Eclectic Amateur

After a great off-peak field trip, you can go to McDonald’s with the other homeschoolers and no one orders their kids a Happy Meal®.

Reason #5 to Homeschool:

You can take your field trips whenever you want, and avoid the crowds.

Therac-25

The Therac-25 accidents may count as the deadliest software/engineering design fiasco to date. (What? You’ve never heard of it? Neither have most people.)

For a serious treatment of what went wrong, you can read Nancy Leveson’s report or just do a Google search.

For a more warped and twisted perspective, here are the South Park kids paying a visit to a Therac-25 installation.

… comes The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.

St. Lawrence Nurseries looks very cool. Hopefully, I’ll have enough land someday to need to order lots of trees from them.

Dale Price has a great takedown of Richard Dawkin’s idiotic bigotry.

Choice Dawkins quote:

Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.

Yes, Dawkins is claiming that to raise a child Catholic (or Protestant, or even Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or almost any historic faith) is worse than child rape.

To top it off, he even claims that besides, fondling kids isn’t such a big deal:

… I suspect that most of the sexual abuse priests are accused of is comparatively mild – a little bit of fondling perhaps, and a young child might scarcely notice that.

“Schmuck” is the most charitable word I can come up with.

In case you think I’m misrepresenting Dawkins, you can read his twaddle yourself and decide if I’m being unfair to the Great Clearthinking Rationalist™ basking in “the glories of true understanding” (yes, that’s his phrase).

schmuck, n. See Dawkins, Richard.

In case you didn’t already know, Pope John Paul II is an honorary Harlem Globetrotter.

No, I’m not making this up. I can’t make up things this weird.

I’m currently reading The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer, and found this gem:

Look at the general state of peace, joy, and sexual fulfillment at the average high school and ask: Is this what I want my teen to be socialized to?

John Augustine has an excellent essay: A Woman’s Place:

One Catholic’s Perspective on Women in Family & Society, Past, Present, & Future.

Read it. Then re-read it. That’s what I’m going to do.

John Augustine does a great job of picking up threads I’ve found in G. K. Chesterton and Wendell Berry, expands on early feminist and anti-feminist repsonses to the changing roles of women due to the Industrial Revolution, and seasons with much quotation from “Il Papa Feminista” (“the feminist pope”).

A beginning excerpt:

People my age, raised in the 70s & 80s after the advent of “second wave” feminism, have generally been taught (implicitly and explicitly) that until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique all married women were housewives, who polished floors and baked cookies, and all married men were “breadwinners,” who worked outside the home as doctors, mechanics, etc. We watched the “Leave It to Beaver” reruns on afternoon TV and we saw the struggle of women in the workplace in movies like “9 to 5.” … And so we developed this idea that June Cleaver was every woman of the past and now things, for better or worse (usually both), were changing.

But we were very, very mistaken, because our Ozzie & Harriet understanding of women (and men) in history was ridiculously shortsighted.

Journey with me way back in the day, before the Industrial Revolution, in your imagination. There’s pretty much always been some kind of sexual division of labor in most societies (a division different from society to society), but it looked nothing like the recent past. Why? Because almost everyone, men and women, did most of their work at or very close to home. Consider the following list of pre-industrial jobs:

• Agrarians/Farmers – raising animals for milk, meat, wool, leather, etc.; growing various plants like grains, vegetables, fruits, herbs, textile crops, etc.; doing numerous farm-related jobs like making & repairing tools, making & repairing clothes, etc.
• Craftsmen & Artisans – including smiths, coopers, cobblers, candlers, carpenters, weavers, etc.
• Other Small Tradesmen – including grocers, clarks, bankers, millers, bakers, butchers, printers (later), import/exporters, etc.

In most cases, the “business” was operated from or very close to the family home (e.g. a shop with an apartment above or behind), and the wife and children were just as active in the business as the husband. In the not-so-distant past, “business” was always considered a part of the “private” sector because it was a personal and/or familial interest. Only matters of civic culture, like government and public works (e.g. public libraries), were considered the “public” sector.

There’s more, and it’s good. But why are you still reading here, read it.

Anne Wilson has a nice summary of the problems with the H1-B visa program and engineering employment. I don’t know if I agree with her solution (“eliminate the H1-B visa”), but it’s definately a problem that needs to be addressed.