Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   a planet for those predisposed towards authoritarianism
Friday, August 25 2006
Science is a method, not a dogma. It is a process for interpeting nature. As the facts come in, the story is fleshed out and nuances are added. Periodically assumptions that have been made are found to have been wrong. This is particularly true when it comes to placing things in categories. Are Giant Pandas a kind of bear? Or are they more like enormous racoons? Do whales have a closer evolutionary relationship to seals or to goats? The other day Pluto fell victim to the harsh reality of accumulated information. To continue calling it a "planet" was to either render the term "planet" meaningless or to expand its definition to encompass other things. The easiest solution, the correct solution, was to demote the damn thing. Just because you learned it was a planet in school doesn't mean it has to stay that way. If that's the reason it should remain a planet, than we're catering to the idiots who slept through the lesson about what science is. It's much more important to remember how science works than to remember how things were classified. In the hierarchy of importance, the highest is "how science works." This is followed by some basic underlying principles uncovered by science, such as Darwinian Natural Selection or Newtonian Gravitation. Far, far down in the list of importance is the classification of objects. It's no surprise that a flamboyant know-nothing like Fox News' John Gibson (any relation to Mel?) thinks that the rote memorization was the important stuff. That's characteristic of a mind predisposed to function in an authoritarian environment. It isn't just that the man has a weak mind; he's also fundamentally not-free.

We had rain today for the first time in weeks. We also dogsat a tiny purebred long-haired Daschund, one with the color pattern of a Rottweiler. As dogs go, he was a sad specimen, acting confused and disoriented when Gretchen took him for a walk in the woods. What, had he never walked on leaf litter before? His only other contribution to our day was terrorizing the cats with a series of monotonous barks. His contribution to our life was to remind us how wonderful our dogs are.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060825

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