FlaSoxxJim

QUOTE(Mr. Zero @ Jan 2, 2005 -> 06:34 PM) Haha, I just got the Tull 25th Anniversary DVD. I'm really not too happy with it, to be honest. Some of the stuff is really neat, but I HATE how they cut out some songs for interviews. I bought it thinking they had full versions of all the songs on the back. Really disappointed. The Slipstream concert/music video compilation is still the best commercial Tull video release I have seen - including last years' prety decent Living With the Past DVD release. If you have never seen it, the live footage is from the 1980 "A" concert tour, so Eddie Jobson is on electric violin and keyboards and Dave Peggg is still bassist. Videos include Sweet Dream, Too Old to Rock and Roll, Dun Ringill, and maybe a couple of others.

haberdasher lumpectomy = 1 unique result. Yes. Indeed, I rock.

Hell yeah. I think Ian's last two solo albums were really sharp, expecially Secret Language of Birds. I also think the new, stripped down Tull approach is really approprate for them. Ian and Martin aren't spring chickens anymore, but it doesn't mean they need to pack it in any time soon. No, you're never too old to rock and ro-oh-oll

Cool Ian A. sig., Zero! where's the flute-playing, codpiece-wearing smiley when you need one?

Bravo!! What are you guys going to do with all that award money? You did get your award money, right?

The goose comes out of the oven in 10 minutes!! I;m very excited, since it's my first goose...

My New Years' Eve morning started with a visit to the emergency room with my 6 year old girl having some chest pains. She has a bad cold and probably just pulled muscles or ligaments with a violent coughing spasm, but with as much illness as there is down here right now I wanted to rule out pneumonia and pericardial inflammation. All seems to be good, though. We will be staying home tonight and eating and drinking and making merry. Tonight I'll put a New Years' Day goose (tres Dickensian, no?) in a honey/maple brine to roast tomorrow for dinner along with the traditional black-eyed peas and whatnot. We'll also have a gruyere and emmental cheese fondue followed by a dark chocolate dessert fondue tonight (yumm?). For libations, we have several nice Belgian and American winter seasonal offerings, a big framboise lambic and maybe some Chambord liquour, more good beer, good champaigne... *hic!* Then, hopefully some more marrymaking of the variety best accompanied by Barry White records... MMmmm... I can't get enough of your love, baybay..,

Happy B-day, ya big New Years Baby!

Yes, yes, YES! This was exactly what I was going to ask about. Uncanny...

Yes, and that is, well, by design.

Yas and Wino, ID was conceived as a foot-in-the-door attempt to get Creationism on the ticket. Any argument based on so-called 'rational design' begs but intentionally fails to ask the pregnant question - Who is the designer? Shrewd fundamentalists have seen what caused their prior overt attempts at pushing a Creationist curriculum componentn to be struck down, and they have taken pains not to give their intelligent designer a name. They are not saying who put it all together, just that it had to be some sort of omnipotent agent with the capacity to design the universe with rational care and forethought. Gee, who does that sound like? Yas, As for science looking to "disprove" God, religion, etc.... all matters of faith are outside the realm of the testable and are not of concern to science. The problem has been religion wanting airplay in science class and not science looking for equal time in theology class.

Agh. My teaching semester begins this week and I'm not even close to ready. I need to redo the lab sequence to get around some of the logistics of still not having our main education building up and running after the hurricanes.

Perhaps they have. As for getting back to the original topic, I don't think it's happening and I'd say the thread has been irreversibly hijacked, as Juggs had intended.

Wrong. Again. The source of my knowledge about Creation 'science' and Intelligent Design and all such other rubbish comes from these silly rags that try to pass them off as textbooks. For the life of me I cannot understand how you misunderstood the direct reference to having read several primary source Creationist "textbooks" as some blanket statement about how myself or any in the modern sciences garners knowledge. Unless, the 'misunderstanding' was deliberate. I'm as big a fan of overturning the long-discredited dogma passed off in most textbooks as there is. It is the nature of the beast that it takes about 10 years for new ideas and findings to make it from peer-reviewed primary literature into college textbooks, meaning they arre somewhat outated before they even hit the shelves. But hopefully only by 10 years. The Creationist "textbooks" in contrast are outdated by about 150 years. And about that Ph.D.... I have seen them advertised online for $89.95 or so. I think that's your best bet.

Should the separation of state and any form of state-sanctioned religious worship be ensured in the public school system? Yes it should. Doesn't mean Christianity cannot be explored in a Social Studies-type setting, and it doesn't mean debates in such a seeting shouldn't get heated at times. Despitte the lack of understanding of this concept by the current Administration, there is not supposed to be a state religion, and the Founding fathers actually made a point of sayinng so.

This from the person who posited metaphysics as one of the key sources of information about the natural world? Yeah, OK. I'm not going to get into comparing brainpans with you Juggs, because there's not much reason for it. I can guarantee I've read a lot more primary source Creationist "textbooks" than you have because I get a kick out of seeing what passes for science over at the shallow end of the gene pool. I also spend a portion of my professional life 'watching the skies' and helping make sure that when the UberChristians in Florida or Ohio or Kentucky or Texas, etc. get it in their mind that they are going to take another swipe at evolution that they are kept in check and science wins out over bulls***. So, it's good to be familiar with the bulls***. You, friend, are full of it.

Suppose all of this was happening at a privately funded school - then knock yourself out, worship the Aliens, worship the Lettuce, worship the Nazz. But if it is a government-funded school system, that should be the end of the argument. I'd like to see kids get their silent moment with the lettuce/alien/Nazz (I always gave it to them - and I also always made the Under Gawd part of the Pledge optional). And they should be welcome to form their Dungeons and Dragons/Jesus Loves Me before- or after-school organization, and, again, they can and should take time some out of their 16 or 17 hours away from school to worship however they see fit. To force the issue and demand that everybody around me stand up and take notice when I pray - rather than keeping me and my God betwwen me and my God - well, that is a bunch of shallow and pretentious holier-than-thou crap that isn't getting anyone past the pearly gates any faster than anybody else.

No. It is rooted on a fallback foot-in-the-door strategy conceived by the Creationists who never could ram their dreck past the Supreme Court and into the classrooms. It is essentially Creationism without naming the Creator - simply saying that, 'the universe is so b****ing it simply HAD to have been the product of rational design, but gosh, we're not suggesting who the architect of that plan might be... (wink wink)' And of course it is all hogwash. Statistics falls sqarely on the side of those who think that 4+ billion years and trillions upon trillions of imperfectly replicating cells is more than adequate to stack up some measure of organic differentiation and diversification.

The big sleight-of-hand trick the Creation 'scientists' like to pull is to poke holes in classical Darwinian evolutionary theory. Well, consider that Origin Of Species was published in 1859, and the core arguments it contains were developed two decades before that (Darwin respectfully waited for the Beagle's Captain, Fitzroy, to pass on before publishing his treatise because of the strong Christian/Creationist beliefs of this good friend). By comparison, how would you like to check into a surgical ward at a hospital that follows procedures set forth befor the Civil War?!? Darwin's theories represent the beginning and not the end. Creationists would be at least approaching a level playing field if they would debate the merite of Neo-Darwinism - which is Darwin plus Mendellian inheritance mechanisms at a mechanims, and Darwin + Mendel + Dobzhanski + Goldberg + Wright + a half-dozen other seminal minds who refined the science. If they ever bother to look at the molecular and genomic evidence of the last 30 years they would be absolutely sunk - and so they don't. How hard is it to find shortcomings in anything espoused 150 years ago. Not that hard, obviously, because even the Creation 'scientists' have managed to do it.

The recent militant emphasis on standardized testing is the single worst thing that has happened to our educational system in our lifetime. Teachers now spend the entire year 'teaching to the test,' and schools that get failing grades are gutted rather than fixed. Teachers have resorted to cheating and administrators to turning a blind eye because it is now vastly more important to be an "A" school than to teach honesty, integrity, or any kind of work ethic. "No Child Left Behind" is true enough though, because: 1) there are no children being allowed to excel and we are now embracing mediocrity as an acceptable goal; 2) Not enough teachers give a f*** enough to hold students back when they need it. Low-grade morons matriculate through the system with the full blessing of the powers that be because it would just be such a hassle to actually HOLD THE STUDENTS ACCOUNTABLE for the academic competencies they are supposed to have mastered.

I certainly think animals are in tune with broader spectra on the natural world, and as such there is no need to invoke a "sixth sense" per se. Many can see better than us, hear better than us, sense ultra-low vibrations better/broader than us. None of it needs to be a sixth sense - their innate natural sensory perception just goes well beyond ours. We know full well there is an infrared and an ultraviolet component to the light spectrum, but there are animals that actually see those wavelengths clear as day. As sound becomes touch low on that scale, we become deaf, but some whales hear-feel low frequencies in the so-called SOFAR range that they may be able to use to literally communicate across ocean basins. House cats and dogs sense barometer changes that are compleetly out or our sensory perception... That said, any suggestion that animals just plain didn't die in large numbers in this catastrophe is talking in hyperbole. Coastal subtidal and even intertidal habitats probably fared well, and upland species probably did as well. But, every range-restricted domestic animal in the path of the tsunami - cats, dogs, livestock... - all of them must have suffered substantial losses.

Have I got one for you Apu... 10 years ago I was courted away from grad school for a year to teach AP Biology in the public school system. Despite my best efforts, they hired me anyway. Well, in the job inerview, the school administrators down here in the southern extreme of the Bible Belt finished up by asking me how I planned to tip-toe through the "controversial" subject of evolution. Beilng prepared for the Inquisition, i was quickly able to produce the table of contents of all four county-approved textbooks, and show that each of them devoted THREE OR MORE CHAPTERS to the subject, and so I planned to be a good county teacher and stick witth the curriculum they had ordained. It was soooo great to see the thumpers speachless when they couldn't demand I deviate from the approved curricula. But, in the interest of fairness and equal time we talked about Intelligent Design/Creation "science" etc. as well. Oh boy, did we have a hoot talking about that.

Allow me to take some liberties - in the spirit of being against sensorship of any kind. Casting off the old ways is tough, but strides are being made. Hell, the Greeks and Romans had dozens of really cool friggin' Gods, and we've managed to explain away just about all of them. The god of death and fear and the unknown is a hard one to kill off though, to be sure.

I heartily agree with that - because you seem to intimate that this would be before or after, but NOT DURING class time in any organized sense. That said, if a teacher at the end of the Pledge of Alliegence (the after-the-fact added 'under Gawd' part completely optional, of course) says, 'please take this silent moment to add your own personal thoughts,' and students decided to use that time to ponder a real or imagined Divine Agent... I have no problem with that. Kids are in extracurricular chess clubs, pep clubs, debate clubs, creepy Dungeons and Dragons clubs... certainly they should be allowed to be in extracurricular religion-centered clubs as well. And aside from any in- or out of class time set aside, what goes on in kids' heads during the day is not controllable. If a teenage boy can manage to think about sex 27 or whatever times a day, who's going to fault the kid that thinks about more spiratual things for an equal amount of time. In the end, what everyone needs to keep in mind is that kids are only in school 6 or 7 hours a day, and they aren't getting enough done academic0wise during that short span as it is. If students want to use some chunk the other 16 or 17 hours to worship a head of lettuce because that is their chosen faith, then love and do what you will.

Oh, what about these nice puppies... No, wait, I mean THESE nice puppies...