I have slept through my springtime sleepiness, and am noticing things are settling into their warm-weather demeanor. The afternoon is sunny in a way that just doesn’t happen in January, regardless of the presence or lack of clouds. What is up with the world?
I read earlier in the print edition of the WSJ that spam is on the decline. Right. I can really tell that by my inbox, with its 1 good mail per 20 spam average ratio. Supposedly, spammers are cutting back because fewer people read spam any more. People read that stuff? Sucker born every minute, I guess.
Then, on the drive home, I think of an odd correlation: the one between the large amount of fuzzy-thinking moral relativists out there (“Everyone’s point of view is valid, and ought to be considered.”) vs. the seemingly smaller amount of moral thinkers (“Right and wrong exist.”), and the large amount of humanities and soft-science majors (“You can believe in any viewpoint you want, as long as you back it up with research/statistics.”) vs. the smaller amount of mathematics and hard-science majors (“I don’t care how hard you worked on the homework questions — you got all the answers wrong, so you don’t get any points.”).
Math is hard. That’s why people don’t like it. Unpopular positions are unpopular usually for very good reasons. If you take one, you can be shot down in a sometimes surprisingly large variety of ways. Gauss proved the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, that each integer has a unique prime factorization, in four different ways. There are probably even more ways of proving the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. You don’t like it? Tough.
But in English departments around the land, one can get good grades for arguing any sort of tripe, if you argue it well. One therefore thinks one can do this in real life, and therefore goes about calling thugs and murderers “statesmen” and “freedom-fighters.” It doesn’t work like that, fellas. The intentional killing of innocent people is WRONG.
My advice to those who are upset by the previous sentence: get over it.
white pebble 