them. Part of this demonstration of understanding is that you visibly attempt to match the scale of the original injury with the scale of the apology. In other words, you don’t just say “Hey, my bad,” after you run over somebody’s head with your car.
3) You promise to try very hard not to do it again, ever.
4) You make an effort to fix what you broke.
Continue reading “An unfortunately long post about a small but annoying event”
Ugh. This article bubbled to the top pages of Digg today. I’d known about it before, but found it freshly disturbing upon reading it again. From the Times Online:
Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.
His book, The Language of God, to be published in [July, 2006], will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.
“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”
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