Tried With Fire

A few random thoughts before I cut the weeds lawn. - The Event Horizon Telescope's image of the black hole is pretty cool. The fact that they used the Earth as the telescope and that this particular black hole just happens to be facing earth is also pretty amazing. I found it interesting that one of the scientists in the press conference mentioned that it was very "humbling" to have all these factors come together. Humble is a good word for man given the size of the universe. So regardless of where we find ourselves in the origins debate, let's not make God too small. - I need to find a book club for readers of history and for discussion of how it impacts us today. It would also be nice if it was a place to mourn for the past and the present. But if history is only used to promote national pride, it's probably not popular to read about our faults. I may have to resign myself to a book club of one. - On Tuesday, some of the ladies from church were discussing...

This past month has been a whirlwind. I was on the road every week to visit potential grad schools with my daughter. All things considered, the trips went well. I got to meet a friend in real life for the first time and saw some friends I hadn't seen for 20 years. I wouldn't mind visiting some of these places again, but there is no place like home. We drove by the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and saw the memorial for the shooting victims. Just the previous week, I sat across the street from the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville where the white supremacist rally resulted in the death of a protestor. Seeing these two sites in close succession was sobering. The statue was cordoned off with bright orange netting that you see on construction sites. There were flowers in front of the synagogue. What a tragic and sinful world we live in. As a result of my travels, I had a chance to do more reading. I am continuing to work my way through the stack of grimly fascina...

It's been a while since I've gotten back to blogging regularly. Part of it is I'm still in mourning for my dad. I think grief is going to be a steady stream that flows below the surface. It may rise or ebb, but it's always there. Another part is having too many thoughts in my head to organize in a coherent manner and reading too many books simultaneously. So in lieu of a pensieve, this post will be the repository for the random thoughts that have been swirling in my brain based on my recent reading. I wonder if my lack of concentration is due to my use of social media. I'm halfway through Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf. (Ironically I learned of the book via @scifri on Twitter.) Wolf is a neuroscientist and reading specialist. She is concerned that too much screen reading is impairing our ability to read deeply which impairs our ability to think and feel deeply. She is coming from an evolutionary perspective, so she believes that our reading brains evolved o...