30 March 2006
A smattering of opinionism
North Carolina's lottery began today, the last of any East Coast state. This is the worst idea in the long, sordid history of bad ideas. What will happen is this: it will be a huge success at first because everyone will rush out and buy a ticket to see what the fuss is about. Sales will be good, lawmakers will grow complacent, and when that money stops trickling in because the novelty has worn off, what happens is funds that they thought were coming in for education simply won't be there. The program will run in the red, and you know who gets screwed?--the taxpayers.
The rape at a Duke house party made the front page of the New York Times yesterday. I really hope these allegations aren't true, but this thing isn't going away any time soon (DNA testing from every member of the lacrosse team except one is apparently in the lab right now, and should exonerate them according to a letter they wrote to their coaches).
Oh, and UNC renamed where I live so it can feel better about itself. "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet."
A brief defense of Intelligent Design:
There was an article in the Hill last month by Ben Lundin about how Intelligent Design isn't a science. He got it half right.
Intelligent Design is a philosophical argument against the categories naturalist materialism uses to interpret the world. Science gives two reasons for everything: causal laws (gravity, light waves, etc...) and randomness (the subatomic level). Intelligent Design says that there is one more cause: a rational agent. By design, science isn't meant to catch this third category because of what it assumes about the nature of the world, what "categories" it uses. The movie Contact touches on this "third cause" philosophy. If we got a signal from outer space that listed all prime numbers in sequential order, we wouldn't assume that it either derived from a natural law or from randomness. We would assume that a rational agent created that signal. It would drastically alter our conception of science.
Now that wild tangent #2,435 is done, I just got killed by an 8 a.m. exam. My bed is calling my name, or maybe that's just the sleep deprivation...
The rape at a Duke house party made the front page of the New York Times yesterday. I really hope these allegations aren't true, but this thing isn't going away any time soon (DNA testing from every member of the lacrosse team except one is apparently in the lab right now, and should exonerate them according to a letter they wrote to their coaches).
Oh, and UNC renamed where I live so it can feel better about itself. "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet."
A brief defense of Intelligent Design:
There was an article in the Hill last month by Ben Lundin about how Intelligent Design isn't a science. He got it half right.
Intelligent Design is a philosophical argument against the categories naturalist materialism uses to interpret the world. Science gives two reasons for everything: causal laws (gravity, light waves, etc...) and randomness (the subatomic level). Intelligent Design says that there is one more cause: a rational agent. By design, science isn't meant to catch this third category because of what it assumes about the nature of the world, what "categories" it uses. The movie Contact touches on this "third cause" philosophy. If we got a signal from outer space that listed all prime numbers in sequential order, we wouldn't assume that it either derived from a natural law or from randomness. We would assume that a rational agent created that signal. It would drastically alter our conception of science.
Now that wild tangent #2,435 is done, I just got killed by an 8 a.m. exam. My bed is calling my name, or maybe that's just the sleep deprivation...
