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.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
October 07, 2009 - 10:11 p.m.
My plan was to be in bed by ten tonight. That plan was like a political promise. I meant it but I also know there was no way I would be able to keep to it. It's 9:18 now. I'll see how close I can get. I'm waking up at 4:50 tomorrow. That's why I want to get to bed early.
Not that much to write about today. I got up early so I made breakfast at home and played on the computer so I left the house late. I still got to school 20 minutes before class.
My afternoon class did not listen to what I said about graphing. For the most part they did the homework but they did a terrible job. I stress that graphs are about communicating and the way they look is important. They apparently didn't think I was serious. I let them know I am.
I had leftovers for dinner tonight. I hate leftovers but I love the not having to clean up after I cook part. I made my first baked potato since the last Crohn's attack. I thought the potato skin brought that on. The potato was good but I hated throwing out the skin. That's my favorite part.
I saw my first anti-health-reform ad today. It scared people by saying that our health care could be like it is in England and France. You know places where people live longer, have lower infant mortality, and better health care than we do. Wouldn't that be horrible? Now some people are ideologically opposed to it. They are against reform because they actually believe the current system is better. My bigger gripe is with the vested interests that are against it because they are afraid it will hurt their profits. I'm tempted to say that they prefer that people die if it means more money for them. That isn't fair. I'm sure they convince themselves that the present system is better for the patients even if it means covering their ears and saying "la la la la" when the contrary facts are presented to them.
On a somewhat related note. In class I explained how we can connect dots into smooth curves because we are primates and our monkey ancestors needed similar skills to jump from branch to branch in trees. One student, a bright one, said; "That is if you believe we evolved from monkeys." I said, "No, it's true whether you believe in it or not."
I figured something out today. You often hear that if you shave your beard it will grow back thicker. Today I trimmed my beard and it feels thicker. I know why. It of course didn't become thicker. Hair didn't grow in the 3 minutes it took me to trim it. What happened was simple statistics. If we say that a beard is 90 mm long that doesn't mean that each whisker is that long. They actually follow something close to a normal distribution. They continually fall out and new ones come in. They grow at different rates. They grow at different angles. We call the length of the beard the length where you start getting a significant amount of hairs, maybe 1 out of ten. The rest are shorter. So when you feel the beard you only feel one tenth of them, or maybe a half of them. Some fraction. When you trim it you get rid of the outliers. Now 90% of the hairs are the same distance from the face. So when you feel it, you feel more hairs. So it feels thicker. I love when things end up being simple math.
This is a shotgun entry. I hope there are parts of it that interest you. I'm not going to be able to update tomorrow. I'll be at WFUV from 6 AM to 5 PM. Then I’m driving out to Babylon on Long Island to see Cheryl Prashker's Irish band RUNA. It's a free show at the Astoria Federal Savings Bank. It's sponsored by the Babylon Village Arts Council. Who wants to join me? The shows at 7:30.
Charity Can Begin at Home but it Can't End There - October 13, 2009
One Bitchin' Babe - October 12, 2009
How to Get to Carnegie Hall - October 11, 2009
Reading the Runa - October 11, 2009
I'm a Renaissance Man - October 10, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile October 07, 2009
