Ricky Gervais on Noah’s Ark

I woke up this morning convinced it was Friday. Needless to say, the realization it was only Wednesday threatened to undo the little bit of sanity that I’ve been holding onto this week, and that was quickly exacerbated by the first new story I came across on my Facebook feed “Asteroid 2011 AG5 My Pose Threat to Earth in 2040.” A long week and threat of annihilation from above? And all of this before coffee? So in an attempt to “rebalance” before facing today (and the rest of the week), I turned to a little comedy.

Here’s a clip from Ricky Gervais’ “Science” show, where he tackles the inconsistencies in Noah’s Ark. It’s very funny stuff (and I typically don’t like stand-up).  I’ve decided to pass it along, in case you, too read about the asteroid or woke up this morning thinking it was Friday.

Enjoy!

Day 10: A Book that Changed My Life

This Thirty Day Book Challenge is turning out to be significantly more, well, challenging, than I had initially thought. I have spent the last few days giving today’s topic some serious thought…

There is no one, single book that has “changed my life.” No magic moment upon reading a book that as I finished it I knew that I was forever different. What there has been, however, is a series of books, from different authors and at different times, that have forced me to look at the world, my life, my ideas and my beliefs in new and different ways. This group of books, once I really began to think about them, have quite a lot in common. They are all in some way “academic” as opposed to more popular fiction, and all have an undeniable philosophical component, although some more than others. Perhaps what the strongest common thread between all of these texts is that they have all, in their own way, helped me form my intellectual curiosities, my personal philosophical outlook, my moral and ethical grounding, and my general sense of what life should be about.

A more honest way of framing today’s post would be to admit that it’s not necessarily books that have impacted me so strongly, rather thinkers and writers. If I were to list a few, I would include as varied a group as David Hume, Carl Sagan, Thomas Kuhn, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Erwin Schrödinger, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, and Michel Foucault. If I were to count fiction as well, then I would also include Umberto Eco, Aldous Huxley again, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Tom Robbins. If I included poetry, then the list would have to expand to also include William Blake and Allen Ginsberg. In other words, there is no way that I could sit and discuss a single text, or even a single author in regards to how they have changed my life.

I’ve been reading for a lifetime, and for that lifetime these thinkers and writers have had a certain and cumulative effect. They have, together, taught me to think critically and embrace reason, and to revel in questions instead of becoming entrenched in apparent answers. They have reminded me to never fail to pay attention to beauty that surrounds me, and to live curiously, openly, and passionately. They have taught me that a vigorous intellect is nothing to be ashamed of. Together they have reinforced the idea that kindness and generosity are the highest virtues, and that our significance is measured by how we love, how we think, and how our actions affect those around us. They have opened my eyes to the wonders of this universe, as well as the magnificence of our minds and our hearts. In short, they set me on the path to become the woman who I am, and every time I read anything by these scientists, writers, poets, and thinkers, I see a little of myself reflected in their words.

Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive as there are authors whose influence, although subtle, was nevertheless significant, and other authors who as a result of time have simply been forgotten, although their impact surely remains. Morevoer, and perhaps most importantly, I have not stopped reading. I encounter writers, historians, scientists, and philosophers who, on a daily basis, push me out of my intellectual comfort zone and cause me to rethink my ideas and question my realities, and I hope that this will forever be the case.

Day 3, Revisited: Books that have made me laugh

I was looking through some of my books this past weekend in a vain attempt to put some order to my shelves, and I realized that I was completely wrong in my response to day three of the Thirty Day Book Challenge. I had originally selected Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha, and although I certainly did laugh my way through the book with its unapologetic irreverence, as i looked through my less obviously funny academic books, I realized that they were the ones that truly made me laugh.

I’m not kidding, let me explain. I don’t tend to find humor in obvious places, but I do (I think) have a sense of humor. The vast majority of my reading consists of academic non-fiction, and let me tell you, these historians have a wonderful sense of humor! I think I’ve laughed more reading Isaiah Berlin and Peter Gay than while reading anything labeled as comedy. Thankfully, I annotate my books heavily so I can back this claim up. Allow me to submit the evidence, although I know that I will be dropping some serious “cool points” by showing this…

and yes, even footnotes can be funny...

Beautiful Alignment

As you already know, I’m constantly looking up at the moon and stars. This past Friday night as I headed out to dinner with my daughter, the sky was especially stunning.  My daughter saw it first and pointed it out. Jupiter, Venus and our Moon were perfectly aligned, and the moon, an impossibly thin crescent, was illuminated by earthshine. Just beautiful.

Einstein on God and Religion

I recently came across this letter by Albert Einstein, written to Erik Gutkind, in 1954. Einstein had just read Gutkind’s book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, and this letter was his response.

Translated Transcript (from Letters of Note):

Princeton, 3. 1. 1954

Dear Mr Gutkind,

Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me … With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element … unites us as having an “American Attitude.”

Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong … have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision…

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluation of human behavior … I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

Yours,

A. Einstein

The letter was sold at auction in May of 2008, and not surprisingly one of the bidders was Richard Dawkins.

The same site had other interesting letters by Einstein on religion. Here are the links, and all are worth a read.

• “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic.”
• The Delusion
• Einstein on Astrology

Sunday Funnies #8

From SMBC

Umberto Eco’s Semiotic Schema for the World “Neanderthal”

from The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco
via biblioklept and To a Dusty Shelf We Aspire

Old Photographs

I recently wrote, as part of the Thirty Day Book Challenge, a post about Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the young-adult novel by Ransom Riggs. It came recommended by my students, and as I wrote in the entry for that day’s challenge (favorite Y/A novel), I really enjoyed the book. My favorite part, however, was not necessarily the narrative, although it was certainly enjoyable. The best part of the book, for me at least, were all the old photographs.

My great-grandmother's engagement photo, taken sometime in the mid-1920s.

I have always loved looking at old photos, especially of people who I don’t know, and thinking of all the possible back-stories that could have led to the moment the photograph was taken. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with four generations living under the same roof, and when I was young I would spend countless hours lost in my great-grandmother’s photo albums, creating different stories each time I leafed through those pages. There was a certain attractive combination of mystery and nostalgia (even for something I never knew) when I looked at old photographs, that exerted an almost gravitational force. I would really lose myself in my great-grandmother’s old photo albums,  being unconsciously careful not to tear the brittle, black pages, but entirely consumed by all those unknown histories. Now, as I take photos documenting my own family’s life, I often wonder if many years from now someone will be sifting through them, creating their own narratives for us, inventing our pasts, and wondering whatever became of us.

Last night, as I was laying in bed and catching up on some reading, I came across this on LibriCritic; a video created and narrated by Ransom Riggs about his passion for old photographs.

Enjoy!

Something beautiful for a Friday evening.

This has been one of those weeks where work has threatened to completely consume my last shed of sanity, and my daughter, who only recently started school, has been sick again. In other words, it has been a week where I have been occupied and preoccupied to the point of near-numbness, and as the weekend approaches, I have decided to take a moment to stop and remember that not all is stress and worry.

I admit to having more than a mere passing interest in the work of Spanish street artist Sam3. His work, which I’ve featured in this blog here and here, has an uncanny ability to tug at something almost visceral, and fill me with that ineffable sense of wonder that I’ve so often talked about here, and that at times like this is so sorely needed. I wish I was better at expressing what his art communicates to me, but I can say that it is certainly poetic, always thought-provoking, and unfailingly beautiful.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Day 9: A Book that Made Me Sick

Unlike the majority of the previous challenges, today’s selection was incredibly easy to come by: Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker’s central thesis is that we are now living in an essentially peaceful time, where the chances of meeting a violent death are far lower than in past eras, and moreover, our era is less cruel and less violent (person to person as well as state-sponsored violence) than any other era in human history. He argues this thesis over the course of nearly 800 pages, with the assistance of an overabundance of graphs (mainly containing a single line declining from top right to lower left), and incredibly graphic descriptions of how violent we used to be (more on that later).

First, let me start by saying that I did not like this book. At all. I thought the argumentation was incredibly weak, the thesis dodgy, and that his attempt at history, albeit incredibly descriptive, lacked any real analysis. I know that I’m not in the majority here, and that most reviews were favorable and found his book convincing, but I have to politely disagree. Simply exhausting me with volume (be it of words, graphs, or graphic examples of violence) is not enough to convince me of any argument, not even one, such as this one, that I was predisposed to accept.

But that’s not what today’s challenge is about, and although I did feel “sick” having to read 800 pages of never-ending graphs and poor logic, the reason that I selected this book for today’s challenge is because of it’s incredibly graphic (maybe even gratuitously so) descriptions of the violence that we have, in times past, perpetrated against each other. I don’t like gratuitous violence, not in film nor in print, and although some descriptions presented in this book did effectively serve to further his argument, at times it felt as if he was trying to “gross us out” with these descriptions so that we could, in turn, pat ourselves on the back for having moved so far beyond it. Some of it is even too graphic to post here, but I will provide a couple of examples.

Breached with surprising ease by the cold bronze, the body’s contents pour forth in viscous torrents: portions of brains emerge at the ends of quivering spears, young men hold back their viscera with desperate hands, eyes are knocked or cut from skulls and glimmer sightlessly in the dust. Sharp points forge new entrances and exits in young bodies: in the center of foreheads, in temples, between eyes, at the base of the neck, clean through the mouth or cheek and out the other side, through flanks, crotches, buttocks, hands, navels, backs, stomachs, nipples, chests, noses, ears, and chins. . . . Spears, pikes arrows, swords, daggers, and rocks lust for the savor of flesh and blood. Blood sprays forth and mists the air. Bone fragments fly. Marrow boils from fresh stumps.

Right. Or this,

As the levers bent forward, the main force of my knees against the two planks burst asunder the sinews of my hams, and the lids of me knees were crushed. My eyes began to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s stick. My lips were shivering, my groans were vehement, and blood sprang from my arms, broken sinews, and knees. Being loosed from these pinnacles of pain, I was hand-fast set on the floor, with this incessant implication: “Confess! Confess!”

I read this book relatively recently, and I started reading at the dance studio waiting for my daughter to get out of her ballet class. That turned out to be a poor decision. I had to stop once to step outside for some fresh air, a second time to get a drink of water, and I eventually had to stop reading the book altogether as the other moms were casting strange looks my way as a direct result of the look of sheer horror on my face. Like I said, I don’t do well with such vivid descriptions of violence, and graphic nature of the examples selected by Pinker, compounded by the sheer number of them, quite literally made me sick.