Lift Up Your Hearts!

I had to watch it, since my genealogical organizations, websites, and contacts kept bringing it to my attention:  NBC's new genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?  My reactions?  Mixed.

Each week, apparently, the show will present an investigation into the family history of one person.  Supposedly these are famous people; I haven't heard of any of them, but that helps me concentrate on the data, which I find more interesting anyway. (More)

Beer, bread, cheese...and now musical instruments.   Jan Swafford's recent Slate article, In Search of Lost Sounds, mentions that in Europe, artisanal craftsmen are creating reproductions of period instruments for those interested in more flavors than the standardized, homogenized, modern sound.  This comes as no surprise, since Janet owns at least three such instruments.

The article is long, and some of my readers will be tempted to skip it, but please don't.  Skip the text if you wish, but don't miss the recorded excerpts, which are Flash objects that I can't reproduce here.  Hear Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy on the pianos of their day, and compare the sound to the same music on today's instruments.  Whichever you like best, you'll agree that the older instruments have a different and often exciting flavor.  (They also occasionally sound out of tune to me, and I'm wondering if it's my ears, the recording, or a different tuning of the pianos—though I thought equal temperament tuning was common by Beethoven's time.) (More)

Saint Patrick, by Jonathan Rogers (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010)

This new biography of the man whose feast day we celebrate this month is part of Thomas Nelson's Christian Encounters series.  I was pleasantly surprised by the intellectual seriousness of this book, which I had expected to take a light and popular approach.  It is certainly accessible, and short—just over 100 pages of text, plus appendices and notes—but packed with what little definitive information there is about this 5^th century saint.

Although legends about St. Patrick abound, all that we truly know of him is deduced from two documents, written by Patrick himself later in life.  Translations of both are included in the appendices.  Rogers weaves together passages from these texts with cultural and historical background information to create a picture of both the man and his times. (More)

Three Cups of Tea:  One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Penguin Books, New York, 2007)

Greg Mortenson, the son of missionary parents, had a happy childhood in Africa, but his return to the United States as a teenager was rough, and it took him a long time to find his way.  As he tells it, it took a dramatic failure to lead him to his calling—but I disagree that someone has failed who has not succeeded in climbing the infamous K2 because he expended too much time and energy rescuing a climber in distress.  Whatever you call it, from that point in 1993 on, Mortenson's energies would be spent on a different form of rescue:  building schools and promoting education, especially for girls, in the remote, impoverished villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Mortenson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009; even President Obama's most enthusiastic supporters cannot read Three Cups of Tea without entertaining a doubt or two as to the wisdom of the Nobel Committee's final choice.  (The Nobel Committee overlooked Gandhi, too, so their peculiar judgement is not without precedent.) (More)

National Treasure (Walt Disney Pictures, 2004, PG)

I may have discovered the secret of enjoying movies:  low expectations.  All I had known about National Treasure was that it had something to do with a puzzle in American history, and when I learned that it was instead more along the lines of The Da Vinci Code, I wanted nothing to do with it.  My knowledge of history is shaky enough as it is—the last thing I need is another set of false "facts" cluttering up my brain, a la Braveheart and Amadeus.  But I was assured the movie is so unbelievable that would not be a problem, and indeed that I probably wouldn't like it because of the great, glaring impossibilities.

So, armed with that knowledge, I really did enjoy the movie, in the same way that I enjoyed Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Once you know it's ridiculous, it's actually funny. They even got some of the history right.

Between the two of us, we guessed a lot of the plot and even some of the lines, but the movie is about a puzzle so that only added to the enjoyment.  And I always like seeing places I know, like Philadelphia's Franklin Institute and Independence Hall.

The rating is PG, but I didn't find anything that would make me issue a granchild warning—in fact, it reminded me of the McGuyver shows they like so much.

What drives spam?  Money, obviously.  And sin.  Sin on both ends:  the sin of greed on the part of the spammer, and the sin that the spammer is hoping will entice his victim to throw money his direction.  Spam, therefore, may be a diagnostic tool, an x-ray scan revealing the broken and diseased places of our society.

If the spam that hits this blog (and is mostly filtered out before you see it) is any measure, the sickest area of our society is sex, although that observation is a bit like peering at an x-ray and announcing that the patient's leg is broken when anyone can see the jagged bone protruding from the flesh.  Porn of the worst kind, body part enhancements, "performance" drugs:  "greed meets lust" is a terrible combination. (More)

Someone else posted an enthusiastic link to Michael Hyatt's Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?  That I am not so enthusiastic is probably due to having a serious problem with the first sentence, which reads, 

Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful.

After reading Hyatt's article I realized that not only do I make several of the mistakes, but I often make them on purpose.  That's when I realized the real problem:  I'm not convinced I want to increase my blog traffic. (More)

A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe (New American Library, New York, 1960)

I first read this as a requirement for school, I believe, though I remember nothing of it, not even the grade I was in.  It has long been my theory that many schoolteachers take good books and make them boring, either by being bored themselves, or by presenting the books to students who don't have enough life experience to appreciate them.  A Journal of the Plague Year is proof that some required books don't need any pedagogical interference to be boring.

The plague in question is the Great Plague of London in 1665.  Defoe had been born about five years earlier, and wrote the Journal in 1722.  It is a work of fiction, but written in such detail and with so much obvious research that it is impossible to tell where history ends and fiction begins. (More)

Jamie Oliver, a British chef, is apparently a big hit in Europe.  (Perhaps here, too; that I had never heard of him doesn't mean a lot.)  He has cooking shows, a Tupperware-style home party business, and has taken on school meals in England and the eating habits of an entire West Virginia city.  I find his flamboyant style annoying, and some of his information dated or controversial (e.g. demonizing saturated fat without mentioning the more problematic trans fats), but there is still plenty worth watching.  (H/T Janet)

Grandchild warning.  Forty-five years ago, my British-born Girl Scout leader explained to us some of the differences between the US and the UK when it comes to acceptable and unacceptable language.  Some words considered normal here were horribly offensive there, while certain words for bodily functions were unacceptable here but commonplace there.  She tried to clean up her language in deference to her adopted country, but sometimes slipped—hence the explanation.  Oliver's videos are best watched without grandchildren in the room.

Oliver's TED lecture on teaching children about food and good eating habits.  He's not a great speaker in this context, but I like the format better than the other videos.  He's a little too inclined to look into non-personal (i.e. government and business) solutions, but an important message nonetheless.  If nothing else, this one's worth it for the clip at 11:16 where he asks schoolchildren to identify foods in their natural state—and they are baffled by tomatoes and potatoes.

This article about the mathematics department at the University of Rochester credits much of their recent success to an online homework system developed by two U of R professors.

Any system that results in 80 percent of undergraduates taking calculus, without any requirement to do so, bears looking into.  (More)

Just Courage:  God's Great Expedition for the Restless Christian, by Gary Haugen (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2008)

Christianaudio.com offers a free download each month, and a few months ago the offering was Just Courage.  I'd rather read a book than listen to it, but audio books are perfect on my walks or when driving.  It sounded interesting, and the price was certainly right. 

Gary Haugen is the president and CEO of International Justice Mission.^*  I was not familiar with the organization before reading (listening to) Just Courage, but it's enough to make one hesitate before making the next lawyer joke.  The description from their website sums their mission up well. (More)

Weapons of Mass Instruction:  A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, 2009)

A pastor I know was fond of quoting Martin Luther, who, when asked why he preached on justification by faith every week, responded, "Because you forget it every week."  John Taylor Gatto has no love for Martin Luther, but I can imagine him giving a similar response when asked why his books, articles, and lectures include so much that he has said before.  He has a critically important message to deliver, and is clearly compelled to repeat it as many times and in as many ways as he can.

In his desperation to make people understand what he has learned, from his research and 30 years on the front lines of teaching, Gatto has become more pointed, strident and radical as time goes on.  It's an understandable reaction—I remember noting the same effect in John Holt's writings, and I fall prey to it all too often myself—but for this reason I hesitate a little to recommend Weapons of Mass Instruction to anyone who is not already convinced of the dangers inherent in our pubic school system.  And yet...I do recommend it, highly.  Why?  Let me digress. (More)

We don't see robins much at all here, but when we do, they are almost always in flocks.  Having grown up with the excitement of one or two robins heralding the arrival of spring, to see a couple of dozen robins suddenly descend on our yard is always a thrill.  If these robins are working their way north, I think they're a bit premature.  But they sure had fun eating the berries off our trees.

The pictures don't do the sight justice (a video would have been better), but you can see them a little better by clicking on the images.

  

This is SO typical of our wonderfully nerdy family that I had to share Jon's birthday cake here.

The Selfless Gene:  Living with God and Darwin, by Charles Foster (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2009)

Charles Foster got one thing right:  "The biologists will think that I have oversimplified the biology....Theologians will justifiably moan that I have summarized too brutally some very big and complex ideas."  That's inevitable in a book that purports to bring sense to the evolution/creation debate, and might be forgivable for the extensive footnotes and bibliography, were the book not condescending as well.

Foster cries, "A plague on both your houses!" to young-earth creationists (a category which he unfortunately stretches to include nearly everyone with doubts about some parts of the evolutionary paradigm) and Richard Dawkins-style hyper-Darwinists, then sets forth his own solution to the problem. Unfortunately, his conclusions aren't as obvious or as logical as he would like to believe.  After several chapters that needlessly insult creationists he shifts his aim to the hyper-Darwinists, following that with chapters that must have theologians scratching their heads.  I can't decide if he's brilliant or merely heretical.

Nonetheless, The Selfless Gene is still a book worth reading.  Foster is unafraid to tackle the important and perplexing questions that most people, especially those on the extremes of this debate, would rather ignore.  And he's right that the extremes actually support and reinforce each other, increasing book sales while decreasing understanding.  Whether or not Foster's ideas are right, they are at least thought-provoking, and might break a few mental log jams.