Highlights (and one lowlight) of my last delinquent period of non-writing (As I'm sure you can tell, public self-flagellation on my blog is a great motivator to write more often, and so I do it at every opportuity.): The wedding was awesome! Great to see everyone: Cyndi, Jaya, Jen, Esosa, Kav, Bill, Filip and Adriana, Damien and Martha, random MIT people that I had only met a couple times before, and of course Apara and Jitin. I only wish I could have been less tired and partied with you all all night, with the college throwback Smirnoff screwdrivers to set the mood.
Ann Arbor: Laura's roommates seem nice enough, and somewhat talkative, which is what you can hope for for random science grad students, so that's good. Mostly I'm just excited to be definitely going there. I'm looking forward to learning the city, and walking around the law school's campus just made me feel ready. And of course I'm excited to be living a ten minute walk from Laura. Much better than a two hour plane ride. I also particularly enjoyed handing the lease and deposit check in, and the surprised look I got from the admissions officer since they're used to getting it by mail. Just thought that was fun. Dunno why.
The Creation Museum: I don't believe I have adequate enough words to describe how depressing a place that was. Most horrible were the kids being led around and indoctrinated. You could almost see the ignorance seeping into their eyes. Never have I been prouder of the teenagers making fun of the stuff they had to do with student groups. At least they had some chance at resisting.
Basically the museum boils down to contrasting human reason with the Word of God. Humans have been trying to poison the Word of God with contrasting knowledge for centuries. Some attacks were from the "infidel philosopher Voltaire", and the most recent example was the fictional DaVinci Code. The techniques for convincing us that not just evolution but all human reason was wrong varied from lazy logic to outright lies. Scientists are not "puzzled" as the to cause of speciation of finches, thank you very much. And the lazy logic argument goes something like this:
Scientists say that canyons all over the world were formed over very long period of time by rivers and erosion. But we know this one canyon (including a picture) was formed in only four years by mud and silt from Mt. St Helen. So how were the canyons really formed?
Later in the museum they inform you that the answer is Noah's Flood. The whole museum would have just been funny if they had stuck to Creation, but because they extrapolated that Human Reason was the cause of all things evil, it was sad and dangerous. They had one poster toward the end that showed Reason as the cause of all racism, genocide and abortion in the world. Never mind that the Bible was used to justify slavery, religion was used in the Inquisition, countless crusades, and the Holocaust, and contraception prevents many future abortions today. I guess I didn't really know what to expect going in - were they supposed to make some sort of argument actually justifying Creationism? They tried by saying that we all have different starting points and they should be equally acceptable to society (the one argument that could persuade people that they're acceptable for at least a short time), but they shot themselves in the foot by denouncing Human Reason at every opportunity. The saddest part though, was that if you didn't know any better, some of the lies were insidious enough to maybe get you thinking that it was right. If I find out there is any public funding for this museum, I will be very angry.
Anyway, back to Tampa, Laura's family, and a Rays game, then to LA for Mets v. Angels and sightseeing, then SD for another wedding, and back abroad I go.
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