Terry Gross interviewed Richard Dawkins today. You can listen to the interview here. I’ll have my thoughts on it, as soon as I get a chance to listen to it.
Update –
I’ve listened to it, and found that it was fairly interesting, although nothing I haven’t heard before. If you don’t know much about Richard Dawkins, it is worth a listen. Tonight Terry will interview the evangelical christian who ran the Human Genome Project.
In a feeble attempt to win prizes, I’m putting a link to a website HERE in hopes that you click on it. There’s no porn. It is, however, a good tech blog.
The Daily Texan has an opinion piece written by David Horowitz that is a read if you have nothing better to do and doing nothing is not an option. It concerns the supposed ‘liberal bias’ in places of higher education – specifically, the University of Texas.
While it is true that the more education you have the more likely you are to be liberal – I find it hard to believe that their is a liberal bias in most universities.
Full disclosure: I did graduate from perhaps one of the most liberal colleges in the country, Reed College, whose school motto was, “Communism, Atheism, & Free Love”.
Anyway, Mr. Horowitz is concerned that the University of Texas is teaching such liberal ideas as, you know, gender equality.
Among the departments and programs at UT that are parties to this scam are the Communicat-ions Studies Department, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Division of Rhetoric and Writing. Space only permits a glimpse of the problem.
Alright, so I may be reading a little too much in to his idea that these departments teach leftist politics, not academics. But the truth is, until he takes the courses, he’s not really in a position to comment about their content. Respectable universities would not allow so called indoctrination to exist in their classrooms.
One problem that has become all too prevalent today is that of people confusing opinion and fact. Too many people are holding on to opinions that have no basis in fact or reality (we’ll use Intelligent Design as an example). An unbiased investigation is one that looks at all the facts, all the evidence, and proceeds from there. It would be counter-productive for any investigator to consider every possible explanation regardless of evidence in an effort to be ‘unbiased’.
When investigating the origin of life on earth, we certainly arn’t going to hold everything while we look into the creation myths of every religion that has ever existed. We will look at the evidence we have, and go where it leads us.
That being said, there can exist legitimate academic studies of specific opinions. I.E. one can study the feminist movement, the evangelical christian movement, whatever – these studies arn’t indoctrinations.
This is what Mr. Horowitz evidently doesn’t understand. Maybe instead of criticizing the University of Texas, he should enroll.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
from Wikipedia:
Cryptomnesia, or “concealed recollection,” is the name for a theoretical phenomenon involving suppressed or ‘forgotten’ memories. It refers to cases where (apparently) a person believes that he or she is creating or inventing something new, such as a story, poem, artwork, or joke, but is actually recalling a similar or identical work which he or she has previously encountered. According to the theory of cryptomnesia, the person is not engaging in plagiarism, but is rather experiencing a memory as if it were inspiration.
I’m a believer despite the lack of scientific evidence simply because I’ve experienced it. I’m sure many people have had a similar experience where you write something and than later go back to it and realize that it came from somewhere else. Memories in the mind are like water in the ocean.
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Shaved monkeys, becoming gay prostitutes, and Rudolph Juliani – classy right?
Some students at Reed College in Portland, OR thought that they might put a white flag in the lawn for every 6 Iraqis killed in the war and a red flag for every one US serviceman. So they did. It is hard to tell from the photographs, but being familiar with the campus I can say that these flags surround the main building in the pictures (Elliott Hall) on all sides. Skim through the photos here – it kinda puts things in perspective.
Fear of Ignorance 
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