the importance of fairies
Noted atheist Richard Dawkins is apparently leaving his post at Oxford to write a children’s book designed to suck all of the imagination out of childhood.
His theory, apparently (leaving the ridiculous and manufactured Harry Potter aspect of the article out), is that there’s something harmful in raising kids to believe in magic and fairies and the like. He goes on to tie this into religious upbringing, calling it child abuse to label a kid “christian” or “muslim”. On the labeling issue i agree; it’s up to the child to figure out their belief system. But the idea that there’s no value in the fantastic is ludicrous and misses the point entirely.
Young children (4-6 or so) are figuring out the world. There is plenty that they can see and touch and experience, and much that they can’t explain. The idea that there is magic in the world, or fantastic creatures that remain hidden from humans can help bring some of the world into a story framework that children can deal with. They’re just a metaphor, and whether that early belief in magic develops into a belief in God or a belief in the expanded possibilities of life depends on the context given by parents and by the kids themselves.
What the idea of the fantastic can do, however, is to spark the imagination for the possibilities of life and the world around us. I have tromped through the woods with my kids looking for signs of fairies and discovered a myriad of plants and animals and insects to study and talk about. My oldest daughter (7) believes in the Greek gods at the moment and builds fairy houses while waiting for the school bus, but loves to perform experiments in the kitchen and workshop to help understand how the world works. She also wants a generator wheel for her bike with training wheels so she can make her own electricity.
Fairies are not a gateway drug to Jesus, as Mr. Dawkins seems to contend, the world of the child is not that clear-cut. At the moment, string theory takes a certain amount of faith too, but it’s the ability to take those leaps of imagination that is important. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of children’s book he comes up with that’s fully rooted in the scientific, and whether he can make a story of it that kids will like. If it is good we’ll probably buy it, but it’ll live on the shelf right next to Egyptology and Dragonology and other books that help expand growing minds.
sub-30
First morning ride under 30°F
Not cold enough to freeze eyelashes shut
but time for the big gloves.
Find that balaclava already.
Acceleration exhaust hangs in the air
when it’s cold and still,
like a fart waiting to be pushed around.
Gentle showers of ginkgo leaves,
a flurry of tiny locust leaflets,
only contrails in the clearblue sky.
2008 CX #2: Afton - DNF!
It was a beautiful day for ‘cross racing at one of my favorite places to mountain bike; the course was tough but fun, i had rushed to get there but was ready to roll, the bike was running great except that the rear tire just should have had a bit more air. I was running in the top 15 or so mid-way through the second lap, having dodged the pile-up on lap 1, turn 1, and dodged a couple of others’ barrier mishaps. My lungs were on fire, as expected, but i was settling down to a good pace now that i knew the course (arrived too late for a pre-ride), and starting to make progress through the pack. Then i hit the asphalt straightaway and felt that queasy little squirm from the rear end of the bike that meant something just wasn’t right. I don’t know what did it, but it was a rough course, could have been about anything. No spares for me and no pit crew, so i was out. My first race DNF ever!
I could have tried to redeem myself on Sunday at Lake Elmo, but i decided to bag it and get some house work done instead. I’m a total CX slacker this year. The race was fun, for sure, and i’ll be back, but there haven’t been enough free weekends to stay on top of things lately.
I think i’m getting hooked on singlespeed ‘cross racing. The bike feels light and solid as a singlespeed, very reassuring to not have the chain bouncing all over the place. If there was an internal 3-speed hub with something like a 8-10% difference between gears, it would be the perfect setup.
anyone have an eee pc?
I’ve been sorta fascinated with the little Asus Eee PC netbooks, reading Dave Winer’s experience with them, and just this week i saw that Target, of all places, is carrying them too.
I used an iBook for 6 years until the screen died about a year ago, and then a very used titanium Powerbook that also had a bad screen, but i’m now on a desktop computer again. It’s really nice having a laptop, but of course i don’t have a spare $1k+ sitting around. So the idea of a $300 laptop that’s just good enough to browse online is really appealing; it’s pretty much all i’d want a laptop to do anyway. Solid state would be nice too, in a house with pets and kids and me knocking things over.
Anybody have one of these? Are the keyboards annoyingly small? Is the screen large enough to be usable? (i’d get at least the 9″ version)
Thank you, Michele Bachmann
For reminding us of the dangers of McCarthyism.
For inspiring a million dollars worth of investment in your opponent’s campaign.
For erasing any doubt about the impending electoral landslide.
For giving Sarah Palin a break from the media spotlight.
For putting a public face to all the neo-conservative whack jobs who might otherwise fly under the radar.
Thank you for being so completely batshit crazy as to effectively give the election to the Democrats this year. I’m almost feeling sorry for the Republicans, things are falling apart so quickly and so thoroughly. Almost.
fixed door follies
I have 3 pets; a dog and 2 cats, and i have a cheap wooden screen door on the back of the house. Earlier this summer, a hole appeared in the bottom left corner of the door, i think from one of the kids. It was a cheap fiberglass screen, well on the way to hanging in shreds already. Whatever the initial source of the hole, the little orange cat, Louis, decided it made a dandy escape route and over a couple of days worked to enlarge the hole enough to get out to the back yard.
Over the course of the summer the hole got big enough for both cats to easily jump through the door without trouble, and they spent most of the summer coming and going freely when the main door was open. Between the pets and normal wear and tear of kids coming and going and my own clumsiness, by fall that screen door wasn’t so much a screen as a frame for holding scraps of screen-like fabric. It hung in strips from the middle of the door, only the top 1/3 relatively unscathed (and only relatively at that).
Finally yesterday i had a chance to use the new screening i bought and fixed the door. The new screen i got is Pet-D-Fence Screening; it’s not metal, but some sort of coated screening, supposed to resist getting torn up by claws, seems like a good application for it. Installation was straightforward, just like any other screen job, and it came out nice and tight. I got the door installed again last night and forgot about it until this morning.
The typical morning routine is that the dog DEMANDS to be fed, then goes out to pee, often followed by one or more cats. This morning was no different, the dog doing her manic tap dance while i scooped food and cats meowing in circles. When the dog wanted out, i opened the wood door and Louis became an orange blur streaking past the dog, smashing into the screen mid-leap, in the exact spot where the hole used to be. He hit the door hard enough to open it several inches and sat there dazed for a couple of seconds while i opened the screen door and let them both out, laughing my ass off.
Although, i’m sure, the neighborhood cats will be sad for having less access to their sparring partners, I get a nice new-like screen door, and hours of entertainment until the lack of escape route sinks into his little feline skull!
the future of food
In the NYTimes, Michael Pollan wrote a letter to the next farmer-in-chief discussing the state of modern food production. A telling quote:
… a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
It’s an excellent article on the simple premise that the current era factory farming practices must change back to a more balanced system that uses less energy. Pollan covers the topic well, from national security to school nutrition to drug-resistant bacteria strains. It’s a compelling read.
I have a good friend who left the city and career in design work to start an organic farm, and i’ve been a member of his CSA for years now. It’s very satisfying to get food grown by someone i know, and it’s excellent produce too. It’s always a sad day, in the middle of winter, when i realize that the farm vegetables are finally gone and i’m going to have to buy vegetables from the grocery store again.
Being part of a local CSA farm is in some ways a luxury, but it’s also a good direction to be heading in. I’ve been a lot more aware over the last couple of years (before the current labeling guidelines went into affect) of where food comes from, and the total cost of that food. The cheapest food is anything grown in your backyard. For the cost of seed and a few hours of watering and weeding, you have food. Contrast that with a tomato shipped across the country, or the box of cereal that went from field to silo to processor to market and home, using energy at every step of the way.
Minimizing the cost of food is a different quest than spending the least amount of money on food. Rather than dollars per calorie, we really need a scale of food dollars per nutritional unit. The price of my CSA produce is more than buying the same produce at Cub or Target, but i’d bet that the per-pound nutrition value of the CSA produce is higher and therefore more valuable as foodstuff. It sure tastes better. Whether food from organic farms have more nutrients and antioxidants than food raised on artificial fertilizer or not, it’s certain that the organic operation is using less fossil fuel to get the job done.
In a world where the use of energy is increasingly expensive, it’ll be interesting to see how agriculture begins to cope. The organic food movement is looking… dare i say it… downright conservative. A diverse and active community of small farms is going to be the ongoing trend, and if the new administration is smart, they’ll support that trend as a security and health issue as well.
all hail the blazing orb
A simply gorgeous set of pictures of the sun right now on the The Boston Globe’s Big Picture website. If you haven’t been, it’s always worth checking out. Amazing shots of the hurricanes this past summer too, in the archives.
2008 CX#1: Wirth Park
update with results: 16th out of 98 overall, 15th out of 76 for the C1 race, not too shabby.
A little break from landslide election coverage for some bike content, for a change. I had a delayed start to the ‘cross season this year, with some busy weekends lately, but i was back into it yesterday with the return of cyclocross to Theodore Wirth Park in Mpls.
Wirth Park was the location of my first cyclocross race ever, in 1992. I was 24, had only heard of the race a couple of days before and had only the vaguest idea of what cyclocross was about, just that it was on dirt and i could use my mountain bike. I showed up barely in time to register, hungover, with a belly full of White Castle and with no clue what to expect. I went to the line with a field of maybe 10 total and just rode my ass off, following people the first lap to learn the course and just trying to hang on. I finished 2nd.
This race was different. I was NOT hungover, there were 103 riders in the C race, and i rode 3 laps before the race start. I didn’t finish quite as well this year, but not bad for my first race of the year, with little training, and my first race on a singlespeed. The course was very mountain bike-oriented; to be expected in a park featuring a good network of singletrack. There were riders complaining that the course was too hard or too rough, but it was right up my alley. The singletrack sections were fast and narrow, no room to pass. Between that and the 2 long switchbacks, there wasn’t a lot of room on the course to pass, so the strategy came down to sprinting into position before the bottleneck each time. On the other hand, i was able to make a few passes just off the beaten path, and on the last lap, squeezing on the inside of the hairpin turn (luckily and happily not crashing and taking out 3 others).
skinny-armed bike geek photo from skinnyski.com
biker down
Mega-mile fixed biker friend Ken is out of commission for a while, hit by a car yesterday on his way home from work. People think i ride a lot, but Ken is 3x the commuter i am - literally, he has a streak of 298 days commuting by bike, with a year to date mileage so far at 7,910 miles. That might be more than my car and bike mileage combined.
Get well soon, Ken, and make the driver replace that nice Quickbeam!
