Sunday, 1. June 2008, 21:08:25
prayer, NYT, brian greene, kaddish
...
It’s one thing to go outside on a crisp, clear night and marvel at a sky full of stars. It’s another to marvel not only at the spectacle but to recognize that those stars are the result of exceedingly ordered conditions 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang. It’s another still to understand how those stars act as nuclear furnaces that supply the universe with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the raw material of life as we know it.
And it’s yet another level of experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of what’s out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine.
Brian Greene's
NYT Op-Ed,
"Put a Little Science in Your Life", touches on the fact that science is not only a discipline, but a way of life and a perspective. That is, you don't have to work in science to be a scientist. And perhaps some people who do work in science aren't scientists.
Of course, I couldn't resist the above astronomy excerpt. Just like I can't resist this quote, from
Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier:
Look at the night sky. You are not seeing only the light of the stars. You are also seeing the journey of the light of the stars toward you. Admire space and you admire time. In this way, immensity conducts you to history.
Leon Wieseltier is not a scientist in the traditionally understood sense of the word, and the book
Kaddish is not about science, overtly. Except that actually, the book is about science, in that it is about systematic inquiry. Relatively systematic inquiry; the kind of systematic inquiry that is personal.
The point is that systematic inquiry makes me a very happy person.
Kaddish is a record of Mr. Wieseltier's explorations of the origins of the prayer, and is highly interesting. Also, there are various references to Washington, DC, which is always nice.
Also, the photo is todays
APOD, a particularly awesome photo of a solar eruptive prominence taken about eight years ago.
Monday, 26. May 2008, 21:11:40
nasa, alien life, Mars, astronomy
...
And because I am a geek, I have made a new header for my blog out of photos of Mars that have recently been sent back by Phoenix.
The
Mission Overview and all of the
images which have been sent back so far can be found on the
NASA website, along with other information about the mission.
The photos I used, from left to right:
On Solid GroundFirst Look at Martian Arctic PlainsPolygon on MarsIcy, Patterned Ground on MarsSome may remember that a while ago there was a major breakthrough - evidence of the presence of water and ice on Mars. The Pheonix was sent to the north pole of Mars gather samples of water ice and the local soil for scientific analysis.
Also because I am a geek, I think this is pretty awesome. If anyone's counting, Phoenix is the sixth confirmed landing of American spacecraft on the surface of Mars.
Wednesday, 14. May 2008, 03:54:27
science, catholic church, club, catholicism
...
So I am at home now. One of the comforts of home that I can enjoy this summer is television. My parents switched cable providers in my absence, and now we have more channels.
Earlier I watched about five or seven minutes of Queer as Folk on LOGO, as a sort of anthropological experiment. It was very dated and contrived; I felt like I was watching Saved by the Bell.
There is a guy on The Daily Show discussing Obama's preacher in context, but not really in context. From what I hear, some of the religious figures McCain associates with are crazier.
Now I've been distracted from The Daily Show by the Science channel. They have a silly logo that is meant to look like a periodic table box with an atomic symbol. The program is about the Solar System, and totally more interesting to me than The Colbert Report. I'm fairly sure that fact means I'm supposed to be having some kind of college-student-quarter-life-crisis-identity-freak-out right now. Oh well.
Today was actually rather productive. I finished tweaking the brand new GUAS website, and I'm rather proud of myself. I've never actually done anything like that before, beyond the occasional HTML markups on this blog. Except that they aren't really HTML, because they use []'s instead of <>'s and slightly different tags. Anyway, I am particularly pleased with the header; this makes up for some nagging technical issues that aren't currently in my power to fix. Joe and I figured out the error problem on the GUAS listproc, so now I'm the only person who gets them, and after today I won't have to send out anymore spam test messages. There is one more thing I want to test, but it can wait.
I am almost done with the first season of 30 Rock. And because now on the Solar System program they are discussing the possibility of water on other planets (and therefore carbon based life forms) I will link to this AP write up of an interview by Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, S.J. with L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper. Rev. Funes is the director of the Vatican Observatory, and discusses the implications of the possibilities of extraterrestrial life for Catholic teachings. Apparently this (aliens) is also one of those things that people get irrationally worked up about.
I seem to be particularly enamored of the bold tag today.
EDIT - Today for breakfast I had scrambled eggs, wheat toast with butter and grape jelly, bacon, and orange juice. This is notable because the eggs tasted like eggs, the toast tasted like toast, the bacon tasted like bacon, and the orange juice tasted like orange juice. Eating non institutional food is like eating for the first time. Everything tastes delicious. Kraft Mac & Cheese is even better when you have fresh grated cheese to toss into it.
EDIT EDIT - I have made this entire post courier new. Because I felt like it. And that might be my favourite font right now - see the GUAS website header.
Sunday, 3. February 2008, 22:25:08
writing, homonormativity, oppression, Georgetown
...
[This blatantly stolen lolcat sort of expresses how I feel right now.]
Okay, I don't have writers block. Really.
I know what I want to write. I want to write about Ferguson's concept of heteronormativity and its unloved stepchild, homonormativity, and Wittig's concept of the Structural Unconscious as a self perpetuating oppressor. And I want to write about how even though the oppression and process of oppressing is more obvious in Ferguson's paradigm, the oppression itself is more sinister in Wittig's because the Structural Unconscious is self-legitimizing as well as self-perpetuating. But I can't make heads or tails of how we're supposed to write this paper.
It has to be comparative, but we can't compare and contrast. We have to have our own ideas, but we shouldn't really have a concrete conclusion, and we're not supposed to be proving a thesis. But there has to be 'movement of thought'. And when I google 'synthesis paper' I get results that don't really sound like my professors description of what we're supposed to be writing. Or, what I think we're supposed to be writing.
Actually, that's the problem - I have no idea what I'm supposed to be writing. This paper is due in less than 24 hours, and it's the only thing I've been working on since Thursday (by working I mean: thinking through it, which is usually the hardest part.)
I really miss lab reports right now.
