Current Affairs
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Or maybe it should be mongoose and cobra: here's a liberal who can't believe her best friend is a Republican. It's a somewhat encouraging story, but what strikes me as most significant about it is that this should be considered a big deal. Not that I'm surprised that it is; the comments on the piece are…
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From the fellow who does the xkcd comic, a chart putting the reported radiation levels at Fukushima in perspective. If you have trouble interpreting the chart or don't want to bother, here's a fact: everybody, every day, receives a small dose of radiation from natural sources, and the additional radiation measured at many places in the…
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I have been trying to follow what's going on at the crippled Japanese nuclear plant, but it's very difficult because the press is being so hysterical. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to look at the Drudge Report again (yes, I still have the habit of checking it several times a day–I mean, it…
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Sunday Night Journal — February 13, 2011 It’s probably an indication of just how deeply materialism has been adopted by educated and partly-educated people that the ideas of Ray Kurzweil are generally accepted as fundamentally plausible, even if not as close to becoming reality as Kurzweil and others insist. In a nutshell, Kurzweil believes that…
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Anyone who's been anywhere near higher ed in recent years knows that standards are declining, in general, though I think (think) that the good and conscientious students and teachers are still doing good work on each side of the relationship. Here is an interesting report confirming what is pretty apparent. The problem is complex but one…
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Dr. Ed Dyas, RIP Almost twenty years ago, in late 1991, I developed severe back problems that eventually made it hard for me to stand up for more than a few minutes at a time, and resulted in my having surgery on Mardi Gras of 1992. The surgeon was Dr. Ed Dyas. As far as…
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Bravo, Mr. President.
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I don't talk much here about current events, but I want to register my objection to the hideous attempt to exploit the killings in Arizona for political gain. It's hard to tell how much of this is just partisan hysteria and blindness, and how much is calculated, and it doesn't really matter: it's repulsive. I could…
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Sunday Night Journal — January 2, 2011 Here I am, writing on the second day of a year which would once have seemed impossibly far in the future to me, and which I would have expected to be a very different place, more “futuristic” in what is now itself an antique sense of that word.…
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This time from Dave Barry, so no exclamation mark–Dave Barry would not want me to give the impression that he expects the year actually to be happy.
Light On Dark Water 