Assembled Randomage

1. james was right. a [science] grad student is a function that maps caffeine to output space.
2. biology needs a 1905.
3. self-righteousness extends far beyond the religious sphere of life. so does orthodoxy. both are tied to the submission of freedom (intellectual, moral, et al) to a system.
4. the overt lack of a political/social philosophy in the Gospel only tells us that Jesus invites us to join Him in transcending politics. not buddhist transcendence or some such nonsense. Christ's transcendance is unique in the spiritual dialogue in that it actively deals with politics while exposing its mechanism, ultimately revealed in the Crucifixion.
5. being a Christian (on the days where I actually feel like a little Christ..) grad student in physics is.. a learning experience. being a Christ-representative in the physics workplace is very different than at S/V or UPS. lots of learning from the Master required.
6. when you set up an empirical epistemology wherein the necessary forms for an event's possible signature are a priori dissallowed, noting the lack of admissible evidence to that event doesn't constitute a disproof of said event's existence. it only says that you know how to turn the crank on your a priori criteria.
7. america really is a unique nation in the history of hegemonies thus far (whether due to broader trends in the west or america's specific cultural brand, we'll see), namely in how unimperialistic our policies have been relative to historical precedent. historically, truly imperialistic democracies require something close to a supermajority's support for blatantly imperialistic policy. and no, iraq isn't and never was imperialism. if it was, we wouldn't have reached $3/gallon in cali this past summer. which leads to..
8. if modern academia had a decent appreciation for military history and closely studied the surrounding trends, chomsky would be out of a job. in a just world, he'd also be executed on the basis of the justification and support his writings have provided for a slew of totalitarian regimes and by proxy the virtual enslavement and murder of significant portions of their populaions (current project is revisiting american involvement in serbia, which thus far amounts to an expulcation of guilt from milosevic & co.). sorry bud. exporting mcdonald's versus spastically gassing your own citizens and raping their descendants isn't really much of a comparison.
9. in general, there are too many bright people in the social sciences that are smart enough to construct models ten levels of abstraction from available evidence but aren't wise enough to relate the effectiveness of such overelaborative construction. there's also the small matter of effective untestability, where such models run the dangerous road of appearing to merely represent the fluctuating whims of the involved community with no means to evidentially show otherwise.
10. music bears a fundamental relation to the erotic, a fact revealed in the language often used to describe its structure and effects. as such, perhaps music is a clue to part of eros-nature as found in eternity..?

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"He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart."
- C. S. Lewis