Outer Rim Territories

I’ll spare you the gory details. Click the link if you really want to know what was in this document. I didn’t.

The World Association of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides hosted a no-adults-welcome panel at the United Nations this week where Planned Parenthood was allowed to distribute a brochure entitled “Healthy, Happy and Hot.” The event was part of the annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which concludes this week.

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Totally geeky.

YouTube - TRON: LEGACY – Official Trailer.

First, these efforts suggest the importance of faculty taking their vocations seriously. On a micro-level, what if faculty, as they design courses, intentionally allow the texts, values, and outcomes of a liberal education to shape the development of their syllabi and daily course content? What if they mentor students and advise them to pursue a liberal education? What if they, in their personal reading and research, grow themselves as students of the liberal arts? On a macro-level, what if faculty committees (Development, Curriculum, Assessment, and Uffda, how the list goes on!) pursue a liberal arts agenda in their committee work and use those values as the standard against which they measure their work?

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Dare we as a society–heavily urbanized, hyper-sexualized (even down into grade school), able to create offspring in test tubes–call marriage that which has never been marriage? Does the loss of a primarily agrarian culture in which men and women complement each other in the home economy and where children are welcomed—does this loss mean a new cultural norm, an “evolution” of sexual and familial arrangements? What of polygamy and polyamory for those who want them?

To look at it another way, we can ask, what villages would “gay marriage” build? What strength and hope for the future would “gay marriage” bring in rebuilding a place like Haiti? Are we so sure we can do without a marital foundation protected at the core?

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YouTube - CTS Special Presentation on Haiti – 02/03/10 – Part 1.

File this in the “DUH” category.

Lifestyle Changes: Which Is Best?

The researchers defined the three healthy routines as eating the evening meal as a family more than five times per week, getting at least 10.5 hours of sleep nightly, and watching less than two hours of TV on weekdays.

The researchers say adopting just one of the practices could lower a child’s risk of becoming obese. Each routine was linked with 23%-25% lower odds of obesity.

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The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.

None of this is to say that the conclusions the ID movement draws about how life came to be and how it evolves are intrinsically unreasonable or necessarily wrong. Nor is it to deny that the ID movement has been treated atrociously and that it has been lied about by many scientists. The question I am raising is whether this quixotic attempt by a small and lightly armed band to overthrow “Darwinism” and bring about a new scientific revolution has accomplished anything good. It has had no effect on scientific thought. Its main consequence has been to strengthen the general perception that science and religion are at war.

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YouTube - Sir Patrick Stewart #dig_nat.

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

via stevenf.com – I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been….

Prior to becoming the devout, busybody next-door neighbor on the animated hit “The Simpsons,” Ned Flanders was an out-of-control brat whose beatnik parents didn’t believe in discipline. To reform Ned, a child psychologist enrolled him in the University of Minnesota Spankalogical Protocol, which included eight months of continuous spanking. It cured his rambunctiousness and set him on the path to becoming the cartoon world’s most famously pious Christian.

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