The Kindness of Internet Acquaintances
The tail end of last Winter term found me getting muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder, and eventually landed me in the emergency room at 3 am. I'm two-thirds of the way through grading the first formal lab report for my class this term, and I'm pretty sure I've identified the proximate cause of those muscle spasms, because they're back. It's the combination of spending long periods typing at my office computer (I collect and grade lab reports electronically), and occasionally hunching forward to bang my head on the edge of the desk when confronted with a particularly egregious sentence.
I've still got six more reports to grade, so I shouldn't spend much time typing on my blog. Happily, people I don't know well at all have done me a huge favor by writing what I would've written on a couple of topics of interest to me.
John Scalzi on Intelligent Design and Michael Behe's testimony in Dover:
It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing for Behe, who claims to be a scientist. It's embarrassing for Behe's employers (who have been forced to acknowledge the embarrassment Behe causes them on a regular basis by posting a disclaimer on their web site), and it's embarrassing for anyone who likes to imagine that science should actually be about science, and not about comforting people twitchy about the fact they share a common ancestor with whatever animal it is they like the least. It's not embarrassing for those people, of course, but the fact it's not makes me embarrassed for them. I think it would be ashamed to go through life so afraid of ideas that I'd be willing to force ignorance on others to make myself feel happy and safe. Seems a little selfish, and a lot sad.
EvolutionBlog on liberal education:
Education isn't primarily about facts or job training. It's about exposing yourself to all of the things human beings have been up to for the last few thousand years. You read the works of the ancient Greek playwrights not because you really care about their nifty plots, but because by reading those works you immediately realize that the concerns of people thousands of years ago are pretty much the same as their concerns now. You read Dickens or Shakepeare or Hemingway (or Agatha Christie or Stephen King (yes, they belong in the canon too!)) because by doing so you appreciate for a moment what the English language can be made to do. You learn science partly for the specific facts you learn (you really ought to know that the Earth orbits the Sun an not vice versa), but mainly so that you can marvel for a moment at the sheer ingenuity, persistence, hard work and cleverness that went into figuring all this stuff out. You learn history not just because you should know when the Civil War was fought or what the Mayflower compact was, but because everything that happens today finds its raison d'etre in the past, and knowing something about the past can not help but make it easier to make good decisions today.
(via InstaMunger)
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
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