I'm about to graduate college wondering what the hell I've been doing in college for the past few years? What could I have possibly learned at this institution that is worth so much of my parents' savings? I cannot point to a tangible body of facts, figures, or specific examples that I have acquired. Did the dean of admissions steal my parents' money?
The answer depends on what you value. While I value the practical applications of a product (knowledge?), others enjoy the less tangible aspects of a good. Status. Revelry. Youth. My parents have given me all of those with higher education, and I have a feeling that these compose the benefits of an institution' s higher price tag.
Despite my general suspicion of higher education: the glut of B.A.s in the workforce, the ever mounting student debt young professionals face, and the deceitful efforts of those who seek to tie the notion of higher salaries to higher education, I believe that higher education is worth the expense. My years of a liberal arts education have taught me to literally think liberally, examining every assumption and honing solid beliefs about the world and the way that it behaves. The Liberal Arts have also given me enough confidence in my critical thinking, problem solving, and time management to act toward improving the world that I have viewed with a critical eye from my perch atop the Ivory Tower.
Is that what we pay for? Or is it status, revelry, and youth?
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Christmas with Extended, Extended Family
I find that a recurring theme in Christmas specials is a message about the meaning of Christmas: it's not about the commercialism, but about family, and it's easy enough for us to get caught up in the tension between the cult of Jesus and the cult of Santa Claus. After an especially enjoyable Christmas spent with my loved ones, I've been reminded that the cheesy specials are right.
Christmas is definitely about time spent with loved ones, but what about religion? Faith in the face of science is a challenge. All that survives my objective scrutiny, regardless of one's beliefs, is this: Christmas is a celebration influenced by the late Roman celebration of Sol Invictus, when the Sun falls to its lowest point in the sky, and then is "resurrected" in its first perceptible northward motion on December 25th, and adapted to advance the often political agenda of the early church in the dying days of the Roman Empire around 380 C.E.
This event has been observed by pagan cultures for millennia with certain recurring themes. A savior rises after 3 days, being born on December 25th of a virgin, announced by a star in the East, and attended by three magi. Without going into detail, these themes all have their roots in the cosmological position of Earth and the Sun as it appears on December 25th.
Now imagine living in prehistory. Chiefs and priests followed the movements of the sun with precision, and everyone had a spiritual dependence on the Sun as their annual savior, who chased away the cold and brought food in the harvest. That seems joyous to me and a better time than any to rejoice with your clan that you are all safe, well, alive, and together.
I like to recognize the pagan roots of Christmas in the winter solstice as a sort of hyperbolic celebration of the "Christmas is about your family" message that I so love. Regardless of how it is celebrated, the winter solstice seems to be important across cultures. This is a celebration that connects so many humans, across cultures, across continents, and, perhaps the most difficult, across time. I find relief from our generationally self-centered and narcissistic society in the ability of Christmas and its progenitors to bind us as one species to the cosmological breathing of Planet Earth, to those who have come before us and will come after us, and to our extended, extended family.
Merry Christmas
Christmas is definitely about time spent with loved ones, but what about religion? Faith in the face of science is a challenge. All that survives my objective scrutiny, regardless of one's beliefs, is this: Christmas is a celebration influenced by the late Roman celebration of Sol Invictus, when the Sun falls to its lowest point in the sky, and then is "resurrected" in its first perceptible northward motion on December 25th, and adapted to advance the often political agenda of the early church in the dying days of the Roman Empire around 380 C.E.
This event has been observed by pagan cultures for millennia with certain recurring themes. A savior rises after 3 days, being born on December 25th of a virgin, announced by a star in the East, and attended by three magi. Without going into detail, these themes all have their roots in the cosmological position of Earth and the Sun as it appears on December 25th.
Now imagine living in prehistory. Chiefs and priests followed the movements of the sun with precision, and everyone had a spiritual dependence on the Sun as their annual savior, who chased away the cold and brought food in the harvest. That seems joyous to me and a better time than any to rejoice with your clan that you are all safe, well, alive, and together.
I like to recognize the pagan roots of Christmas in the winter solstice as a sort of hyperbolic celebration of the "Christmas is about your family" message that I so love. Regardless of how it is celebrated, the winter solstice seems to be important across cultures. This is a celebration that connects so many humans, across cultures, across continents, and, perhaps the most difficult, across time. I find relief from our generationally self-centered and narcissistic society in the ability of Christmas and its progenitors to bind us as one species to the cosmological breathing of Planet Earth, to those who have come before us and will come after us, and to our extended, extended family.
Merry Christmas
Friday, December 23, 2011
Climate Change is NOW
"My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet, and the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us."
-Mitt Romney 10/28/2011
"Establishment" Republican Nominee for the 2012 Presidential Race
Wait, Mitt, are you telling me you think that half of us believe that we can drive SUVs, burn coal for electricity, and spew black smog into the air without any consequences? Are we so myopic?
Actually, yes. It seems that most of us would rather ignore the problem. Since they peaked during the winter of 2006-07, queries in Google for "Global Warming" have been progressively lower each winter as people scratch their heads, wondering, "Wow, it never used to be so warm this time of year," without ever asking "why?" It happens every winter, but memories are short and no one notices the pattern. The 20 warmest years ever have all occurred since 1981, and the 10 warmest have all happened in the last 12 years.
As 2011 draws to a close, we are wrapping up one of the warmest years ever, this January through November period is the seventh warmest on record. In Western New York, we expect to have snow on the ground by this time of the year. I'm used to hearing my friends at the University of Rochester complain about how their flights home for the holidays might be grounded by blizzards, but this year, I saw a kid playing guitar on the quad as late as mid-December. MID-DECEMBER! We should be trudging through snow drifts!
Hey that doesn't seem so bad... 55 (F) degree temperatures mean that I can ride my bike to campus to take my finals. Who wouldn't welcome a little global warming?
Well, global warming is a misnomer. The proper monicker is climate change. The trapping of heat on planet Earth by greenhouse gases adds energy to climate patterns. While this will make the Earth warmer in general, we can't predict what effect this influx of energy to climate patterns will have. Climate scientists are warning the world to prepare for extreme weather patterns as the planet adjusts to the energy we are trapping. Think, more energy in warmer oceans makes for more violent hurricanes.
Climate change is already happening, and we are ALREADY witnessing the weather anomalies that this added energy in the climate system will produce. 2011 has been a weird year for weather, hasn't it? A heavy snowstorm in late October shut down many Northeastern coastal cities like New York and Philadelphia that hardly ever see snow before December. Droughts across Texas and New Mexico parched Southeastern Americans this summer, and 20 cities in the United States set all-time record heat highs! The problem isn't localized to the United States, either. Does anybody remember the disastrous floods in Thailand? According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these freak weather events are caused by the warming of our planet.
Climate change is staring us in the face every time we wear our spring coats in the winter. But nobody seems to notice. As Mitt Romney's statements make clear, nobody really wants to own up to the fact that our civilization is causing this problem. Numerous scientific indicators, including tree rings and glacial ice cores, indicate a steadily accelerating rise in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and the empirical data can only be explained by climate models that account for anthropogenic forces. In other words, there is no scientific explanation for the observed warming of the planet other than human activity.
But we all go about our daily lives driving cars and leaving the lights on, and the people who see this problem developing are shrugged off as loons. It's okay, I'm guilty of it, too. Who wants to believe that doomsday is coming?
We are just going to need to adjust to living in a new world in a decade or two. Maybe it will be one where warmer seas produce deadlier hurricanes. Maybe it will be one in which New York City's subway system and driving tunnels have been flooded by rising sea levels. I don't know what it will look like, but I believe that the weather will be worse and I refuse to kick the climate-change-can any further down the generational timeline. Our climate is changing now, and our only hope of saving the quality of the environment in the future is international regulation. We're not going to get that, though, as long as it remains a requirement that the candidates for the presidential nomination of one of the two major parties in the most powerful nation in the world doubt the science of climate change. WAKE UP, AMERICA.
-Mitt Romney 10/28/2011
"Establishment" Republican Nominee for the 2012 Presidential Race
Wait, Mitt, are you telling me you think that half of us believe that we can drive SUVs, burn coal for electricity, and spew black smog into the air without any consequences? Are we so myopic?
Actually, yes. It seems that most of us would rather ignore the problem. Since they peaked during the winter of 2006-07, queries in Google for "Global Warming" have been progressively lower each winter as people scratch their heads, wondering, "Wow, it never used to be so warm this time of year," without ever asking "why?" It happens every winter, but memories are short and no one notices the pattern. The 20 warmest years ever have all occurred since 1981, and the 10 warmest have all happened in the last 12 years.
As 2011 draws to a close, we are wrapping up one of the warmest years ever, this January through November period is the seventh warmest on record. In Western New York, we expect to have snow on the ground by this time of the year. I'm used to hearing my friends at the University of Rochester complain about how their flights home for the holidays might be grounded by blizzards, but this year, I saw a kid playing guitar on the quad as late as mid-December. MID-DECEMBER! We should be trudging through snow drifts!
Hey that doesn't seem so bad... 55 (F) degree temperatures mean that I can ride my bike to campus to take my finals. Who wouldn't welcome a little global warming?
Well, global warming is a misnomer. The proper monicker is climate change. The trapping of heat on planet Earth by greenhouse gases adds energy to climate patterns. While this will make the Earth warmer in general, we can't predict what effect this influx of energy to climate patterns will have. Climate scientists are warning the world to prepare for extreme weather patterns as the planet adjusts to the energy we are trapping. Think, more energy in warmer oceans makes for more violent hurricanes.
Climate change is already happening, and we are ALREADY witnessing the weather anomalies that this added energy in the climate system will produce. 2011 has been a weird year for weather, hasn't it? A heavy snowstorm in late October shut down many Northeastern coastal cities like New York and Philadelphia that hardly ever see snow before December. Droughts across Texas and New Mexico parched Southeastern Americans this summer, and 20 cities in the United States set all-time record heat highs! The problem isn't localized to the United States, either. Does anybody remember the disastrous floods in Thailand? According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these freak weather events are caused by the warming of our planet.
Climate change is staring us in the face every time we wear our spring coats in the winter. But nobody seems to notice. As Mitt Romney's statements make clear, nobody really wants to own up to the fact that our civilization is causing this problem. Numerous scientific indicators, including tree rings and glacial ice cores, indicate a steadily accelerating rise in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and the empirical data can only be explained by climate models that account for anthropogenic forces. In other words, there is no scientific explanation for the observed warming of the planet other than human activity.
But we all go about our daily lives driving cars and leaving the lights on, and the people who see this problem developing are shrugged off as loons. It's okay, I'm guilty of it, too. Who wants to believe that doomsday is coming?
We are just going to need to adjust to living in a new world in a decade or two. Maybe it will be one where warmer seas produce deadlier hurricanes. Maybe it will be one in which New York City's subway system and driving tunnels have been flooded by rising sea levels. I don't know what it will look like, but I believe that the weather will be worse and I refuse to kick the climate-change-can any further down the generational timeline. Our climate is changing now, and our only hope of saving the quality of the environment in the future is international regulation. We're not going to get that, though, as long as it remains a requirement that the candidates for the presidential nomination of one of the two major parties in the most powerful nation in the world doubt the science of climate change. WAKE UP, AMERICA.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Collective Thought on the Internet
I just opened an email from the Electronic Frontier Foundation claiming to update me about this week's developments on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a piece of legislation with growing infamy among the internet savvy that is now in committee in the House. The news was good. While the legislation is still on the table, the outcry against the bill from the Internet's industry as well as its patrons was loud enough to raise the eyebrows of our representatives' campaign managers, and further consideration of the measure has been postponed till January (which in a Congress that can barely find time to keep the lights on in the office, is a promising sign that continued opposition can condemn SOPA to the waste bin of scheduling obscurity that has collected so many much better ideas).
Since I stumbled upon the controversy surrounding SOPA through the tried-and-true "COPY from Facebook and PASTE into Google", I have done all I could as a citizen to stop this legislation from going through. I wrote to my Congresswoman and Senators about opposing the bill and emailed my friends about doing the same. To my horror, my New York State Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, wrote back defending her position as a cosponsor of equivalent legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act.
I still did what I could to participate in our democracy. As I much as I could, I tried to talk about this issue and, as Justice Scalia might say, "change the minds of my fellow citizens." After talking to my friends and observing the vested interest of Hollywood, however, I gave up. If you haven't guessed it yet, I am among the 91% of Americans who disapprove of Congress. Washington and Hollywood are both so drowned in the capital of those who have it that I couldn't imagine my efforts making much of an impact compared to the Goliath of the entertainment industry.
I am so proud of the intelligence and ingenuity of my generation evidenced by the outpouring of online videos, blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, forum threads, memes, Reddit threads, and even shitty pop songs advocating a free Internet and the defeat of SOPA. Opposition to SOPA went viral! This is very interesting because the weapon that we have wielded against SOPA is that very beast it wishes to tame, and the implications are HUGE.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are witnessing today a historical revolution in the medium of information dissemination and in the mechanics of social thought that will have implications far greater than those had by some of the most important technologies ever developed. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 was the spark that lit the fire of the Enlightenment, renewed mankind's curiosity for thought, and ended the Dark Ages. The Internet is the printing press for the 21st century, and it's the stuff of revolution.
One cyborg anthropologist even offers that the Internet is not just a revolution, but evolution, too. One defining characteristic behavior of higher primates is the use of tools to expand operative capabilities beyond the limitations of the body, and now, human beings are using tools like the Internet to expand the operative capabilities of our minds. We are able to connect to anyone on the planet and access limitless information in seconds. My friend said to me yesterday, "How crazy is it that the Internet is always just there, man?" The world wide web of communication we have built has taken on its own life. The Internet is like an organism that we have built. Only humans haven't built the Internet per se; human beings are the Internet.
This goes beyond piracy, beyond emails replacing snail mail, and beyond Facebook. I think we are building a mind. Imagine... the GOOGLEPLEX, a connection of the mind of every human being. All of society's knowledge, instead of being placed by each specialist in each book in each library or on each page of Wikipedia, is instantly accessible to every mind directly. The limitations of space and memory are eliminated and innovation is instant. Is this "hive mind"? I don't know. But I do know that as societal knowledge grows, so does quality of life. Politically, I think the Internet offers an unprecedented opportunity to return to the strict egalitarian ideals the United States was founded on. What's the use of an electoral college when everyone is wired to the web?
Okay, so I have a flare for science fiction. This goes way beyond SOPA, which should basically be opposed today because it threatens free speech as well as technological innovation in one of the few growing industries remaining in America. My point: threats to the flow of information, which today is the Internet, are dangerous to our growth as a species. I'm optimistic though, because recent political action has shown us that the Internet is already powerful enough to prevent its own demise.
Wow, I cannot wait to see the future. On second thought, I'm just going to go enjoy being young...
Since I stumbled upon the controversy surrounding SOPA through the tried-and-true "COPY from Facebook and PASTE into Google", I have done all I could as a citizen to stop this legislation from going through. I wrote to my Congresswoman and Senators about opposing the bill and emailed my friends about doing the same. To my horror, my New York State Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, wrote back defending her position as a cosponsor of equivalent legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act.
I still did what I could to participate in our democracy. As I much as I could, I tried to talk about this issue and, as Justice Scalia might say, "change the minds of my fellow citizens." After talking to my friends and observing the vested interest of Hollywood, however, I gave up. If you haven't guessed it yet, I am among the 91% of Americans who disapprove of Congress. Washington and Hollywood are both so drowned in the capital of those who have it that I couldn't imagine my efforts making much of an impact compared to the Goliath of the entertainment industry.
I am so proud of the intelligence and ingenuity of my generation evidenced by the outpouring of online videos, blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, forum threads, memes, Reddit threads, and even shitty pop songs advocating a free Internet and the defeat of SOPA. Opposition to SOPA went viral! This is very interesting because the weapon that we have wielded against SOPA is that very beast it wishes to tame, and the implications are HUGE.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are witnessing today a historical revolution in the medium of information dissemination and in the mechanics of social thought that will have implications far greater than those had by some of the most important technologies ever developed. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 was the spark that lit the fire of the Enlightenment, renewed mankind's curiosity for thought, and ended the Dark Ages. The Internet is the printing press for the 21st century, and it's the stuff of revolution.
One cyborg anthropologist even offers that the Internet is not just a revolution, but evolution, too. One defining characteristic behavior of higher primates is the use of tools to expand operative capabilities beyond the limitations of the body, and now, human beings are using tools like the Internet to expand the operative capabilities of our minds. We are able to connect to anyone on the planet and access limitless information in seconds. My friend said to me yesterday, "How crazy is it that the Internet is always just there, man?" The world wide web of communication we have built has taken on its own life. The Internet is like an organism that we have built. Only humans haven't built the Internet per se; human beings are the Internet.
This goes beyond piracy, beyond emails replacing snail mail, and beyond Facebook. I think we are building a mind. Imagine... the GOOGLEPLEX, a connection of the mind of every human being. All of society's knowledge, instead of being placed by each specialist in each book in each library or on each page of Wikipedia, is instantly accessible to every mind directly. The limitations of space and memory are eliminated and innovation is instant. Is this "hive mind"? I don't know. But I do know that as societal knowledge grows, so does quality of life. Politically, I think the Internet offers an unprecedented opportunity to return to the strict egalitarian ideals the United States was founded on. What's the use of an electoral college when everyone is wired to the web?
Okay, so I have a flare for science fiction. This goes way beyond SOPA, which should basically be opposed today because it threatens free speech as well as technological innovation in one of the few growing industries remaining in America. My point: threats to the flow of information, which today is the Internet, are dangerous to our growth as a species. I'm optimistic though, because recent political action has shown us that the Internet is already powerful enough to prevent its own demise.
Wow, I cannot wait to see the future. On second thought, I'm just going to go enjoy being young...
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Something New
It seems like everybody who has something to say is blogging about it these days. I don't want to be so pretentious as to assert that I have something to say that is worthy of anyone reading, but I do occasionally have a thought or two and the best way to channel these is probably by writing about it on the internet for 7 billion people to read, right?
I've always been fascinated by science fiction and the future, and when my mind turns to musing, it's often about how our world will look in 20, 50, or even 100 years. As a young man, I'm excited to see how the world turns out. My generation faces a lot of challenges, and I look forward to solving them.
I'm going to use this blog as a forum for my thoughts on politics, religion, technology, business, and society. I'll probably stray into the zone of preaching too much, but that is only because I care about securing a future for my grandchildren that is better than the present. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions about where we are, where we are going, and how people my age should think and act to realize a better society down the road.
This blog is where I am going to deposit those thoughts.
I've always been fascinated by science fiction and the future, and when my mind turns to musing, it's often about how our world will look in 20, 50, or even 100 years. As a young man, I'm excited to see how the world turns out. My generation faces a lot of challenges, and I look forward to solving them.
I'm going to use this blog as a forum for my thoughts on politics, religion, technology, business, and society. I'll probably stray into the zone of preaching too much, but that is only because I care about securing a future for my grandchildren that is better than the present. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions about where we are, where we are going, and how people my age should think and act to realize a better society down the road.
This blog is where I am going to deposit those thoughts.
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