I finished reading Janet Evanovich’s One for the Money. It was well written, with interesting characters, but it was just too violent for me. I had to skip through some of it, and will not read more in the series. Instead, I have moved on to Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
LikeWowMom has read and rejected Frenchwomen Don’t Get Fat, which appears to lean heavily on leek soup. I enjoy a good leek soup as much as the next woman, but it’s too hot even to think of that right now.
The Princess is reading The French Diet which recommends chocolate, and allows one to eat plenty of ostrich and quark. I have never eaten either of those things knowingly, in France or elsewhere. I think of “quark” as a term in physics, in fact.
Booksfree has just sent me The Mediterranean Diet, so I feel as though I am climbing onto this bandwagon. I do not, however, think about my figure. I have to think about lipid profiles, and count grams of saturated fat and sugar, so it would be excessive to expect me to think about calories as well.
I do think about physics quite a lot. When #2 son got home from Trebuchet Physics camp last year, he confided that they “could have done it all without the physics.” I really like that idea. We do of course do things “without the physics” all the time, and could not perhaps get through the day at all if we had to calculate stuff before we could accomplish it. Like walking, for example. Feynman says that there are things which are not about physics, like love. That is the only example he was able to come up with, but he generously allows that love does not require any math.
I think that physics is like God in that respect, that we really cannot do anything without either of them, and are in fact subject to them, whether we ever think about it or not.
Thoughts of God and physics together are perhaps naturally coming to my mind, because I have also just read a new book that arrived at the store: Galileo for Kids. The physics in this book was not new to me, but I definitely got some history lessons. I had never before really understood why Copernicus’s view of the universe was considered heretical, for one thing. For another, I had the time line all wrong. Copernicus did not get into any trouble for his views — he actually dedicated the book explaining why he thought the earth moved around the sun to the Pope, and the Pope is reported to have liked the book.
Then, of course, Galileo and some other guys got in trouble for believing what Copernicus had written. If you are interested in law at all, I think you would find his story quite fascinating. This part of the story I had pretty clear in my mind — the Inquisition and all.
But the Catholic Church did not publicly take back their condemnation of Galileo until the 1990s. Yet there must have been some point at which they decided that a heliocentric view of the solar system was not heresy. It cannot have been the case that Catholic schools in the 1980s were teaching the Ptolemaic model. If you know more about this, enlighten me, please.
We also got a nice shipment of toys in. This was not a Christmas preparation shipment, but rather just a summer fill-in. We are thinking back-to-school, but children continue to have birthdays and things, so we have to have some toys.
Every year, the Poster Queen announces to us on June 25th that it is six months till Christmas. Somehow, this year she neglected to do so (she was home having a garage sale). As we unpacked toys on June 28th, I realized that we had missed that important announcement.
It is not time to think about Christmas in the usual way, of course. However, since I spent much of last year’s cool weather knitting small things for holiday gifts, I am resolved to knit my gift things this year in the hot weather, and leave the cool weather for knitting the lovely wool Fair Isle cardi that I have been planning since last year. If you do not knit, you may not understand why this matters. If you knit, though, you will know immediately why a person might not care to knit large woolen objects when the temperature is in the upper 90s.
So I am looking through my knitting books in search of inspiration on this subject. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
In the meantime, #2 daughter and I are trying to decide on a duet for church for the 24th, #2 son is giving no thought to his upcoming camp (I suggested that he begin to think about what he would like to take with him, but he thinks of packing no more than he thinks of physics, and was politely incredulous), and #1 son is considering taking up food service for the second half of the summer.
5 thoughts on “Wednesday June 29, 2005”
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Gallileo for Kids sounds good. Thanks for the recommendation! I wish we had a trebuchet camp. My boys would be ALL OVER THAT.
I’m going to develop an obsessive-type thinking problem about temperature at this rate…
RYC: Your description of the Baptist Church fits the one I went to perfectly. Lots of nice, friendly people, a fun Sunday School, cheerful singing … I think that was why I found the refusal to discuss alternate views so confusing – how could people be that nice and yet so narrow in that one area.
The lack of religious teaching in NZ schools is relatively new I think – in my mother’s time and, as described, in my time, there was at least an hour a week of it in one form or another. It was stopped because it was considered to be impolite to students of different faiths to teach only the tenets of the Christian religion. I still think they could have taken the other route and rotated the classes among Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism with a minority religion thrown in occasionally. A friend of mine was annoyed enough about it that she sent her daughter to a Catholic school even ‘though they were not Catholic so that her daughter could learn about the religion – and be taught in a more disciplined environment than is necessarily the case in non-Catholic schools. The Catholic schools have picked up quite a few students this way now that they have been integrated into the state school system.
RYC: cheating is the fault of both parties in a relationship but I am more concerned about how women act in taking that act in men to their own sense of guilt. Men cheating inspires more self doubt and graver depression then I could have ever dreamed and it does happen often. Maybe if women and men both open up more when they do get to a ‘relationship’ level many of those problems will be solved…
That POV is logical – up to a point …but it cannot be used to justify a refusal to discuss other points of view. After all I could remonstrate with a friend about their tendency to practice unprotected sex and legitimately justify my nagging by saying that the reason I nag is ‘cos I care. I cannot, however, use that same justification to then say ‘…and I’m not interested in your reasons for your behaviour because I care about what happens to you.’
The problem with the bus analogy is that we know, from the generally accepted worldview of physics that if you step out in front of a moving object that is considerably bigger than you, you are likely to be squashed. The problem with the whole going to Hell thing is that, even among Christians, there is not a generally accepted model of the Christian spiritual world that must include the existence of Hell. In fact, I think the Catholic spiritual world involves Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. (I dreamt about Purgatory once – it looked like a gigantic skyscraper much like many of the buildings in the huge metropolitan areas of the US and Asia) A foolish pedestrian who is saved by a more fundamentalist Christian pulling them out of the way of a bus will accept the justification ‘I’m sorry but I did it because I care about you and wished to stop you getting squished by that bus’ because they both share the same world view in this particular context. On the other hand, a more fundamentalist Christian who prevents a woman entering an abortion clinic for example and justifies it by saying ‘I’m sorry but I did it because I care about you and I want to prevent you from ending up in Hell’ is on much shakier ground because the two are no longer working within the same world view.
I just had a thought. I wonder what the rescuee would say to the rescuer’s justification if it went ‘I’m sorry but I did it because I care about you and I wanted to prevent you going to Hell when that bus squashed you.’