Shout Out

Thanks to him for showing me how to do that.
No more long links on this blog!

Bush, Leinhart, or Young?

With olympic hockey over its time to start thinking about the upcoming NFL season. If I were the Texans (and all things considered I'm glad I'm not) I don't know what I'd do with the first pick of the draft. Bush seems to be the most sure bet, but he's also a running back. This is detrimental since it means that his contributing years will likely be significantly less than a QB, and the position is also more vulnerable to injury. However, Leinhart and Young are both QB's which is scarry since a good transition to the pro's is less likely than with a RB (Ryan Leaf anyone?). Both positions require a good O-line, but I think that the QB position does less than the RB position (though David Carr will likely disagree). I think with everything on the line I would take the guarentee though it may bring with it a shorter term payoff.

Those Fat Cats in Washington

Well apparently all the fat cats are not in Washington.

Sydney is 3 and 1/2 years old and been on weight control food for 2+ years, but you could never tell.

Scarry factoid: our stairs squeak when she ascends or descends on them. We have squeaky
stairs, but she's a cat!

Bathtime Fun

Here is a recent picture of Karis. As you can see

she thoroughly enjoys her bathtime.

P.E. Bribery

So apparently a middle school gym teacher in Florida was accepting bribes from his students to skip class. The cost was a mere $1 a day, but they speculate the teacher brought in thousands of dollars.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/16/national/main1325333.shtml

Is Jesus a Christian?

This follows from a discussion a little while ago over at The Prosblogion (a philosophy of religion blog)
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2006/01/how_should_we_d.html
The short of it: I don't think so, and I don't think that is problematic. I'm not even sure it's that awkward to say.

Christian Service

Our church is focusing on service for the next 4 weeks, and it has already been challenging.
This last week we were studying the story of Jesus washing the disciples feet. Two key parts jump out of that story to me that characterize ultimate service:

1) The act was not deserved by the recipient of it/ it was an act of grace
2) The act was not petitioned for by the recipient/ the servant acted on his own prompting

These two features are extemely challenging to me, since I often ignore or refuse service opportunities for one of those reasons. It is easy to claim the cause of justice in such situations and view something either as deserved by me or not deserved as much by someone else [ie. I was closer to the open parking space]. It is also easy to sit back and wait for someone else to initiate [ie. no one asked me to help out], yet this is not our call.

Ethical Naturalism

Ethical naturalism is the metaethical theory that all moral properties (morally right, morally wrong, morally good/bad, etc) are identical to natural properties (physical properties). In other words, every moral property could be discovered by a scientific analysis of physical properties. It is obvious that moral properties could be realized in different ways in different possible worlds. For instance, what moral goodness looks like in some possible world W could be different than here, at least in the physical make-up. Imagine that the agents on
W are made of completely different stuff, perhaps they are silicone based beings instead. If they have moral properties, then those moral properties would be realized by different physical properties than they are here in the actual world. The ethical naturalist gets around this by positing a disjunctive natural property as that which is identical to a moral property. So, moral goodness for instance is [either N1 or, N2 or, N3 or, . . . . or, Nm] where the N's are natural properties. Moral properties are still identical with natural properties, the natural properties are just quite complex. However, the ethical naturalist must also say that there is no possible worlds where moral properties are realized by non-physical/non-natural properties. This means that there would be no possible world where God exists (where God has at least one morally good property), Descartes' evil demon genious exists (since it has some morally bad properties), or a world where substance dualism or idealism is true and there are moral properties had by such beings. Now these theses are not very philosophically popular, but it is quite another matter to claim to have utterly refuted them and show that there is no possible world where they are true, yet this seems to be the burden of the ethical naturalist.
This post is cross-posted at Moral Realism http://moralrealism.blogspot.com/ if you want to follow discussion there.

Non-Referring Names (and definite descriptions too)

My philosophy of language class has been a trip thus far.
We are just starting to get to discovering the meaning of the word 'the'.
I wanted to see what people thought of the following sentences (whether they are true, false, or neither)
1) The King of France is bald.
2) I had lunch with the King of France.
3) The King of France does not exist.
4) Santa has a beard.
5) Santa exists.

Too funny not to post

I was warming up my logic class with a trivia question before a quiz the following happened:
I asked them which two states had names which contained the entire state name of a different state.

The answer took a while, but eventually Arkansas and West Virginia came out.

At that point a girl in my class boldly proclaimed, "West Virginia is not a state!"
Immediately all eyes came upon her and she quickly started to lose her confidence that West Virginia was really a city. She didn't leave class convinced in the statehood of West Virginia, but hopefully she will figure it out someday soon.

D'oh Canada

I am so depressed over the early exit by team Canada from the men's hockey tournament. How does an all-star team get shut-out in three games, one of which was against the Swiss! The *only* consolation in that loss was that both Swiss goals were scored by a Canadian and they have a Canadian coach, but that is not much consolation. I guess the lack of the lucky loonie was a big factor.
A couple other Olympic notes:
1) Who decided it would be a good idea to put the USA snowboarders in pinstripes? I just don't see pinstripes making it in snowboarding culture.
2) What is with the need of NBC to use constant sport analogies in their olympic coverage? Snowboard cross is 'the nascar of the winter olympics', waiting at the top of the hill is like 'icing the kicker', skating warm-ups are like 'a basketball shoot-around'. Are these analogies really helpful? I certainly hope that they are not necessary.
3) Which feud was funnier: the Italian ice dancers or the American speed skaters? I say the Italian ice dancers. That girl had a glare like I haven't seen since . . . .

first post

I feel like my first post should say something profound.
Oh well.