Category: Of Random Interest

A British girl was struck in the foot by a mete­orite.

Yeah, you read that cor­rect­ly. She was hit by an object falling from space.

If you’re like me, you’re first thought is to assume that she should be dead (or at least foot­less). The arti­cle does­n’t even men­tion that the impact hurt.

So I did some quick research. The mete­or would have reached ter­mi­nal veloc­i­ty well before impact. Ter­mi­nal veloc­i­ty for medi­um-sized mete­ors is only around 45 miles per hour. This one was much, much small­er (looks to be only around 1–2 inch­es in diam­e­ter). That means its ter­mi­nal veloc­i­ty is below 45 mph.

So I guess it felt like get­ting hit in the foot by a base­ball.

I’ve just kicked off a dis­cus­sion over at The Idea Exchange (nation­al Chi Alpha’s peer-learn­ing site) about the ethics of down­load­ing music and movies.

You can find the dis­cus­sion (along with a poll) over there, so why not join in the fray?

My ini­tial post­ing pos­es three ques­tions:
1) What is the law?
2) What should the law be?
3) What should we do?

Not­ed philos­pher Charles Tay­lor (who seems to be a Chris­t­ian) has just been inter­viewed in Books and Cul­ture on What It Means to Be Sec­u­lar.

It’s pret­ty inter­est­ing stuff. For exam­ple

To say we live in a sec­u­lar civ­i­liza­tion is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It does­n’t mean that we live in a soci­ety from which God has been expelled. I don’t think we ever will live in such a soci­ety for very long; the Com­mu­nists tried that. But the nature of this mod­ern sec­u­lar soci­ety is that it’s deeply plur­al. We have to accept that the ulti­mate ground­ing of the civ­i­liza­tion we share in com­mon is up for grabs.

and lat­er on

There is an alter­na­tive reading—namely, that we’re mov­ing to a soci­ety where more and more the con­sen­sus will be around an unbe­liev­ing vari­ant of the mod­ern social imag­i­nary. But to me this seems to be just a dream. It’s a dream that aris­es among those who are deeply into an athe­ist or non-believ­ing posi­tion and are con­vinced as a mat­ter of faith that reli­gion will grad­u­al­ly dis­ap­pear and every­one will think as they do. For them, the sec­u­lar world is one in which we all end up agree­ing fun­da­men­tal­ly that there’s no God, and that agree­ment is the basis of every­thing. That’s an impos­si­ble sce­nario, and the more they think like that, the worse it’s going to be.

Check this out on CNN: A Pornog­ra­ph­er Hacks An Al-Quae­da Site. This is one of those bizarre lit­tle sit­u­a­tions in which some­one we thor­ough­ly dis­ap­prove of does some­thing we great­ly approve of.

Evi­dent­ly his exper­tise in run­ning a smut site was imme­di­ate­ly applic­a­ble to the chal­lenge of hack­ing a para­noid and ruth­less orga­ni­za­tion’s com­put­er. Mess­ner, using the aggres­sive tac­tics he’s employed to run his adult site, said he “hijacked” Al Neda for five days It kind of makes you won­der exact­ly what skills porn site oper­a­tors pick up… One more good rea­son to avoid porn like the plague–some of these guys are ace hack­ers!

I found the fol­low­ing excerpts sad: “I bought a dig­i­tal cam­era and con­vinced my wife to get naked for the Inter­net.” … His Porsche and its “WIVES” van­i­ty plates memo­ri­al­iz­ing his suc­cess in adult enter­tain­ment are, he believes, a tes­ta­ment that he and his fam­i­ly are liv­ing the Amer­i­can dream. And, in his own way, Mess­ner said, he is fight­ing an Amer­i­can war.

In the entire CNN arti­cle there’s not a hint of appro­pri­ate moral indig­na­tion that this man is both destroy­ing the sacred­ness of his own mar­riage and entic­ing men across the world to vio­late their mar­riage vows. I’m will­ing to bet that it did­n’t even cross the jour­nal­ist’s mind… *sigh* Does no one see how destruc­tive pornog­ra­phy is?

I ran across a very inter­est­ing rant com­par­ing Islam and Chris­tian­i­ty by a blog­ger I’d nev­er heard of called James Lileks (I found the link on blogdex).

At one point, Mr. Lileks iden­ti­fies him­self thus­ly I am a Deist, which means EVERYONE dis­agrees with me.

Trans­la­tion: a lot of his under­ly­ing assump­tions will dif­fer from yours, but you should still read the piece. He puts some very impor­tant points in a very direct way.

Here’s his open­ing state­ment:
There are two ways for a reli­gion to approach life:

A) Every­thing is per­mit­ted except that which is for­bid­den; over time, we work out the details as the sit­u­a­tions arise.

B) Every­thing is for­bid­den except that which is per­mit­ted, and we will work out the details in advance.

After an open­ing like that, how can you not read the rest?

(there’s a sim­i­lar dia­tribe at Lit­tle Green Foot­balls, although it’s not as reflec­tive it does have the virtue of a very active com­ments sec­tion)

I added this next bit on 8/9/2002
Ever won­der what an Epis­co­palian ter­ror­ist would look like?

Here’s an inter­est­ing tid­bit report­ed by The Wash­ing­ton Times: Thomas Jef­fer­son did not want a wall built between church and state. There are two books by two dif­fer­ent schol­ars ref­er­enced in the above arti­cle: Daniel Dreis­bach’s Thomas Jef­fer­son and The Wall of Sep­a­ra­tion Between Church and State and Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State by Philip Ham­burg­er.

Alan Wolfe, direc­tor of the Boisi Cen­ter for Reli­gion and Pub­lic Life at Boston Col­lege, is impressed by the new find­ings but doubts they can make a dif­fer­ence.

“I think it is ter­rif­ic schol­ar­ship, but I don’t think it can change any­thing,” said Mr. Wolfe, who reviewed the Ham­burg­er book and has sur­veyed pub­lic opin­ion on pol­i­tics and reli­gion.

“The ‘wall’ idea has tak­en on a life of its own and is part of our cus­tom and law,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Amer­i­cans love God and hate pol­i­tics, so they ask, ‘Why mix the two?’ ”

You can read some reviews from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press here and here.

Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine brought an unex­pect­ed arti­cle to my atten­tion. In Why We Need Hell, TooNewsweek jour­nal­ist Ken­neth Wood­ward argues for the impor­tance of Hell as an induce­ment for moral liv­ing.

This is a side­bar arti­cle to the main Why We Need Heav­en, which is a dis­cus­sion of the rival Jew­ish, Mus­lim, and Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives on the after­life and the way they impact the news.

I found quote par­tic­u­lar­ly amus­ing: (Speak­ing of the Koran’s promise of heav­en­ly orgies) Georgetown’s Voll doesn’t think that the vir­gins car­ry much weight with the Pales­tin­ian mar­tyrs; unlike the Ira­ni­ans in the 1980s, teenagers on the West Bank do have access to sex. More seduc­tive is that you would have “a house, reg­u­lar food, pros­per­i­ty,” he says. “You would have flow­ing water; some­one wouldn’t be bomb­ing your well. If you had lived with­out all that stuff for the first 15 or 20 years of your life, heav­en would sound pret­ty good with or with­out 72 vir­gins.” Hmmm… I’m guess­ing Voll does­n’t know any teenage boys.

And of course, Ernest Hem­ing­way wrote that he thought of heav­en as “two love­ly hous­es in town; one where I would have my wife and chil­dren and be monog­a­mous and love them tru­ly and well and the oth­er where I would have my nine beau­ti­ful mis­tress­es on nine dif­fer­ent floors.” Hmm… log­i­cal con­sis­ten­cy was­n’t one of Hem­ing­way’s dom­i­nant con­cerns.

The author buys some unfor­tu­nate inter­pre­ta­tions of the devel­op­ment of the after­life in Jew­ish the­ol­o­gy, and enjoys play­ing with the notion that both the sui­cide bombers and their vic­tims think they’re going to heav­en (and that their ene­mies are going to hell). Over­all, it’s a pret­ty inter­est­ing read (if not a good course in the­ol­o­gy).

Emergesque just turned me on to a great arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cals in acad­e­mia.

The arti­cles focus­es on the neces­si­ty of large foun­da­tions (espe­cial­ly the Lil­ly Endow­ment and the Pew Char­i­ta­ble Trusts) to pro­vide fund­ing for evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars (things like research and sab­bat­i­cals cost mon­ey!)

Some­thing I find pret­ty inter­est­ing: the evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars seem to be good invest­ments: “As mea­sured by schol­ar­ly pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, foun­da­tions sup­port­ing evan­gel­i­cal schol­ar­ship have received an unusu­al­ly high return on their invest­ment. A study by the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties found that 45 per­cent of their grant recip­i­ents had pub­lished books with­in six years of receiv­ing their grants. By con­trast, a study of schol­ars receiv­ing grants from the Pew Evan­gel­i­cal Schol­ars Pro­gram found that 90 per­cent had fin­ished their books with­in six years.”

There’s a relat­ed arti­cle from 2000 in the The Atlantic Month­ly

The August 4th San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle has a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on John Ashcroft called Son of a Preach­er Man. The arti­cle is pret­ty fac­tu­al, although the jour­nal­ist’s dis­like of Ashcroft’s val­ue sys­tem shows through.

In case you did­n’t know it, John Ashcroft (our cur­rent U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al) is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, and his father J. Robert Ashcroft was respon­si­ble for the found­ing of Chi Alpha.

This is sort of an off­beat post that caught my eye: dogs have rudi­men­ta­ry math abil­i­ties (CNN).

That’s right: Fido knows the dif­fer­ence between one and two. The research will be pub­lished in an upcom­ing issue of Ani­mal Cog­ni­tion final fan­ta­sy vii advent chil­dren divx down­load . For more details, check out the report on New Sci­en­tist.