favorite Williams College courses

1. ARTS 100: Drawing I
2. GEOS 217T: Planetary Geology
3. PHYS 411T and PHYS 405T: Newtonian Dynamics and Electromagnetic Theory, both with Prof. Bolton!
4. PHYS 141: Particles and Waves, Enriched
5. PHYS 301: Quantum Physics
6. LING 212: Historical Linguistics

Lists of Things Official 2008 Campaign Coverage: several political views of Ron Paul, each of which, alone, is sufficient to make me scared of him

1. He wants to eliminate the Federal Reserve and have a floating currency. Because, with a huge national debt and trade deficit, with China becoming an economic powerhouse and holding the largest foreign reserve of US currency, with the dollar sinking against other currencies, and with the current mortgage crisis, having no monetary policy at all would be great. Yeah, no risk of inflation or recession or staggering economic crash there.
2. He wants to abolish the IRS. I assume he thinks that citizens should decide on their own how much in taxes they owe to the government, and should make the check out to “The Government, c/o Ron Paul?” Seriously, he’s such a free-market nut, but why did he seemingly forget that companies tend to hire accountants?
3. He wants to prohibit the federal government from levying income taxes. Apparently, his US history is pretty weak: we have tried this twice before. The first time, under the original Articles of Confederation, we realized that our government was headed into a hole and we wrote the Constitution instead (with federal income taxes as a prominent feature). The second time, half of the US seceded and wrote itself a constitution that did not allow federal taxes, with the result that they printed a hugely inflated currency and had no capital to spend on the war they were trying to fight, a major reason why they lost spectacularly.
4. Speaking of, he lambasted Abraham Lincoln for fighting the Civil War at all. Uhhhh…yeah…way to endorse states’ right to secede, there. I hereby declare my apartment a sovereign nation.
5. He wants to pull out of the UN, IMF, NATO, etc. NATO! Why the *$&% would any Presidential hopeful want to pull out of that enormously successful alliance?! Also, this sends a great message to the rest of the world. Something akin to, “Frak you, we don’t care what you think, we’re just going to do whatever the heck we please to you and you’d better just take it lying down. How dare you suggest that we sign your pathetic treaties and try to work out our global problems.”  Because, of course, there are no problems that affect the whole world at once, just individual nations one at a time.  Kind of reminds me of a horrid sitting President I know.
6. He thinks that is basically okay for any American citizen to go walking around in a city with a concealed automatic grenade launcher. Because (so says Wikipedia) he thinks that school shootings etc are a result of “prohibitions on self-defense.” Logic?
7. He wants to eliminate federal agencies like FEMA (because we never have emergencies that need responses, no sir) and the Department of Education. (Because we don’t need educated children–after all, if we had an educated populace, who would vote for people like Paul?)
8. He supports legalizing prostitution. I fell like there is a very, very limited number of reasons why a male politician would want this.

actors who were considered for roles in ‘Star Wars’

1. Richard Dreyfuss
2. Jodie Foster
3. John Travolta
4. Tommy Lee Jones

ummm

1. Apple
2. Windows XP Pro SP2
3. Seinfeld
4. Toboggan
5. 0.5mm mechanical pencil
6. Cycloid
7. White envelope
8. Balloon

important things to remember about Charles Darwin

1. He was a devout Christian.
2. He found it amazing and awe-inspiring that God chose to create the world through the process of evolution.
3. He did not “believe” in evolution a priori.  He became convinced of evolution through true scientific process of induction, of inference through observation.  It’s not like he was “indoctrinated” in “scientific dogma” in grade school.
4. He did believe in God a priori.  He wasn’t out to get religion.
5. His theory was formulated in terms of so-called “macroevolution,” and was founded on evidence of same.  So-called “microevolution” was observed later.  (Both so-called because the distinction is artificial: it’s a way for Creationists to refuse evolution without also giving up their vaccines.  This makes them Cafeteria Scientists as well as Cafeteria Christians!)