Wherein I say the word “ass” as often as possible.
You know how it's all the rage for kids to have their pants half way down their ass so you can see their underwear? Well, today the kid pouring my latte had his pants hanging off his ass except...no underwear. His ass was totally hanging out of his pants. Not that I'm complaining, really. I can think of more than one person I'd like to see make that particular fashion statement. I was just caught a bit off guard.
It makes you wonder what everyone else in the coffee shop was thinking. I didn't notice any obvious reactions: bugged out eyes, hanging jaws, whispering behind hands, etc. Not that the self-righteous crowd in this state is going to be in a coffee shop in the first place.
This local roaster has a penchant for hiring ... non-traditional ... employees. They have a dozen shops around the valley and more often than not the employees are pierced and tattooed and otherwise thumbing their nose at social convention, but I wonder how the boss would react to the whole bare ass thing. Also, would that count as indecent exposure? We're not locking up plumbers, so I'm not really sure.
I must confess I was almost giggling as I thought of those law makers who had palpitations when boxers first appeared on the scene and felt compelled to introduce legislation to prohibit such moral turpitude. Can you imagine the apoplexy when they spotted this kid with his ass out there for all to see?
Oh, did I mention I was at the one shop down in Utah County?
What is it we really know?
I've been reading Rewriting the Soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. It was recommended to me by one of my professors. I picked it up more for the "sciences of memory" part than the "multiple personality" part. I confess I am a skeptic of multiple personalities (officially Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID now). It's been a very interesting read. His commentary on how we acquire knowledge in the social sciences was particularly intriguing.
[Binet's] measures of "intelligence" had to agree, generally, with preexisting judgments and then be adapted at the margins. Had he declared that many children who could not cope with French elementary education were intelligent, he would have been mocked. Had he said that the better students at the lycées where stupid, he would have been reviled. ... Binet's great innovation, the testing of intelligence, made sense only against a background of shared judgments about intelligence, and it had to agree with them by and large, and also to explain when it disagreed. Who shared the judgments? Those who matter, namely the educators, other civil servants, and Binet's peers in the middle classes of society.
...One result of calibration is that prior judgments became both sharpened and objectified. What were once discrimination made by suitably educated or trained individuals were turned into impartial, distant, nonsubjective measures of intelligence. Intelligence became and object, independent of any human opinions (my emphasis).
Now, I was aware that IQ tests are under fire for being culturally (white, middle class) biased, but it wasn't until I read those words that I understood the why and wherefore.
Many sociologists of science, and a few philosophers, have recently welcomed the idea that scientific knowledge is a social construction. They contend that science does not discover facts, but constructs them (Hacking, 1995).
Makes you stop and think doesn't it?
Yippee!
Tired of feeling fat and out of shape, I've been making a concerted effort at getting to the gym on a regular basis. I started swimming a few weeks ago—at the gym, a full hour workout w/ QUAC would kill me right now—and today I was able to finish a length of butterfly w/o feeling like I was dying. OK, so it's a long way to go until I'm back to doing a 50m fly in just under 32 seconds, but it's progress and a milestone I feel pretty good about. Yea, me!
No, that's not me, but I did take the picture. It's a good friend kicking ass at the IGLA championships in Ft. Lauderdale a few years ago. He took home several medals. I don't remember if one of them was for fly or not. As a matter of fact, a sizable contingent of QUACers is in D.C. right now at this year's IGLA championships. Really wish I was there, but between the whole chubby-out-of-shape thing and the too-damn-much-on-the-credit-card-as-it-is thing, I stayed home this year.
An incredible commencement address
J. K. Rowling was invited to give the commencement address for Harvard this year. You really should take some time and read it.