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Seen, Heard, Said

Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.

Delivering Understanding Versus Truth

One of the many things I like about Neil is how he parses a high level idea into separate parts. For Neil, education is more than just presenting the truth.

Being an educator means that you have to teach the truth, but you can’t just shove information on to people and say, “Here you go and if you don’t get it, too bad because it’s the truth.”

There is an art of persuasion involved which includes being sensitive to the students state of mind. You can’t just dump data on them, you have to combine the truth with how the student is receiving the information and adjust your delivery mechanism to create a lasting impact.

Likewise, you can’t be solely sensitive to the students state of mind. If they become upset when you talk to them about dinosaurs, that doesn’t mean you don’t teach them about dinosaurs. It doesn’t mean that you stop talking about dinosaurs. It doesn’t even mean that you stop acknowledging the existence of dinosaurs. It means that you find a way to teach them about dinosaurs while also acknowledging the reason they become upset to begin with1.

From 37signals.com:

And to do that, you have to understand what’s already in their head and how those ideas got there. Teaching is about bringing facts and external sensitivity together to have impact. This is powerful stuff and a great lesson for everyone.

Richard Dawkins “gratefully accept[ed] the rebuke” of Neil and then goes on to provide this hilarious quote from an editor at New Scientist that I think goes to show why sensitivity is important.

The editor, when asked, “What is your philosophy at New Scientist?” replied, “Science is interesting and if you don’t agree you can fuck off.”

  1. Feel free to replace “dinosaurs” with any other topic, such as evolution ↩

Something Blue

I was at a wedding over the weekend for some friends. During dinner, there was a trivia game and each table (ours was a table of five UPC folk) were able to submit their own questions for round :

  • After the 2012 earthquake in Haiti, what type of plane was JoEllen evacuated on?1
  • What is Chuck Noris’ first name?2

Round two was an entire section on wedding trivia — who knew weddings cost so much and people married so late in life. This one in particular stood out for the comment delivered with such comedic timing half a beat later:

“In the phrase ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,’ what does blue signify?” (half-beat) “Balls.”

The correct answer is actually purity, love, and fidelity3. I liked the first answer better — which also indicates that I’m apparently still 12 years old.

  1. DC-3)

  2. What is the tallest building in the US? ((Willis Tower ↩

  3. Carlos ↩

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_old ↩

Simpson’s paradox

“A common example of Simpson’s Paradox involves the batting averages of players in professional baseball. It is possible for one player to hit for a higher batting average than another player during a given year, and to do so again during the next year, but to have a lower batting average when the two years are combined.”

Age of Ignorance

I feel like this quote does a good job of capturing my feelings behind why I have no kill switch on awesome:

From www.nybooks.com:

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

I’m just one person though. And my sphere of influence is only so big and so powerful. This makes me feel very sad about what our country has become. Is it too late for us to make things better? How do we make intelligence desirable?

Church and Sexuality

Chauncey linked to this the other day, and I finally had a chance to read it; I think this is a great conversation to be having:
From teamchauncey.wordpress.com:

It seems to me that many of us Christians are born, raised, and taught with a giant elephant in the room.

That elephant would be sexuality.

Most Christians don’t hear anything about it growing up or if they do it’s an entirely negative frame of reference that only shifts dramatically once the word marriage is attached to it.

I’m unsure how young adults who grow up without healthy conversation regarding sexuality are going to be able to participate in a healthy expression of it.

Chauncey helps kick off the discussion by linking to an article written by Tina Schermer Sellers, “a clinical professor in the graduate Family Therapy Department at Seattle Pacific University and director of their post-graduate certificate in Medical Family Therapy”, called Christians Caught Between the Sheets – How ‘abstinence only’ Ideology Hurts Us:

From theotherjournal.com:

“The sex affirming Hebraic roots of Western civilization has been masked by Augustine’s legacy of eroticism-hating sexual dualism, perpetuated by authoritarian-rooted Christian dogma, which negated the basic worthiness of human beings. The evolution of Western culture is a history of theologically based sexual oppression.”5

…

“Traditional Christian sexual ethics is not only inadequate in that it fails to reflect God’s reign of justice and love which Jesus died announcing, but its legalistic, apologetic approach is also incompatible with central Judaic and Christian affirmations of creation, life, and an incarnate messiah. Because the Christian sexual tradition has diverged from this its life-affirming source, it has become responsible for innumerable deaths, the stunting of souls, the destruction of relationships, and the distortion of human communities. The Christian sexual tradition uses scripture and theological traditions as supports for a code of behavior which developed out of mistaken, pre-scientific understanding of man, anatomy, physiology and reproduction, as well as out of now abandoned and discredited models of the human person and human relationships.”7

It’s a long read, but I think it’s worth it.

Quotes for 2010

Every year I collect quotes in the “Favorite Quotations” section of my Facebook profile. I feel that every year has a theme, which make the quotes of that year somewhat reflective of who I am and what I learned. For me, these quotes — these snipets of ideas — serve to inspire, and remind, and educate:

“… when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” – Author Unknown

“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough” – Mario Andretti

“Whatever makes you nervous” – Michael Jordan in response to what he bets when he plays golf

“Malo Periculosam Libertatem Quam Quietum Servitium.” – The Palatine of Posen

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them; disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones – we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Apple

“When I became a man I put away childish things including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – CS Lewis

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” – CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“I would hope that everyone in every profession would take the time to ask themselves on a regular basis one question: Do I tolerate mediocrity? And if the answer to that question is yes, then the next question obviously is: Why? For if we are to have integrity we must answer that question well and not tolerate excuses or half measures. We must lead our lives in an exemplary fashion, offering ourselves a constant, persistent challenge to excel.” – Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger

“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Arthur Conan Doyle

The Pale Blue Dot

Amazing and stunning and poignant and beautiful:

We were hunters and foragers.

The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.

Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.

We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?

By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re…an adaptable species.

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.

They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

-Carl Sagan

via ✪DF