I will admit that, in general, I’m not a huge basketball fan. I know how to play, I know the rules, and I do sometimes enjoy watching it from time to time, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve been to a game and I’ve never been to an NBA game[1]. Would I…
Points to Ponder Archives
Blogs that pose interesting conundrums
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Link: Why I Lost Faith in the Pro-Choice Movement →
Yes, it definitely has an attention grabbing headline, but it also raises several really good points:
I was looking through a Time magazine article whose infograph cited data from the Guttmacher Institute about the most common reasons women have abortions. It immediately struck me that none of the factors on the list were conditions that we tell women to consider before engaging in sexual activity. Don’t have the money to raise a child? Don’t think your boyfriend would be a good father? Don’t feel ready to be a mother? Women were never encouraged to consider these factors before they had sex; only before they had a baby.
The fundamental truth of the pro-choice movement, from which all of its tenets flow, is that sex does not have to have life-altering consequences. I suddenly saw that it was the struggle to uphold this “truth” that led to all the shady dealings, all the fear of information, all the mental gymnastics that I’d observed.
That’s a bold claim: sex does not have to have life-altering consequences. Do you agree?
found via my friend Tim
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In my opinion, there are two critical events that must occur when making something happen. The first is you have to choose to decide to do it. This may seem intuitively obvious and perhaps even easy, but I think it’s actually the hardest. Decide comes from the Latin dēcīdō…from dē (“down from”) + caedō (“cut”).…
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Chauncey has left Seattle for an adventure at seminary. Thus far, I approve of his classes: From teamchauncey.wordpress.com:One of my professors said something yesterday that stuck with me. He said, “There are some people who say there are no stupid questions…we know this is patently untrue. However, the stupid question is not asked from ignorance…
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Until Randall pointed this out , it didn’t even cross my mind: the inverse[1] of miles (length) per a gallon (volume) is a unit of area. Ergo, my car’s efficiency is 0.1023mm2, or roughly twice the area of a pixel on a screen.
- gallons per mile [↩]
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Growing up, my friend neighbor-friend, Eddie, would often joke that he would to hire me for his company when we were older. We were 12 and he was always vague about the actual industry, but it seemed like it could be fun. In high school, another friend, Peter, swore up and down that his sole…
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Failure Doesn’t Suck →
Two comments from Sir James Dyson that resonate with me:
I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.
We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off. I spent seven years on our washing machine [which has two drums, instead of one].
In general, I don’t think we (as society) appreciate and accept failure as much as we should, or maybe we just mislabel them (i.e. call things failures that should be called something else).
Learning how (and when) to fail gracefully and with pride (instead of shame) has been a tough element to learn. However, I’ve found that being okay with failing has lots rewards that make me a happier person, in particular because I’m not as anxious anymore.
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People frustrate me[1], it’s hard for me to even find a word that appropriately reflects my sentiment. It feels like mass ignorance. I see so many things wrong with the world, religion included — there are so many people who do things in the name of Christ that are downright unchristian and not supported by…
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Sometimes I wonder about interesting things, such as how much energy would it take to boil all the water of Lake Washington: The volume of Lake Washington is 2.89 km3[1] The average lake temperature is 9.71°C[2] It takes 4.19 Joules to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C: [3] The density of water…
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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…