blake johnson

Interesting piece: The Harvard Crimson :: Doubting Douthat. The Crimson editorial staff respond to an Atlantic Journal article by Ross Douthat which shares some general reflections on his Harvard experience (see the Crimson article for a fairly good summary). I’m conflicted about what I think of Ross’s article because it seems that many of his beefs with Harvard were the result of his own choices. Sure, you can find easy classes, but I found plenty of challenging courses which taught me a lot.

I suspect I’ll have more to say about this after it has simmered for a while.

Comments are working on my blog again. I simply forgot to rename a directory in my comments script when I moved my site to its new domain name. Oh well. So, comment away!

The Humble Boast: Ignorance Is A Two-Way Street is a post about the frequent mis-categorization of all religious people as right wingers. What I found interesting, though, was this paragraph at the end:

“Religion” itself - depending on your interpretation of the Greek - means “reading” or “re-reading.” I prefer the latter translation, which implies that religious study requires constant analyzation, and then re-analyzation. This not only applies to religious texts, but life in general. Understanding - in the broad, esoteric sense - is gained through constant evaluation.

Something that occurred to me while reading this post is that the author’s interpretation of religion as “re-reading” and continual reevaluation is strikely similar to Nietzsche’s process of “becoming” where man attempts to continually remake himself. Of course, it is rather amusing when we find a similarity between religion and Nietzsche’s philosophy.

My E&M professor closed lecture yesterday with the remark, “oh, and you’ll probably want to know that we’ll have a midterm next week.” Gee, thanks professor for letting us know in such a timely fashion…

As I was encoding a video this weekend, my computer starting making a siren sound. This sound mysteriously went away whenever I minimized or restored a window, which was odd. But, my suspicion was confirmed when I opened the temperature monitor software that came with my motherboard and found that my CPU was 75 C! My computer also overheated a couple weeks ago while I was playing Half-Life 2. So, it seems that I need to get another case fan, which is rather annoying because I already think that my computer is too loud. Oh well.