With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
October 19, 2004 - 1:17 a.m.
Wow, I’m being good. I gave the calculus test today and I finished grading it. The class did pretty well, the Median was 77 and the mean around 72. Two people did very poorly and dragged it down. The grades were really pretty good, three people got in the 90s. I don’t think their understanding matched their grades though. As I’ve mentioned before it is an open notes test and I think many were just parroting back what was done in class without real understanding. You can see that in the nature of many of the errors. I’m going to have to take that into account next test.
After class I had to hang around to give a make-up exam to one of my fundamentals students. She was in Taiwan last week when I gave the test. I planned on giving it in my office but of course we were locked out at first so she started it in the math office.
I have her the same 104 minutes the class had for the test but she finished in an hour. She got the second highest mark in the class raising the mean to 76. My classes did well and I did all the work I needed to do. I’m feeling very good about teaching. Well, OK, not all the work, I have no idea what I’m teaching tomorrow. I don’t have the texts here so I’ll have to prepare before class tomorrow. That really isn’t an issue, As long as I know the topic I can teach it without prep.
The Yankees and Red Sox played another extra inning game and the Sox won again. For the second night in a row Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher ever blew the save. I thought he might be too tired today to be effective.
I just looked at my notes and I’m finally going to write what I meant to write a week ago. I have officially acknowledged the change of seasons. I put my straw hat in the storage wardrobe and took my Irish hat out and put it in the closet by the door. Now I’m prepared to be protected from the cold and rain not the heat and sun. The next big change will be taking my down jacket out of storage and to start wearing gloves and my thinsulate ski cap.
I finished reading Captain Horatio Hornblower III: Flying Colours today. Proctoring exams gave me plenty of time to read. As I mentioned when I started reading it, Hornblower had a very low opinion of himself even though everyone else practically worshipped him. After managing a brilliant escape from the French and recapturing a British ship in the process he was worried facing a Court Martial and being disgraced. Of course he was given a hero’s welcome promoted. The thing that makes that so appealing it allows the reader to hope that like Hornblower, she is far better than her self opinion and that when she faces judgment the result will go as well. Now of course it is false logic to say that just because one person with a low self opinion was misguided that all people with low self opinions are. But it does offer that ray of hope that it is possible.
Tomorrow should be a good day to work on the Horvendile Inquirer. Maybe I’ll have it ready by tomorrow night.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile October 19, 2004
