Sunday, April 28, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
the whole book
at life group the other week they were talking about how, as a christian, you must respect everything in the bible. it's not a buffet, you know, so you can't pick and choose. since the bible is the word of god, and since you believe in god and trust him to be all-knowing, you must also believe in every part of the bible. (we're not talking about literal interpretations of the bible, mind you, just the tenets and such).
someone vaguely alluded to gay marriage, though no one expanded on it. but it was the first thing i thought of too when they were talking about accepting the bible as a whole. then a couple days later i ran into the following clip from the west wing.
amazing! i wish i knew about it earlier and had memorized it so i could've asked life group about it!
but seriously. the bible stuff just so confuses me. the koran is believed to the actual word of god (well, pretty much anyway, muhammad transcribed what god said, so for all intents and purposes, god wrote it). so it makes sense that you should believe every word but even christians will tell you that the bible was not written by god, it was written by man, and lots of them, spanning many years. who's to say that some of these writers didn't insert their own agenda into the bible? or, for those unwilling to believe in such outright deceit, possibly parts of the bible were incorrectly translated or transcribed over those hundreds of years before people invented copiers, but before anyone invented photoshop.
a long time ago (i think this was before high school) i asked my friend's mom, who is very religious, if god made gays. i mean, god makes everyone, right? but he hates gays. so why would he make them? i don't remember what she said, but i do remember her response having nothing to do with "people aren't born gay. they decide to be gay." which brings me to this video...
someone vaguely alluded to gay marriage, though no one expanded on it. but it was the first thing i thought of too when they were talking about accepting the bible as a whole. then a couple days later i ran into the following clip from the west wing.
amazing! i wish i knew about it earlier and had memorized it so i could've asked life group about it!
but seriously. the bible stuff just so confuses me. the koran is believed to the actual word of god (well, pretty much anyway, muhammad transcribed what god said, so for all intents and purposes, god wrote it). so it makes sense that you should believe every word but even christians will tell you that the bible was not written by god, it was written by man, and lots of them, spanning many years. who's to say that some of these writers didn't insert their own agenda into the bible? or, for those unwilling to believe in such outright deceit, possibly parts of the bible were incorrectly translated or transcribed over those hundreds of years before people invented copiers, but before anyone invented photoshop.
a long time ago (i think this was before high school) i asked my friend's mom, who is very religious, if god made gays. i mean, god makes everyone, right? but he hates gays. so why would he make them? i don't remember what she said, but i do remember her response having nothing to do with "people aren't born gay. they decide to be gay." which brings me to this video...
Monday, April 22, 2013
the helpers
this has been a crazy week: boston marathon bombing, texas fertilizer plant explosion, another big chinese earthquake, and other disasters i just haven't heard about / can't remember. but this mr. rogers
quote has been floating around online and man is it a good one.
at life group the other night we were taking about theodicy. and i was saying that while earthquakes seem really bad, they create some of our most beautiful mountains, which in turn shapes many of our lakes, weather patterns, it goes on. likewise, the bad brings out the good in many people, you know?
i volunteered on friday with socal harvest and on saturday with compton initiative and felt like i should still be doing more. which is crazy, obviously. esp considering what i'm doing the next two weekends! but i do feel like it's not doing anything, you know? confession time: i want some sort of emergency to happen near me and i automatically spring into action. it's like that video of the bomb at the boston marathon. many people ran away, but some people actually ran towards the blast! ...but of course i don't wish this because that would mean bad things would have to happen to people... but anyway! how awesome is it that the boston police / feds / whomever figured out who the bombers were and caught "them" in less than a week! amazing, yo!
also, what boston showed about human nature
at life group the other night we were taking about theodicy. and i was saying that while earthquakes seem really bad, they create some of our most beautiful mountains, which in turn shapes many of our lakes, weather patterns, it goes on. likewise, the bad brings out the good in many people, you know?
also, what boston showed about human nature
Friday, April 19, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
immoral medicine
ilana yurkiewicz - modern medical terms are still named after nazi doctors can we change it?
"Medical eponyms are meant to honor individuals who contributed to the field. Torture and murder are not things we wish to honor. After the war, a profound ethical debate sprung from the question of what to do with discoveries that came about from forced experimentation on human beings without their consent... [should we] keep or discard useful medical information obtained through grossly immoral means. All medical information discovered would still be known. All that was asked is that the result was not named to reward a criminal."
i completely understand why the author argues that we should change the names of these medical terms, but it also seems a bit unfair to deny those doctors the credit, because, well, they did discover those things.
"The other argument of course is that no matter how unspeakable the crimes committed by these scientists may be, it still does not detract from the purely scientific value of their investigations."
"...the Stark and Lenard effects, the Debye unit of dipole moment and the Geiger counter are all named after scientists whose allegiance to Nazism was either explicit or ambiguous." and even the Clara cell example, whom the author describes as "named after Max Clara, an “active and outspoken Nazi” who made his discovery using tissues from murdered Third Reich victims." this is a really vague example. did clara do any of the murdering or did he just use the tissues from people who were murdered?
war is a crazy time, what with tons of people getting killed. but it's also a really great time for certain fields of knowledge, and not just military strategy stuff. i read something about how plastics boomed because wwII needed all the steel and iron and metals. and how a crap ton of medical discoveries are made during wars. there's a guy who perfected burn treatment because his hospital just couldn't keep up and treat the many burn victims the way they normally did. the dr had a hunch about another technique and tried it out on patients (without their consent) and it turned out to be a better treatment. but his success is just one of the many many failures. and outside of war, i'm sure that many discoveries medical and biological science have broken moral and ethical codes.
i guess the best way would be to say that discoveries cannot be named after people ever. which is, of course, not a good solution at all.
"Medical eponyms are meant to honor individuals who contributed to the field. Torture and murder are not things we wish to honor. After the war, a profound ethical debate sprung from the question of what to do with discoveries that came about from forced experimentation on human beings without their consent... [should we] keep or discard useful medical information obtained through grossly immoral means. All medical information discovered would still be known. All that was asked is that the result was not named to reward a criminal."
i completely understand why the author argues that we should change the names of these medical terms, but it also seems a bit unfair to deny those doctors the credit, because, well, they did discover those things.
"The other argument of course is that no matter how unspeakable the crimes committed by these scientists may be, it still does not detract from the purely scientific value of their investigations."
"...the Stark and Lenard effects, the Debye unit of dipole moment and the Geiger counter are all named after scientists whose allegiance to Nazism was either explicit or ambiguous." and even the Clara cell example, whom the author describes as "named after Max Clara, an “active and outspoken Nazi” who made his discovery using tissues from murdered Third Reich victims." this is a really vague example. did clara do any of the murdering or did he just use the tissues from people who were murdered?
war is a crazy time, what with tons of people getting killed. but it's also a really great time for certain fields of knowledge, and not just military strategy stuff. i read something about how plastics boomed because wwII needed all the steel and iron and metals. and how a crap ton of medical discoveries are made during wars. there's a guy who perfected burn treatment because his hospital just couldn't keep up and treat the many burn victims the way they normally did. the dr had a hunch about another technique and tried it out on patients (without their consent) and it turned out to be a better treatment. but his success is just one of the many many failures. and outside of war, i'm sure that many discoveries medical and biological science have broken moral and ethical codes.
i guess the best way would be to say that discoveries cannot be named after people ever. which is, of course, not a good solution at all.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
how much?
my mom always said that i would never be rich. i completely agree. more recently i've been thinking of selling some of my crafty things on etsy. the big problem is that i have no idea how much to charge. my problem is that i really only think of how much the materials cost me, then i charge a little extra. rip reminded me to factor in how much time it took to make each necklace. but how much is that?
i'm not exactly sure how apple decides to charge per product, but 68% seems a bit excessive.
i'm not exactly sure how apple decides to charge per product, but 68% seems a bit excessive.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Sunday, April 7, 2013
diana athill
from carlene bauer's article "someone to watch over me" in march 13's elle magazine.
she quotes from diana athill's book "somewhere towards the end": "when spouses are concerned, it seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words, not loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out. fidelity in the sense of keeping one's word i respect, but i think it tiresome that it is tied so tightly in people's minds to the idea of sex.... why, given our bone-deep, basic need for one another, do men and women have to put so much weight on this particular, unreliable aspect of it?"
this was in felicity too. she cheats on ben and tells her counselor that she has to tell ben. and the counselor asks why, and she says something about needing to tell the truth or whatever. and the counselor says about how sometimes it's more important to be kind. rip and i talked about this a few times. he prefers me to be truthful. i think i prefer him to be kind. lol, i don't want this to come back and bite me in the butt later when i find out that he's just another tiger woods or anything, but people do mess up. and sometimes it takes that screw up to realize just how good you had it, or whatever. and you change. you become a better boyfriend/spouse/whatever. seeing as how he's already cheated on me, i would not take him cheating on me again very well. honestly, we'd most likely break up. but... if he really changed and recommitted himself to me. ...would i really need to know why?
and here she quotes diana from a conversation the two had. "one wants to live one's own life, and you can't really be married without living somebody else's life. a lot of women don't have a life they want to live, so they're happy to meld with a man. but if you have a life you want to live of your own, you've got to find someone very like yourself.
while i think this is certainly true of many people (not just women), i don't think it's always true. i think for many people, the definition of a good marriage is where you do meld lives. and i don't think there's anything wrong with that. it's certainly not for me tho. i like having a life rather separate of rip. i think we get along better this way.
btw, i have a similar philosophy to jada pinkett smith, tho i def ask rip not to do certain things. ...well, okay, not so similar, haha. but i feel like, if he's gonna cheat, he's gonna cheat. it has nothing to do with me, how i am as a girlfriend, yaddayadda. it's on you. you make your own decisions. i just hope you don't fuck up!
she quotes from diana athill's book "somewhere towards the end": "when spouses are concerned, it seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words, not loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out. fidelity in the sense of keeping one's word i respect, but i think it tiresome that it is tied so tightly in people's minds to the idea of sex.... why, given our bone-deep, basic need for one another, do men and women have to put so much weight on this particular, unreliable aspect of it?"
this was in felicity too. she cheats on ben and tells her counselor that she has to tell ben. and the counselor asks why, and she says something about needing to tell the truth or whatever. and the counselor says about how sometimes it's more important to be kind. rip and i talked about this a few times. he prefers me to be truthful. i think i prefer him to be kind. lol, i don't want this to come back and bite me in the butt later when i find out that he's just another tiger woods or anything, but people do mess up. and sometimes it takes that screw up to realize just how good you had it, or whatever. and you change. you become a better boyfriend/spouse/whatever. seeing as how he's already cheated on me, i would not take him cheating on me again very well. honestly, we'd most likely break up. but... if he really changed and recommitted himself to me. ...would i really need to know why?
and here she quotes diana from a conversation the two had. "one wants to live one's own life, and you can't really be married without living somebody else's life. a lot of women don't have a life they want to live, so they're happy to meld with a man. but if you have a life you want to live of your own, you've got to find someone very like yourself.
while i think this is certainly true of many people (not just women), i don't think it's always true. i think for many people, the definition of a good marriage is where you do meld lives. and i don't think there's anything wrong with that. it's certainly not for me tho. i like having a life rather separate of rip. i think we get along better this way.
btw, i have a similar philosophy to jada pinkett smith, tho i def ask rip not to do certain things. ...well, okay, not so similar, haha. but i feel like, if he's gonna cheat, he's gonna cheat. it has nothing to do with me, how i am as a girlfriend, yaddayadda. it's on you. you make your own decisions. i just hope you don't fuck up!
Thursday, April 4, 2013
archery
 |
| i look so exceptionally small in this photo! |
all in all it was pretty fun, tho i wish we had more time at it. the groupon was supposed to be for an hour, but we started late and ended early so i had just adjusted my sight when they told us it was our last turn. :( but anyway. it was a fun experience.
also, i'm kind of disappointed because it was a lot different than i thought it was going to be. i thought modern archery was like those really cool looking bows that they use in the olympics. turns out, not so much. it's a bow like the kind you probably think of. which means that i could've crossed archery off my bucket list a few years ago when i went to taiwan and did it at the formosan aboriginal culture village. it was practically the same exact thing! but oh well. archery is officially crossed of me list!
 |
| in taiwan, it's the same thing! |
Monday, April 1, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)