At last, the top secret formula about how U.S. News & World Report ranks colleges has been revealed. I shall inform my university that Step 3 is particularly important and explains why we aren’t the #1 school in the galaxy.
I know I’m notorious for complaining about those goofy definitions of atheism (“it just means “not believing in god”, nothing more!”, the superficial mob will say) because the word has acquired much deeper resonances that we ignore at our peril, and has implications far greater than simple rejection of one assertion. But the other word that people love to abuse is “freethought”. The same superficial twits all think it means simply that you’re allowed to think whatever you want (which, it turns out, you can do even in a theocracy) and that it’s a kind of hedonism of the mind in which all things are permissible.
It’s not. It’s a word with a long history, a real meaning, and a greater substance than the poseurs know of. Alex Gabriel does a marvelous job scouring the ignoramuses on the meaning of freethought.
Objections to Freethought‘s place in our masthead are among the laziest, glibbest soundbites our critics have, but more than that display a failure to grasp even the term’s most basic history. Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry – to think so boasts the same green literalism as thinking a Friends’ Meeting House is a shared beach hut or that Scotch pancakes contain Scotch – though even if it were, it’s silly and inane to assume one’s critics are automatons or say loose collective viewpoints mean dictatorship. Freethought is a specified tradition, European in the main, whose constituents have by and large been countercultural, radical and leftist, everything Condell and cohorts viscerally despise.
I am so fed up with people who say that they understand the meaning of the word “free” and the meaning of the word “thought”, and therefore they understand everything they need to know about “freethought”. And these are often the same people who claim that their tradition is one of knowledge and learning and skepticism, yet they want to replace the complex world of knowledge with a kind of naive literalism.
Or should I say dysteleological physicalesque? Richard Feynman wrote poetry.
I keep looking at this 57 year old sign and my brain just kind of shuts down. The world has changed just over the span of my life, and in this case…not for the better.
(via Mike the Mad Biologist)
I like that title so much better than “Ivy League”. Here’s a brief and amusing history of American higher education that focuses almost entirely on those revered and over-rated East coast places (says the guy at a land grant college, a program which only gets a quick mention).
Other things that get only the most cursory but tantalizing mention: a tradition of rioting and dueling. I think, however, we can do without the tale of the student coming back to Princeton to beat up one of his teachers.
You know how, as the work piles up and the grading becomes onerous and the students get more demanding and critical, you sometimes need a day off? I wonder if my division secretary would be sympathetic if I called in and said I had the brain whispers really bad one day.
Actually, the secretaries sometimes look a little fed up with us faculty around the time we’re failing to meet all our deadlines…they might reply that they’re feeling it too, and then I’d be terrified.
The purported managing editor of CNN explains how they picked their top story in a fictitious opinion piece (which still rings very true).
There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world. For Christ’s sake, there was an accompanying story with the headline “Miley’s Shocking Moves.” In fact, putting that story front and center was actually doing, if anything, a disservice to the public. And come to think of it, probably a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Syria, those suffering from the current unrest in Egypt, or, hell, even people who just wanted to read about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
It’s all about the traffic, I guess, not the news…which any glimpse of CNN, Fox News, or the Huff Po will tell you.
I didn’t say anything about it because I was totally squicked out by the weird things she was doing with her tongue.
In case you can’t tell, that’s a Cthulhoid me careening through the cosmos on a space hopper.
I used to hide in a back room in our basement where I had a stash of roadkill, and I’d … study … anatomy without telling my parents.
Parents, talk to your children. Don’t let them go down my path. You can point to me in public and whisper, “If you keep playing with bones, you’ll end up like him.”
