Five Hours with Cornel West

23 March 2013 | No comments

Had a former student ask about Cornel West — hurray! — and so in my excitement to provide links, I came across two cool videos.

The first is a 2012 speech in Brooklyn:

The other is ten years older, from 2002. Three hours of Cornel West on C-SPAN’s BookTV. (Alas, can’t embed this one.)

Enjoy!

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Didactic SynCast #82: Trading Through The Puke

23 March 2013 | No comments

This episode has a gross title, but it’s a real quote from Dark Pools, the book I’m reading right now about high-frequency trading. Also this episode: stabbing people with letter openers, psychotic robots that follow you into the bathroom, killer super weeds, and cinder blocks to the face! Enjoy.

 DS #82: Trading Through The Puke

Top 3 Links of the Week

Current Events

Economics

Education

Killer Robots, Etc

Hip-Hop

Snoop Lion on Tavis Smiley (Sorry, the PBS embed isn’t working.)

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Alan Watts: Who Are You?

22 December 2012 | No comments

What did you forget?

I’ve changed so many times since this morning, you see..

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The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained

15 December 2012 | No comments

In the midst of the horror and tragedy of Connecticut, let’s remember the healing power of love and grace. In 2006 the Amish community of Nickel Mines reminded us what it looks like.

On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, “We must not think evil of this man.” Another Amish father noted, “He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he’s standing before a just God.” Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: “I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.”

A Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them. Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts’ widow, parents, and parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts’ sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him. The Amish have also set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. About 30 members of the Amish community attended Roberts’ funeral, and Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of the victims.

Marie Roberts wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors thanking them for their forgiveness, grace, and mercy. She wrote, “Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.” The Amish do not normally accept charity, but due to the extreme nature of the tragedy, donations were accepted. Richie Lauer, director of the Anabaptist Foundation, said the Amish community, whose religious beliefs prohibit them from having health insurance, will likely use the donations to help pay the medical costs of the hospitalized children.

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Third Week: Bleah

27 June 2012 | No comments

The first two weeks of my summer vacation have been excellent. I hung out with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, I had lunch with Redditors, I played games and read and rode my bike around the lake.

Week Three was supposed to be the point at which I got back to work on The Novel. Alas, Dawnguard arrived yesterday (Tuesday) and so much for that idea. Now I’m deeply enmeshed in that adventure, and everything else is on hold. (And yeah I feel like a slacker and a video game addict, but what else is new?)

The bigger problem I’m having is insomnia. I keep waking up at 5:15 AM with headaches and groggy confusion. I took a nap yesterday and the woke up in a Twilight Zone, which lasted for the rest of the evening.

We turned on the window AC unit for the first time this morning and it made a hideous bangbangbang noise. Diane tried to get the front panel off, but apparently this is impossible without destroying it. (That pronoun at the end there is deliberately ambiguous.)

I’m not really sick but I have a headache. I read somewhere recently that we often wake up somewhat dehydrated, so drinking water is a good idea in the morning. (Usually it’s just coffee, so this seems plausible.) So I’ve been drinking water in the morning. Today it’s not helping much. I took two Aleve but they’re not doing much either, so far as I can tell.

It’s not a lie-on-the-couch-and-do-nothing-except-watch-30-Rock type of headache, but neither is it the type of ache which is easily ignored. The AC repair dude (a nice and very capable guy who repaired our washing machine once) said he’d come by “later in the morning” so I can’t really take a nap (and besides, napping this early in the morning always seems silly to me, even though I’ve been awake for four hours). Meditating seems risky, since it could at any point be violently interrupted with knocking and dog scrambling.

So instead I’m just writing, mostly because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t feel like playing Dawnguard, but I feel like I should, because The Novel isn’t going anywhere and I need to finish with Dawnguard so I can get to work on it. (Meanwhile I’ve got two other projects sitting on my virtual desktop that I haven’t touched in days. Then there’s the new INS project that’s 3/5 done and I want to get finished this summer, and the fantasy story I started last month and want to work on and blah blah blah.)

Deep breaths are good. Maybe I will lie down. This feels like the most purposeless thing I’ve ever written for public consumption. Apologies to those who expected something more profound or intriguing.

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