Archive for September, 2008

truth and beauty

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

On today’s bike ride I flushed out what I believe to be a Northern Harrier. This one was really impressive; usually they seem kind of scruffy, commonly seen perched atop the street lights around here, but this one seemed well primped and groomed. It was in a tree to my right and took flight right over me, affording me a great look at the white and brown spots under its wingspan. It was big, too; it seemed like it had its own gravity, like I could almost feel the air disturbed by its flight.

And so, naturally, my mind turned to the metaphysical, and I contemplated the apparent discourse between religion and science. And this is what I thought:

The gifts of reason and science allow humanity to understand the mechanics of creation.

God is what makes creation beautiful.

Posted in Cycling, Religion | No Comments »

the slow death of imagination

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Remember The NeverEnding Story? The movie about a boy who must save a mysterious kingdom of imagination from The Nothing? Sadly, I think the premise of that movie applies more and more to the world our children grow up in today.

The United States is entering a crisis of imagination. The risk is very real: if we don’t encourage imaginative play in our children, we’ll get a generation of adults without creative problem-solving skills. The ability to invent is possibly our greatest economic advantage in the global economy, and the problems we face today are in desperate need of creative solutions.

There are a couple of things I see today that are contributing to the erosion of imaginative play in children. The first is that their geographical roaming areas are shrinking. The second is the increasingly strict (micro-)management of our children’s time: more homework and more structured extra-curricular activities. A creative, imaginative, healthy mind is being crippled by over-emphasizing the role of rote memorization in the process of learning.

The following are some links* to articles that demonstrate what I’m talking about:

EDIT: Today I see another related post on BoingBoing: How Children Learn. Talks about the classic series of 2 anecdotal books by John Holt describing how children do and don’t learn.

* Note: credit to BoingBoing for originally finding and blogging the links. I just assembled them here cuz, y’know, they’re kinda related and all

Posted in Parenthood | No Comments »

reducing government, one new agency at a time

Friday, September 19th, 2008

One of the Republican’s planks in their platform is to reduce government size.

Yet, whenever any kind of crisis occurs, their solution is to create a new government agency. After 9/11, we got the [useless] Department of Homeland Security. Nevermind that we already had the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

In response to our current mortgage and financial crisis, John McCain has proposed a new agency, the Mortgage and Financial Institutions trust (MFI). He argues that it will proactively spot institutions in danger and save them before they fail.

I argue that creating this agency is extremely reactionary. The major financial institutions that have failed or are failing (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG) have been around for a very long time and have weathered the economic crises of the past. What brought them down was their own hubris, leveraging 30x or more of their assets against extremely risky mortgages during an obvious economic bubble.

What could the MFI have possibly done to stem the bleeding without the benefit of hindsight?

If a mortgage crisis like this happens again, maybe the MFI will recognize the signs and take steps to avert it. But what is more likely is that a new bubble will form in a different market and unethical business people will create new types of volatile, vaguely legal securities, and the MFI will be powerless to stop it. And our Republican Overlords will create another new agency to deal with the latest flavor-of-the-month economic disaster.

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

the crape myrtle experience

Monday, September 15th, 2008

There is a patch of my front yard that’s been bugging me for a while. And by a while, I mean since we moved in. There was a shrub that grew to a great height, but I had always considered it to be one of those “freeway” shrubs. Nothing pretty to look at, but grows quickly and serves a purpose. The wife liked the privacy but I’ve always hated it for its attempts at my life while hanging Christmas lights and for generally being in the way while mowing the lawn. I removed it during a weekend of great marital strife.

I wanted to replace it with something that would give us privacy, be attractive, and generally be out of the way. I looked online for small shade trees and found a dwarf crape myrtle that looked promising. The particular cultivar was called tonto, and since there was very little chance of finding one locally, I went online and found one from a grower in North Carolina. Excited by my find, I skirted my usual background check of online companies and ordered immediately from fast-growing-trees.com. Of course, after I placed my order, I started researching the company and became dubious about their reputation.

The tree arrived about two weeks later, and I am more than happy with its condition. They sent a FedEx tracking number as soon as they had packed it, which was about a week after placing the order (well within their 1-3 week estimate). I received it a week later. It was very well packaged and had survived the long journey across the States to California. It had lots of leaves and there were four separate trunks. It was easily 3 feet tall (it was advertised as 3-4 feet). I was very pleasantly surprised. Here’s a picture:

Yesterday, I planted it. Here’s a picture of it in its now-natural habitat (pic was taken near sunset, so the top of the plant is bathed in sunlight and looks a different color. Also note the new Italian cypress [juniper] to the rear):

After reading some of the horror stories about ordering online from this company, I was expecting no more than a dry broken twig rattling inside the FedEx box. Instead, I received a professionally packaged, healthy tree, with several flyers containing planting instructions and tips for caring for the tree after its traumatic shipping journey. While it is possible that the complaints against this company on the internet are valid, I suspect that they are simply the competition’s attempts at defaming fast-growing-trees.com. If you read between the lines, the complainants make very little effort to resolve their issues with the company before blasting them on the internet.

I probably would not have blogged about this experience but for the fact that I wanted to share my positive experience with Fast Growing Trees Nursery. I would order from them again.

Today the tree looks very happy in its new home. I am looking forward to many years of growth, flowers, and marital bliss. Kudos to Fast Growing Trees for supplying me with this very attractive specimen!

Posted in Home Improvement | No Comments »