Category: General Discussion

Like many Jewish families, tracing our history is often a sad and difficult task. Three of my four grandparents escaped Europe to found new families in America, giving me the illusion of having a small family, as Hitler uprooted and burnt the rest of my family tree. But the networks formed by immigrants were close, familial, and geographic, facts that were so obvious to them that they often didn’t talk about it.

For example, my paternal grandfather comes from a small city in Poland called Ostrow-Mazowiecka. His mother died of cholera shortly after he was born, and he was raised by various aunts. As a (very) young man, he escaped Poland and came to Detroit alone—I thought. It turns out he came here with his cousin. Each of them founded a new family in the New World.
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This is my little version of blogrolling, something I vowed to never do, but I’ve been reading so many good blogs lately that I’d like to share some links. Some of these are on our blogroll, some aren’t.

EpiWonk: An epidemiology blog.

Archeoporn: one of the best names on the web.

Submitted to a Candid World: progressive politics, but not a rant.

Evangelical Realism: this ain’t your grandma’s Old Time Religion

The field negro: stuff you didn’t know you needed to know, but you need to know it

The Bad Idea Blog, apparently written by Jabba the Hut.

Historiann: written by a, well, historian, and yet mysteriously not boring.

Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes: another great blog with a great name

Some links, general business, and not-so random thoughts.

Tangled Bank #109 is up at Greg’s place.

The Blog that Ate Manhattan is hosting the latest Grand Rounds, Seinfeld additon.

ScienceBlogs has a new project called Next Generation Energy. It will cover energy problems, alternative, etc. It will feature writers from ScienceBlogs and other outside experts. Interestingly, it’s being sponsored by Shell, which has led to a bit of discussion. Check it out.

The 94th Carnival of the Godless came out a few weeks ago, and I hadn’t realized we were featured, so here’s a link.

PZ Myers had an interesting post yesterday that sparked controversy both IRL and withing the blogging community. It is about some shit-disturbing student who stole a Eucharist waffer from a Catholic service.

I’m of two minds about this. If you wish to protest odd religious practices, fine. But to violate a sanctuary where no one is being harmed is not only in poor taste, it scares people, as it has a tinge of oppression (even though one bored student is hardly oppressive). Writing about religious foolishness is one thing, invading a church is another. Obviously, this would be a different issue if a minority religious institution in a secular nation were invaded—most Americans are going to side with the church on this one, so they are hardly in danger. Sure, it’s just a fucking cracker to me, but not to them. To them it is the physical representation of their god. I’m not sure how violating this serves the purpose of rationalism.

Next, an interesting (for me) occurance. I hate medical mis-information, and never hesitate to go after it. A recent post of mine criticized a post in the NYT. The information in the post was execrable. The writer is not. Tara is a friend of medical reporting, which in no way renders her immune from making mistakes, or suffering criticism (as I often have), but when writing a blog on critical thought, where do you draw the line? Folks like Gary Null and Joe Mercola are systematically spreading bad medical information, and taking people’s money. Tara’s column is generally quite good, and is not an outlet for separating people from truth and money. I’m sure that I don’t always know where to draw the line. I think I hit the correct tone in my earlier post about a news reporter. In my critique of the NYT piece, I think I was spot on about the content, but not the writer.

If you have the stomach for it, I’m going to try to teach you a little evidence-based medicine later, and the name Bayes may come up. Stay tuned.

I’ve just returned from one of the world’s great treasures, Algonquin Provincial Park, in Ontario, Canada. I have very little skepticism to offer—sure, I could talk about Park management, the Master Plan, logging, First Nations, etc. but then I’d lose an opportunity to share some of the natural beauty and some of the medical highlights.

The Park is about the size of Connecticut and occupies a huge chunk of Ontario as it bends around Lake Huron. (Remember that Ontario’s southernmost leg is rather far south, with the city of Windsor being directly south of Detroit. It widens toward the northeast, and then opens up north and westward, forming a sort of reverse “c” around Michigan.)

Now, for my fellow Americans, let me just reiterate: Canada is a country, not a state. Not only that, but their dollar is now worth about the same as ours, although many of those dollars come in odd coins called “loonies” and “twonies”. They are also fond of some odd foods, such as poutine (not to be confused with “poutaine“), a dish which ruins perfectly good french fries by covering them with cheese curds and gravy.
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Spring is here, despite this week’s frost (I’m really happy I didn’t get around to planting last weekend). I love being outdoors, but my work keeps me inside a lot. Now that the days are longer, I have more opportunities to take my kiddo outside exploring. Her favorite thing to do is go “hiking”, which essentially means her getting into this kid-carrying backpack I’ve got and riding on my back for several miles of rail-trail.

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I’ll admit right of the bat that I didn’t do any research before posting this one. I haven’t read any literature on dreams in years, but somehow discussion among some egghead-types turned to common dreams. Among these:

–The one where you sign up for a class and forget about it until finals

–The one where you are in class and notice you’re naked

–The one where your teeth are falling out

Now all of these have, in each person, all sorts of interesting associations, but I’m curious whether these particular dreams are more common in academic types. Do folks outside of academia have similar dreams, or are their anxieties expressed differently?

Thread now officially open.

The end of the world is a common religious idea. The end of this planet and the end of time itself are ideas not unknown to cosmologists, but are not exactly an immediate threat.

To certain religious groups, the threat is now, and is welcome. “Signs” are everywhere. Of course, we’ve been down this road before, in the 9th century, a few times in the 19th century, and of course in 2000.

Turn on the TV any Sunday—there are plenty of preachers reading and reading and reading, and of course finding signs of the imminent apocalypse. Hey, there’s that whole “Left Behind” series of books reveling in the end of the world.

Aside from the fact that no one has yet correctly predicted The End, there are a few problems here. First, if God wanted you to know when the end was coming, wouldn’t he have just written a date clearly in the Bible, like, “HEY, MORTAL FOOLS, REPENT! THE END IS NIGH! 8 PM, FEBRUARY 22ND, 2010. I MEAN IT!”

Or perhaps he doesn’t want us to know, and to look for it would be a sin against him?

Or maybe, just maybe, all of this “End times” stuff is just human interpretations of human works and human fears. After all, since God hasn’t bothered to inscribe it on the clear blue sky, or appear on ABC during “Desperate Housewives”, all predictions of the End must necessarily be those of people, not a supernatural being who would know such things.

So, here we are, on our usually pleasant little globe, worrying about when it will end. That’s just lovely. But perhaps—just maybe—we should worry about what happens if it doesn’t end. Cyclone Nargis in Burma/Myanmar, Hurricane Katrina in the U.S., famines, floods, fires—all of these so-called natural disasters, while not entirely preventable, are things we can plan for. This type of large-scale planning (such as the Dutch flood prevention systems) requires casting ourselves far into the future, and actually sacrificing present comfort for future survival. Of course, if the end is near, who cares? Wait for God to take us bodily into his arms, and to Hell (literally) with everyone else.

I, for one, can’t live with that. Just because some sweaty preacher in a studio says the world is ending doesn’t make it so. I have kids, and I care what happens to them, so it really pisses me off when others say, “just come to Christ, and all will be well.” It won’t. If you put your head in the sand hoping for immediate Rapture, you are admitting that you don’t care a whit for your fellow human beings. How Christian is that?