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.
April 18, 2003 - 12:52 p.m.
I’ve had a fairly boring couple of days. My class this morning was even more asleep than usual. There are times that I don’t know if they don’t understand or are just too lethargic to answer me when I ask if anyone knows the answer. One student actually shows some signs of life and I find myself teaching to her. If you ever want to make your teacher feel bad just stare with a blank expression when he or she asks a question.
After class I tutored one of my calculus students. She was in my remedial math course a few years ago and got an A. She’s been doing poorly this year which bothered me. I didn’t know what happened. This was the first time she came for help and actually learned quite a bit. The problem is that so much of what we covered was things that we did in class a couple of months ago. If she had come for help then she’d be doing great. I hope I got her caught up enough to do well the next test.
After school I didn’t do much the rest of the day. I did have three lovely phone calls. I spoke to Carey, Stacey, and Leah. I haven’t spoken to Stacey in months. I really needed that.
Tomorrow is going to be real fun, I get to see Leah. She’s coming to New York with her father. While he’s mixing his CD Leah and I are going to play. It looks like we might go up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Whatever we do it isn’t as important as who I’m doing it with. Her father is actually happy I’m spending time with her. That’s a big switch in attitude. It shows that there’s always hope.
I have lots of fun music planned this weekend. Tomorrow night I’m seeing Sex Mob at Tonic. Saturday night I’m seeing Pal Shazar at the Living Room, and Sunday night I’m seeing Cadence Carroll at Meow Mix. You might have heard of Meow Mix, it’s the lesbian bar in Chasing Amy. Funny thing, I’m pretty sure they actually filmed it there but it looks twice the size in the film. I haven’t seen Cadence headline an act, I can’t wait.
I’ve been thinking about lots of rants and philosophical issues but as they so often do they seem pointless when I get down to writing them. Instead I’m going to share a random problem I was working on. This is the kind of thing I spend mental effort on but hardly ever write about. It’s a math/geography problem.
Where is the population center of the earth and even more interestingly how would be go about defining it? When I first started thinking about it I figured it would be a bit northwest of India, in Afghanistan or one of the central Asia republics. I figured the huge populations of India and China would pretty much balance off the rest of the world. The more I thought about it the less sure I became though. I think the best way to define the population center would be to consider the population spread out in three dimensions and find the center of mass if every person is weighted equally. The problem with this is that the center would be somewhere inside the earth. To put it on the surface you then connect that point with the center with a radius and where it breaks the surface call that the center of population. That leads to some funny results though. If there were just two people on the earth and they both lived in the northern hemisphere at the same latitude and 180° away. The center of population would then be at the north poll even if they both lived near the equator. It does makes sense though as the pole would be the point midway between them. There is no way I can really figure this out without making a huge effort but now I think the population center might be further north than I thought before.
None of this has any importance at all but I wanted to let you know the kind of thing I think about. I tend to talk about the touchy feely stuff here and I neglect much of my inner life. I really am a nerd at heart.
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 April 18, 2003
