So far, I’ve done a bare-bones install of Exchange 2010 three times, (once almost without any screw-ups,) in a lab environment consisting of a domain controller and a member server both running Windows Server 2008 R2. Baby steps, baby steps.

Why would-be engineers end up as English majors.

** Update: finally found this video on YouTube. **

Reading through it, I began to realize that some of the assumptions I’d made about education in my part of the world is pretty much true. For the most part, people find science and mathematics harder to understand and study than they do subjects like history, English, and others that fall under the umbrella of liberal arts. The question I had to ask myself is why. Why do so many people have such a hard time with one area of focus, but not others? Is it because the college coursework for English majors is less complicated and demanding than what engineering and science majors have to deal with? After spending long hours in study-sessions with Hanif Houston, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s English undergradute department, I’d say this isn’t true. His workload consisted of sometimes reading an entire novel per week, analyzing it, and writing several lengthy papers at once. My workload consisted of dozens of math problems, physics questions, and code-writing projects each week; all of these together often times didn’t amount to the amount of time and effort Hanif spent dissecting Shakespeare or building arguments for why Philip Roth’s sarcasm should be bottled and sold as a remedy-cure for common stupidity.

Given, I’m still a lower-division computer science and electrical engineering major, while the comparison is to upper-division English studies. Nonetheless, the CNN article describes people dropping out of their first or second years as science majors to pursue liberal arts degrees instead, taking a path of less resistance. So why is it really, then, that people decide that liberal arts are a path of less resistance to a degree? The obvious answer I can give here is that math and science classes in the public K-12 school system aren’t nearly adequate enough to prepare students for college-level work, but that’s not really the only problem. After all, courses in history, English, art, music, and the like are just as lacking in high school and below. So, perhaps there’s a bigger issue to look at. . . maybe it goes back further and deeper than our educational system.

Growing up, I never quite realized how often I heard the same set of mantras: “I don’t care about the science, as long as it works,” “I’m no good at math,” “when am I ever going to use this stuff?”, and of course, “if you spend all your time studying [math, sciences, or other 'nerdy' subjects], you’ll have no life and never get laid.”

The issue here is that all these things are so damned passive, we don’t realize we think this way. When I used to think of professional writers, for example, I used to imagine the people I saw in movies, like Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets, playing Melvin Udall, living in an expensive New York apartment and writing books at his leisure. Or I’d picture Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys fighting writer’s block, Sean Connery in Finding Forrester as a reclusive shut-in, coming out of seclusion to help a young writer earn his professor’s respect. All of these guys had two things in common: they didn’t seem to actually work all that hard for their money, and there’s never a time we see them struggling to earn that money. Easy living, right? Just write books, cash your checks, and have all the time in the world to deal with life’s other little problems. How hard could that be?

Scientists, on the other hand, get a different image in pop-culture. Up until recently, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and all flavors of engineers have been portrayed either as quirky side-characters, or as eccentric, awkward head-cases that are either used as foils for more charismatic characters, or as “ugly ducklings” that need to be brought out of their shells by friends or a love interest. (See Q from the James Bond movies, the protagonist of the Nutty Professor movies, Doctor Emmet Brown from the Back to the Future series, etc.) The cases where a scientist is considered a sex symbol, a true main character, are the cases where they are more occupied with flashy action sequences than they are with their area of expertise, (see Doctor Jones from Indiana Jones, Doctor Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life video game series, and Doctor Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park.) This is also true for those “lonely nuclear/astro physicists” played by attractive blondes in James Bond movies. The issue here is, simply put, real science isn’t sexy. Most of those nerdy engineers and scientists used as side-kicks and comic relief in movies aren’t what the majority of people want to be.

I say most, however, because there is an exception to the nerdy scientist image. When the movie, video game, book, or television show in question is attempting to make the science, itself, sexy is when we see the geeky scientists become the charismatic protagonist. One good example of this is Dana Scully from The X-Files, as well as Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters and Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H. Often times, with the notable exception of the latter, the main characters are made to look a lot more sexy by virtue of the fact that the science is either questionably feasable, or dumbed-down in order to make for more exciting action or drama. These are people we want to be, for sure, but for the same reason we want to be those writers from a few paragraphs back: their lives consist of other concerns, outside their jobs, that make their existence a lot more fun than our own. Scully performs autopsies on camera, Dr. Venkman actually does perform experiments in psychology, and Hawkeye spends a lot of time in surgery. These scenes, however, aren’t the main focus of the story, they’re merely vehicles for the characters to further conflict between other characters, set mood, or used as a backdrop for later sequences to play out. (Hawkeye also spends a lot of time drinking in his tent and arguing with higher-ranking army officers about the patients he’s worked on in the OR.)

So what’s the payoff for having read this far? My point is that we either paint math and sciences as too dull, too boring, or too difficult. It’s okay to rationalize your C grade in algebra because no one will fault you for saying it’s not your strong point or that you’ll never get any use out of the quadratic formula in your adult life. On the other side of the coin, we sometimes make technical fields seem easy and fun like they are for Indy and Doc Brown, and people are blown away by how much work they have to do in college to achieve a fraction of the progress these characters make and are disillusioned. This isn’t all too different from martial arts movies, signing up for karate classes, then dropping out after a few weeks because you got your ass kicked in a fight after school. The real world isn’t the movies, and usually the jobs we have to do aren’t exciting or sexy at all, so we pick the perceived easier path in order to avoid that work. Between that slap or reality and the stigma of working in “nerdy” fields of study, in my opinon, it’s no wonder people either switch from, or outright avoid, sciences and engineering in school.

How do we rectify this kind of attitude? I suppose we can try to instill in our kids that hard work is a part of life, and if you pursue your intersts you’ll probably end up having a lot of fun as well as studying your butt off. Regardless of the field, reality needs to be observed and people need to start getting genuinely excited and interested in their pursuits. Being an English major isn’t easy, and physics isn’t as hard as you’ve been lead to believe. And honestly, at the end of the day, both writers and scientists are equally geeky in their own right; so are FBI agents, firefighters, and medical doctors.

The political landscape of this country can be summed up in one word: vicious. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen the kind of outright partisanship that’s dividing this country into distinct blue and red factions. President Obama’s being called a nazi, a communist, a Kenyan, and the word liberal is still considered a derogatory term by many. So, who is to blame for this onslaught of venom from the right? Why, we are. . . the very same liberals who are under the gun.

During the George W. Bush years, the outrage over his administration’s policies boiled over to such a degree that nothing was taboo. We called him a nazi, we called him a fascist, we burned effigies of him in the streets, and there was nothing sacred about the posters carried during anti-war rallies. Does this mean that we were wrong in feeling outrage? Of course not, there was plenty to be angry about during the Bush years. However, regardless of how we may have felt about the issues, that doesn’t excuse the tone and approach we took. We, who are supposed to be the “intellectual elite”, let ourselves get goaded into a screaming-match that is the basis for what the right is flinging back at us now.

Regardless of if we were right or wrong, no matter how strongly we may believe we were right, we set a horrible precedent. We sank right down to the level of the conservative mud-slingers and gave the conservaties, particularly the Tea Party, all the ammunition they ever needed to rally support. They can now call us freedom-haters with the same poison language we used against them. After all, why wouldn’t they? They’re simply one-upping us, stepping only a few steps over the line that we drew and then ran over. We gave them the weapon they needed to fight us: self-righteous outrage fueled by memories of our attacks on them. And when you give a chimp a gun, you don’t blame the chimp when it shoots somebody.

We made some pretty horrendous mistakes that the right has taken and run with. So, what can we do? It’s simple, we simply have to rise above it and continue moving forward. The issues at hand are important, but this time we have to address them like the adults in the room, instead of sinking down to the shouting contest of the past. Let the Republicans and other conservatives shout, rally, scream, and yell. They are more than capable of sinking their own ships, especially now that a new crack in the armor is appearing.

During the health care debates, the presence of a group known as the Tea Party was undeniable. Their rallies, promoting mainly fear of the coming changes, were showcases of the kind of rabid ideology conservatives are ready to embrace in this day and age. The Tea Party is a far-right answer to the Republican party’s standard right-of-center  politicians, and there have been several cases where an incumbent Republican politician has been voted out in favor of a Tea Party candidate.

The Tea Party is dividing the Republican party down the middle. And, as one prominent Republican once said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” The first targets of the hyper-idealogical Tea Party  are the centrist Republicans, not the Democrats. This creates an interesting set of circumstances: Republican politicians will either have to shift their policies to appease the Tea Party, potentially alienating independent and right-of-center voters, or they’ll be under threat of being replaced by a Tea Party candidate.

What happens next is the tricky part. The Democrats will lose seats in both the senate and in congress, but it’s very unlikely they’ll lose their majorities. Sure, the filibuster-proof majorities will be gone, but that doesn’t matter since the Dems never had the guts to use them anyway. The tension will continue to grow as the Tea Party picks up more and more steam, generating more empty outrage over the Obama administration, putting more pressure on centrist Republicans to fall in line or be ousted in the next election. My advice to them is to run, run across the aisle and stand with the majority in order go get things done. Results will always win over ideals and outrage.

As time passes, the current Tea Party candidates will fail to live up to the impossible ideals of the Tea Party and the rhetoric of the likes of Glenn Beck. Their own candidates will begin to take heat for not bringing change fast enough, much like they did to Obama starting the week after his election. There will be blood in the water, that’s for sure, and Republicans will be scrambling to ensure their seats in congress and the senate come 2012. As I said, results will matter more than promises, and the only way they’ll get any results under their belts, not to mention the support of anyone outside the Tea Party, will be to vote with Democrats on upcoming bills.

So where does that leave the Democrats? They have to rise above the bickering, the name-calling, and stop acknowledging the blubbering outrage of people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Realizing that Beck and Limbaugh are far more concerned with their ratings than the ideals of their party is going to be the first step, and we’re not going to win any elections or approval ratings trying to shout down or even get into debates with radio personalities. President Obama, in particular, needs to worry less about the resistance his policies see in the here and now, and focus on moving his policies forward. The only way for Barack Obama to ensure a victory in the 2012 presidential race is to bring results of his first four years in office, in order to give credibility to the promises for the remaining four.  In the end, history will remember what was accomplished, not what was attempted.

The same can be said for all of us. It’s time to stop engaging the Tea Party and the outrageous claims made by their leaders. Of course Obama is American, of course he’s neither a nazi or a socialist. We know that, Glenn Beck knows that, but the average Tea Party supporter doesn’t know any better and is whipped up into a frenzy based solely on the emotional response produced by hearing those things. We need to rise above them, be the adults, and stop giving in to tempter-tantrums. Debating issues with a Tea Party follower is useless, they have faith that their own views are right and earnestly believe that liberals are evil people out to destroy their way of life. We cannot get caught up in emotional warfare with them any longer. We have to rise above all that and ignore them, let them torpedo themselves, if we are ever going to see reason win out over zealotry.

The truth of the matter is that the deciding factor in the upcoming elections is going to be the independent vote, as it was in the last election. As long as we stick to our principles and avoid jumping down in the mud with the conservatives, we will win. An undecided voter isn’t going to look favorably on the Tea Party’s extreme viewpoints and unfounded claims, but they’re not going to look favorably at us either if we show them exactly the same thing. I say let the conservatives eat each other, we have a lot of serious work to do and it’s far too important to let fear-mongering and self-righteous nationalism distract us from that fact.

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• iTunes U is a resource available through iTunes which grants access to thousands of classes and complete courses that have been podcasted from universities and colleges around the country (and the world).
• MIT’s OpenCourseWare is an example of the content available from iTunes U, and a great stand-alone resource for any student that wants to get a preview, or overview, of courses offered at MIT.
• TED offers videos of talks and lectures by prominent and influential teachers, thinkers, and artists from all over the world.
• Academic Earth offers a wide variety of courses and lectures in video-format.
• Video Lectures has a large selections of videos covering lectures in a broad range of topics.
• Free Video Lectures offers an RSS feed of newly-submitted videos to keep users up to date of their selection.
• Lecture Fox provides a list of available classes in the form of videos, audio, and notes.

As opposed to this being nothing but a funny entry on a comedy blog, (I laughed when I saw it, just as I laugh at other “blooper videos”,) it actually turned into news when PETA showed outrage at the incident, no joke: PETA miffed at President Obama’s fly “execution”

PETA’s blog points out that they were approached for comment about the incident and did not make any unprovoked statements,

Believe it or not, we’ve actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA’s official response to the executive insect execution.

In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.

Immediately following these comments, they were quick to plug a product they sell and stated that they’ll be sending him a humane bug catcher for future use. . . yes, my head hurts too. They’ll never back down on the position that we shouldn’t even swat flies, but I’m hoping that the present is at least an attempt at humor and that there won’t be follow-up stories of a letter containing lecture on cruelty to animals to go along with the thing. Hopefully, they realize that they were only contacted by other news organizations because somewhere, some producer saw the video and suggested his reporters ask PETA for comment between fits of laughter.

This is what they’re sending him: Katcha Bug™ Humane Bug Catcher

If nothing else, maybe this will boost President Obama’s approval ratings with conservatives and his critics. He’s sending a strong message to the rest of the world: if this is what he does to flies, just imagine what he’ll do to Kim Jong-Il if North Korea doesn’t back off their nuclear weapons program.

Things like this confuse me as much as religion does, though:

Please join us as Ronald Aronson presents his new book, Living without God. In Living without God, Aronson picks up where the writers—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens—he named “The New Atheists” (in Bookforum) leave off, turning to face the need for a coherent and contemporary secular philosophy that will answer life’s vital questions. As Aronson argues, living without God means turning toward something. Grounded in the sense that we are dependent and interconnected beings, rooted in nature, history and society, Living without God explores contemporary answers to Immanuel Kant’s three great questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope? Aronson stresses how much knowledge humans have accumulated, verified, confirmed, and implemented: dozens, hundreds, thousands of things that are vital for human understanding and well-being. Today so much that was once cloaked in darkness is known, and so much that is really essential to our lives is knowable. We have developed methods of analysis, synthesis, and reasoning that can be taught and learned. All of this is now part of what John Dewey called the “social consciousness of the race” and it belongs to all of us, waiting to be claimed and used. We sell ourselves short to pretend otherwise.

About the Speaker

Ronald Aronson grew up in Detroit and was educated at Wayne State University, U.C.L.A., the University of Michigan, and Brandeis University, where he earned a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas. He studied with William Barrett, Page Smith, and Herbert Marcuse. Swept up in the political activism of the 1960s, he became a community organizer in the African American neighborhood of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and an editor of the prominent New Left journal, Studies on the Left. In spring, 1968, as he was completing a doctoral dissertation on “Art and Freedom in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre,” he participated in the “Freedom School” organized in the aftermath of the student strike at Columbia University.

Aronson has taught at Wayne State University since 1968, first at Monteith College, and since 1978 in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, a nationally recognized program for working adults that was abolished by the WSU Board of Governors in 2007. He is now Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas in the Department of History. Winner of several scholarly and teaching awards at Wayne State, Aronson is the past president of its Academy of Scholars.

He was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago in winter, 2004. In 1983-4, he was Research Associate at University College London and in 1987 and again in 1990, a guest lecturer at the University of Natal and other South African universities. The story of his first experience in South Africa, at the height of the struggle to end apartheid, is told in Stay Out of Politics: A Philosopher Views South Africa (Chicago, 1990). In recognition of his scholarly career and political contributions to South Africa, in April, 2002, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa.

Aronson has produced televised political debates on democratic values and affirmative action (participants have included Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Abigail Thernstrom, David Frum, and Dinesh D’Souza) He is co-producer of the feature-length documentary film Professional Revolutionary about legendary Detroit social and political activist Saul Wellman and, most recently, 1st Amendment on Trial: The Case of the Detroit Six, focused on the Federal government’s trial of Michigan Communist Party leaders in the ‘50s.

One of Aronson’s lifelong concerns has been to study and write about the nature of hope, especially as related to political commitment. Since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, he has been active in the Huntington Woods (MI) Peace, Citizenship, and Education Project.

I guess I don’t understand the need to learn to live without something I don’t believe ever existed. A lot of people seem confused by this. Their thinking is that I’m living devoid of something or I’m denying some integral part of me, as if though I was chopping off an arm or my tongue. I don’t see it that way, but it’s hard for others to. Being labeled as “someone who doesn’t believe in a supreme diety”, which is the definition of the word atheist, doesn’t exactly help my confusion on this matter.

The simplest explanation I can give is this: I didn’t go bowling last night, nor did think about not going bowling. I didn’t bring up the thought to not bowl, I simply didn’t do it and it never crossed my mind. From my perspective, the concept has to be conjured up, not rejected. It’s the same with religion, my perspective is that everyone else has added something to their thought-process and their lives, not that I’ve excluded something.

As for the argument that there “has to be something more” and that, somehow, I can’t have any hope if I don’t believe in an afterlife, I can only say this: there doesn’t have to be more of anything, it’s neither my choice nor is it my concern. People feel the need to make sense of chaos, but that’s not how the universe works, there aren’t always tidy explanations for everything you see and hear. Finding comfort in the fact that my time as a living, sentient being is limited is no more strange than the idea of living forever on some other plane of existence. I’ve simply chosen to accept what I am and moved forward. I find hope in my everyday life, in the relationships I have with friends and family, and in myself. I find happiness in my accomplishments, in living my life on my own terms, and in happiness for the sake of happiness. I hold my morals and beliefs up to anyone who follows Jesus, Muhammid, Zeus, Osiris, or otherwise: a person isn’t morally pure or corrupt by default, no one gets a free ride that way, being a good person takes a lot of insight, work, and strength; you cannot claim rightousness by saying one thing and doing another, you can only claim it if your actions define your morals.

My faith is my own, my beliefs are the things I know and see. My understanding of the world changes as I grow, the path I walk is my own and I force no one else to walk it with me. I do not believe in the ceiling cat you believe in.

Now, let’s end this on a funnier, if not happier, note: