Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music at work. Though I’m an unrepentant fan of sports talk radio, I find that I when trying to solve a hard programming problem it’s easier not to have chatter about Barry Bond and Pacman Jones in the background. Today I’m listening to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3. I’ve owned this CD for over ten years, but it’s been a while since I listened to it.
It’s a rather minimalist piece, but it’s brilliantly beautiful. What makes it stand out is the beautiful voice of the soprano, who sings a series of songs about the connection between a mother and her children. They’re wonderful on their own, but they take you to a new level when you realize that one of the songs is actually a prayer to the Virgin Mary that an 18 year old girl wrote to comfort her mother on the wall of a Gestapo cell in Poland, where they were both being held.
No. Mother, do not weep, Most chaste Queen of Heaven, Support me always. Zdrowas Mario
She later died in that cell.
Day 5: Gandhi went to prison. So did Martin Luther King Jr. So did Robert Downey Jr. and Martha Stewart Jr. and I think Nelson Mandela Jr. Mandela was imprisoned for, like, 50 years or something for being black and also for driving an uninsured vehicle, if I’m reading Wikipedia correctly. Nicky often mentions me and Gandhi and how incredibly thin we both are and how she wonders if he used bronzer.
From The Paris Hilton prison diaries
I didn’t see the debate last night (The election is 17 months away, can’t we just enjoy the summer?) But Andrew Sullivan did, and he believes he saw George Bush’s legacy on display:
He has decisively increased the religiosity of public debate – as well, of course, as its fatuousness. How can we “end poverty” in the next ten years, asked Jim Wallis? Umm: didn’t LBJ already try that? And, given the certainty and self-righteousness all around me, why not just end poverty, illness, and illegitimacy in the next ten months? Why not end tyranny as well, while we’re at it? (Oops: we just tried that. Never mind.) Jeez. Some people just keep putting boundaries on the power of God. When merged with government, what social ill can it not solve?
Fabulous.
No, it’s the Washington Post:
A majority of members of Iraq’s parliament have signed a draft bill that would require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq and freeze current troop levels.
Doubtless the work of the Defeatocrats. Somehow Nancy Pelosi is involved. Or maybe Bill Clinton.
From Lily Allen, who I never heard of until 3 minutes ago:
“I thought that being a popstar meant going out getting trashed with famous people and sleeping in all day,” the young singer jokes. “The fact that this is not true has come as a huge disappointment to me.”
I’ve heard a fair share of second-guessing about how the police and the administration in Blacksburg handled yesterday’s terrible events, particularly how slow they were to notify the campus about what was going on. I don’t pretend to know whether and to what to degree they were wrong, but it seems pretty obvious to me that every school in the country should have a Twitter channel and require every student and faculty member to sign up for it.
Yeah, a lot of people would turn off their phones in class, but plenty of them wouldn’t, and the people outside of class may have been able to identify the shooter before he got to second crime scene.
Surely this means the times they are a changin’.
The invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.
Interesting thought about religion from Jonah Goldberg, in which he writes candidly and dispassionately about his (relative lack of) faith.
And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?
I have no idea if this assertion is borne out by the facts, but it’s consistent with the well-document phenomenon of relatively little violent crime in Europe and Canada even as religiosity is much lower there as well.
Every now and then some misinformed clown writes a letter to the editor about how problems in society would be solved if (among other things) we had prayer in school. I always want to ask those people why, except for that commited by Islamists angry about cartoons, violence is so low in <a href=”http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=norris_27_2″>Denmark</a> (scroll to chart at bottom).
Over the last couple years I’ve written (I think) four letters to the editors of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. Most recently I wrote one last week in response to this letter. Today they printed it. That makes three out of the four that have made it to publication. Woo hoo!
As an aside, I noticed that they recently started allowing people to post responses to the letters. An excellent idea since letters are so often edited for brevity.
For the last year or so there’s been a ton of articles about how MySpace, YouTube etc is creating a new generation of narcissistic exhibitionist teens who put it all out there and wait for the pedophiles to come knocking. On one hand, I agree that many teens may not know what they’re getting into and that parents need to pay attention and take reasonable steps to keep their kids safe. That said, I think the long-term impact of this phenomenon could be remarkable.
I’m hardly a teenager at 38, but in the last 10+ years I can trace practically all of the important developments in my life to exposing myself online. At a practical level, I really mean that I’ve met a lot of people (including my wife) simply by emailing them. Being exposed and relatively open online has also helped my business by helping me find customers, investors, partners etc.
My point? I’m probably in the top 10% of people in my age group in terms of leveraging online networking. The remaining 90% are too busy or set in their ways to take advantage of these new technologies (and understanding the etiquette that goes with them). When it comes to social networking, my generation is a bunch of old fogies with their VCR clocks doing this:
A much greater percentage of kids today intuitively understand this. Right now they’re doing sophomoric stuff on MySpace, but today’s teenagers will be looking for jobs in a few years, and in 10 years they’ll be the hiring managers. Of course they will take advantage of social networking tools like MySpace, Facebook etc and will look askance at anyone who doesn’t, just like I’m amazed when I occasionally meet someone who doesn’t have an email address.
(As an aside, while I was writing this post I got a phone call from someone in Belgium who has followed my company very closely online. It may or may not lead to a business opportunity down the road, but the fact that he knew who to call, even though I’m 7-8 time zones away in another country, is yet another example of this trend.)
Hat tip: The Social Networking Weblog