Featured Articles
Losing My Religion
A reflection on religious doctrine, morals, science, and our vast and awesome universe.
Planet of the Altruists
If you are reading this, you are fortunate enough to be literate, and to have access to electricity. These are things we often take for granted.
Why I Love the Khan Academy
Salman Khan, the principal behind the Khan Academy material, understands something very important that emanates throughout all of his lectures whether they be on calculus, projectile motion, or thermodynamics.
Odds
Sometimes I catch myself merely living because I don’t have anything better to do. I wake up from a long slumber and realize that a year of my life just went by.
Most Recent Articles
What Will Our Children Make of This
It’s hard to stay positive right now. Everything seems to be coming apart at this most critical time for the future well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. Indeed, we seem to be causing the next great extinction event in our little world’s multi-billion-year history: Most species but ours will go extinct in the next few hundred years.
People feel disconnected from the political process. The forces of hate are stronger than they’ve been in this millennium, fueled by a ratings-obsessed media that has lost all sense of what it meant to be the Fourth Estate that kept the government in check for the benefit of the populace. Unrestrained corporate greed has defeated healthy political discourse, and indeed objectivity, at least for now. The medium that was supposed to solve the problem, the Internet, has unintentionally exacerbated it in the pursuit of advertising revenues.
The historical parallels to the populist uprisings currently happening around the world are striking and terrifying. We have been here before. Now, we have nuclear weapons and the threat of a changing climate more imminent than ever.
The question is not whether the world will change, but by how much. How many hundreds of millions of people will die or be forced from the places they call home?
What is one to do other than place blame and feel depressed?
It just seems so hopeless.
An abnormally high number of climate scientists are now taking anti-depressants. Their whole lives revolve around seeing a future that ranges from “mild hell” to “blazing inferno,” and nobody is listening, or their opinion is only as valid as that of a high school dropout who spent a few minutes taking a cursory glance at the ‘climate change’ Wikipedia page–if that.
What’s clear is that this trend isn’t going to reverse itself any time soon. Truth, science, and reason are no longer morally important to large segments of the world’s population. The climate will get warmer. Much warmer. We in the West cheerfully celebrate sitting outside to eat at a restaurant in November, without sparing more than a few thoughts to what that means.
What will our children make of this? Will they understand when we tell them we all felt incapable of effecting change? That the pressures of a few massive corporations were simply too great to even try to defend the planet? That the only thing we could collectively come up with was a return to our most tribal, basic and ugly. To everyone having their own definition of truth, and their own facts. To everyone hating anyone who isn’t the same as them.
Can we make it to the other planets before Earth becomes more like Venus?
The only way for us to save ourselves within our current framework, it seems, is to play the same game as the rich and powerful: to make expansion into space a financially obvious thing to do even over short periods of time. To demonstrate that tapping into the practically limitless power supply that is our Sun makes better business sense right now. That people can live a decent life without needing to work a job that destroys the planet.
Those who want to fight must operate within the system, and engage the power centers they revile without being themselves corrupted or controlled.
In the immortal words of Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
The world needs you more than ever for this most challenging and important task. We, the eyes and ears and feelings of the cosmos, have spent 13.7 billion years in the making, and our fate now hangs by a thread. We must not go silently into the night.
Experience Becoming
“Eight years ago, students at my high school wrote to their favorite authors asking them to visit. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one who responded, writing this beautiful and humorous letter.”
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Conglusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
via reddit
Lincoln
Euclid’s first common notion is this: Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.
That’s a rule of mathematical reasoning. It’s true because it works—has done, and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is “self-evident.” You see, there it is, even in that two-thousand-year-old book of mechanical law, it is a self-evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.
We begin with equality. That’s the origin, isn’t it—that balance? That’s fairness. That’s justice.