Maybe even more than scientific thinking, scientists desperately want the public to appreciate and be engaged with science and technology. Which makes me wonder why we brand people as “anti-science” when they don’t believe in evolution. We almost certainly will not convince creationists to change their beliefs. Attacking them for disagreeing with a single theory makes it harder to engage them in fields outside biology. Given how much we care about public engagement, we must tread carefully here. It doesn’t mean that evolution is not important (it is), or that it should be avoided (it shouldn’t). But a strident, narrow defense of evolution may undermine scientific literacy writ-large. We may detract from our own goals and marginalize people we want to reach. Do we really want to tell people that they are unwelcome in physics and chemistry if they don’t believe in evolution? And do we have to do it so angrily? In evolution and in politics, I wish we could all just try a little tenderness. This with-us-or-against-us mentality does not serve any noble purpose. Dick Cheney should not be our role model.
Anonymously calling someone a coward is the height of self-parody and the pit of self-awareness. Each of these [NFL] personnel men feel perfectly comfortable attacking the mental strength of Jonathan Martin. Not a single one of them is willing to put their name on it. That is because none of them wants to deal with the pain of embarrassing themselves, their organization and the league, nor the pain that might attend their careers.Calling for others to endure pain in one breath, while you duck it in the next is a particularly loathsome form of cowardice. The men who call on Martin to fight Incognito in the locker-room, are also the same men who would ruthlessly cut Martin or Incognito should either be injured in any way that jeopardizes the team’s plans. Perhaps one of these braggarts actually would “go down swinging.” But “down” does not have the same meaning for a general manager as it does for a left tackle. Jeff Ireland can report to work with a broken arm. Jonathan Martin not so much.
The point here is power. As demonstrated by Trotter’s column, Martin has risked his career and millions of dollars by exposing Incognito. There’s a solid argument that Martin’s actions were “brave.” It just isn’t the kind of “brave” immediately empowers the NFL. On the contrary, it’s the kind that threatens it.
[gallery] Gregory and his scribes (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 10th century).
The teacher is justified to lead students only if he is and remains a student.
Frankly, the quality of safety provision for students at Hogwarts is totally unacceptable. Despite having a highly qualified, capable and over-worked school nurse, many severe and significant injuries have occured in recent years. The main sport played by the school, entirely internally, is incredibly dangerous and should be reviewed by the HSE immediately. Several injuries from wildlife have occured in recent months, with trees and large flying animals usually to blame - these hazards are not successfully monitored or kept safe by any member of staff other than the groundsman. This kind of Health and Safety brief is not usually in the remit of a groundskeeper, and it is our recommendation that more staff are drafted in to help with this task. There have been several deaths in recent years, all on site. The recent loss of the previous headteacher was a severe blow to the school’s reputation, and many parents have removed their children from the premises. The headmaster’s death went entirely unexplained, though rumours that a pupil murdered him are almost certainly hyperbole. The death of a Year 12 student during an international competition was also kept from the newspapers, and the effects are still being felt across the school. This summer, the school was disrupted by riots and pitched battles between rival sectors of the community. Whether the school was an incidental victim of this outburst of aggression, or an active part of it, is unknown to the inspectors. Siginificant damage was wreaked on the school buildings, with certain wings now closed for repairs. In short, at present Hogwarts is a very unsafe environment for all students and staff.
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But more to the point, “The Circle” doesn’t read like a novel whose author immersed himself in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life in Silicon Valley. It reads like a novel whose author deeply dislikes current modes of online social interaction, and constructed a narrative to deliver that antipathy as harshly as possible. In “The Boy Kings of Silicon Valley,” Losse contributes something very different — a nuanced, closely observed look at the real lives of hackers and the tools they create that tells us more about what Facebook is like than any other book on the company has yet achieved. If Eggers had truly plagiarized Losse, he might have written a better book, the great Silicon Valley/American novel that we’ve all been waiting for.Because to stand athwart history and cry “Stop” is never enough, something that the inheritors of William Buckley’s legacy have so obviously failed to learn. We’re going to continue tumbling forward, and if we have any hope of steering in the right direction, we need to know more than just why everything is so bad and awful and dangerous. We need to know what’s pushing us forward, what needs and desires we are trying to sate. There’s more going on here than the indulgence of a manipulated craving for snack food. We’re hungry for connection. We live for it.
apologetics and imagination
Apologetics, after all, is a literature of the imagination. Its cousins are the memoir, the literary essay, even the travel book. Like the memoir it turns the private tissue of life into convertible coin, like an essay it makes the line of an explanation as concretely felt as it can be, like travel writing it delivers the sensations and incidents of a journey: all to accomplish for a reader on the outside of belief what an insider does not, strictly, need. (Though it’s always a pleasure for a believing reader to see our own half-lit, half-understood experience more perfectly articulated than we could manage ourselves.) The apologist is trying, above all, to convey the body of a truth. For a believer of course truth already has a body, in several ways, ‘body’ being the site of one of Christianity’s profound puns. Our truth is a body, the body of the incarnated Lord, and it makes us a body, the body of Christ which is the church, every time we eat the bread which is also the body of Christ. But more routinely, truth also has a body for us as believers in the sense that it is carnally present to us all the time, in bodily habit and bodily movement; in the lived shapes of a life. But if you’re on the outside, this kind of body is exactly what belief has not got. Apologetics is in the business of trying to create for the reader of goodwill a kind of temporary, virtual body for faith; one they can borrow and try out, so that they may have a concrete inkling of what it might be like to assent, long before they do.
[gallery] uispeccoll:
digitalproductionunit:(via Why Time is Running Out For Your Videotapes | WITNESS Blog)
So important. The same goes for floppy disks.
