All Fall Down

It’s interesting to think that, without God, science turns into engineering, philosophy turns into vocabulary, and ethics turns into politics.  With God, all of these fields of study are transformed into subcategories of theology.

For those who want to protest, here’s what I mean:

Unless there is a God, there is no designer for the universe.  Without a designer, there is no design.  If there is no design, then there is no reason to want to discover the fundamental principles of the universe. What makes you think that there are fundamental principles at all, or that such principles won’t change?  All that is left to science is figuring out how to make stuff.  Everything else is storytelling, with the intent of covering up unproductive employment.

Similarly, if there isn’t a God who generated such abstract concepts as beauty, truth, goodness, agency, and happiness, then those concepts are entirely flexible, and they can change from era to era, and place to place.  Furthermore, there’s no real reason to think that they exist at all, or are worth any effort to achieve.  All that remains is careful defining of terms, so that they can be used cogently in sentences.  You have to know exactly what sort of wind you are sewing.

And Ethics?  The answer to every ethical assertion is always “says who?”  And if the reply to that isn’t “God,” then the next reply is always, “Try and make me.”  Trying to make people do things is the bread of politics.

There’s more than one way  that Jesus Christ holds the universe together.

Good Fashion, Good Business, Bad Science

First, an excellent video about bikinis and modesty:

I am 100% in favor of this lady’s designs and business.

Second, a rant on bad logic in science:

She sites a study that somebody did somewhere that indicated that men, when confronted with a woman in a bikini, lose the ability to think clearly. That should strike you as the sort of thing that doesn’t need a scientific study or a bunch of electrodes taped to a guy’s head, but please remember that people in lab coats need jobs too. What bothers me is that, instead of observing that a woman in a state of undress undermines a man’s capacity for abstract thought, lowers his communication skills, and increases his urges for physical activities, the brilliant scientists concluded that the parts of male brain that became active were those most associated with mechanical tools and that therefore men view women in bikinis as “objects.”

I find myself at something of a loss to describe how poor that logical reasoning is. Working backward, a tool is something more specific and more valuable to a person than a generic “object.” You would think that the logical conclusion would have been that, if a bikini makes a man’s brain activate its tool-oriented sections, he must think of the bikini clad woman as a tool. Or, if that conclusion were unsatisfactory, they might have reached the conclusion that the human brain is too complex to have large sections dedicated to “tools” and “objects” and gone looking for a more justifiable hypothesis.

Beyond that, you can’t escape the impression that this study was attempting to prove that male psychology itself is dangerous to women, that a man who sees a female belly button is unavoidably geared up for assault, that any decent man really ought to avoid seeing any belly buttons ever. At which point, you have to ask the question, “is there no appropriate time and place for a man to look on a woman?” Oh, yes. Marriage.

Well, let’s go do a study on happily married men, and see which parts of their brain light up when looking at their own provocatively dressed wives. If the system works smoothly, you might hope the sight undermines his capacity for abstract thought, lowers his communication skills, and increases his urges for physical activities. At which point you can ask the wife, who knows him best, if in this state he is thinking of her more as an object, or a tool.

Or Else, Not so Stable

I feel the pull of this article on Staying Put.  Stability is something I’ve actually worked pretty hard for.  But I think his parameters may be off.

Fr. Stephen talks about a time in the 1950s, when

the most common pattern in our country was for a local boy to meet and marry a local girl and to settle down and raise their children in the community in which they themselves were born, with relatives and friends forming a network of relationships that surrounded and nurtured (or harrassed) them.

I can’t speak to what most people did in the 50s, but my family at least a hundred years back, has been pretty thoroughly rootless.  My grandfather’s little family autobiography starts with the moves he made to Kansas, Nebraska, and finally Kansas again.  The story goes that, Nebraska was so bad, and great-grandma was so tired of moving, that she refused to leave Kansas ever again – right through the dust bowl.  My grandparents on both sides moved all over before settling down, and my mom’s dad didn’t stop until I was in grade school.  My parents moved an average of once every 2 years, I think, until I left for college.  And me.  I warned Valerie before we married what was going to happen.  So far: Massachusetts, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia.

I determined that all this vagrancy was no good.  So I joined the Army.

Try Writing More Succinctly

There’s a concept we use in the Army called BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front.  It’s a technique of writing that assumes that the person reading your writing is an extremely important person who is super busy.  So you need to put the bottom line, the final answer, as the very first line of your brief.  You then support that bottom line with the strongest, most cogent arguments first.  This way, the reader is free to skim and toss as soon has he’s made a decision regarding the information he has at hand.

The internet understands this, even if individual people who use the internet (like this guy) do not.

He should try theology

From Cafe Hayek:

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine – the special pleading of selfish interests.

Search Engine Optimization

I just ran across this, and I thought it was really funny.  Apparently I’ve been retraining the essay writing skills of Army Officer Candidates and Platoon leaders everywhere.  Over the past year, something like 90% of all traffic to my site have been in search of writing examples of two things – the Officer Candidate Essay, and the Platoon Sergeant Initial Counseling memo.   Skim, don’t read:

Search Terms for 30 days ending 2013-05-28 (Summarized)

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 I don’t know that I wrote the best essays ever, but in a storm, I guess any port will do.  I just never knew there were so many ways of asking for the same thing.

On the importance of Genre analysis in mathematics curricula

This Common Core thing is really interesting. A bunch of people are debating how to change education for the better in America, which is all to the good, since John Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System and the American education system, was about as effective at one as he was at the other. Surely anything would be an improvement on a system designed by a man who couldn’t decide if he was an engineer of children’s minds, or just a plain old communist. And it’s also a pleasure to watch from an amused distance, knowing that my kids will endure no such thing, and that the results of any foolish ideas their teachers do come up with will be evident to their parents immediately.

So I’m all in favor of nationalized testing. Unless, of course they’re testing for something stupid. In which case, stupid tests should be no inhibition to a good education. I’m all in favor of teaching kids to think, instead of mindlessly repeating rote information.  Rote information is boring, in the true sense of the word, and boring is a bad motivator.  Of course, being an engineer in a cubicle is also boring, especially compared to bomb disposal, so there’s something to be said for skill, which takes practice.

But, when it comes to comparing our education systems historically, maybe A Christmas Story is not the best basis of comparison.  Ms. Watson makes the caveat that she knows “that a screenshot from a Christmas movie isn’t a fair representation of the curricular scope covered in the 1950s,” but it still creeps me out a bit.  I have never seen the movie.  I never hope to see that movie, because every impression I’ve ever gotten is that its humor is derived entirely from people behaving like nincompoops.  I wasn’t there for 4th grade in the 50s, but my guess is that 3-digit addition may have been another attempt by the director at being funny.