Here’s a selection of snapshots from my visit to my sister’s place near Fairbanks in Alaska. It’s a very different world than Kansas. As usual, click on the pictures to see them larger and with better color.
The bear in the bedroom
Author: Don
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore
I spent the last week of June in Alaska visiting family. Circumstances precluded any long trips outside of Fairbanks, but I still found plenty of subjects for my camera. Disappointingly, the Alaska Range was generally concealed by haze and clouds. The above was as good a photograph as I was able to get, though I did spot Denali/Mt. McKinley once when I didn’t have the camera in my hands. It will probably take a week or two to go through all the hundreds of pictures I took. For now, here are some of the peonies and roses at the Georgeson Botanical Garden at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the most northerly botanical garden in the world. In Kansas, peony season season is long over, but in central Alaska it’s just starting. The roses are mostly hybrids of the very hardy Rosa rugosa.
Today’s quote: God’s language
I’m sufficiently annoyed to facetiously propose an alternative: that a proper Christian education should be centered on abstract algebra (groups, rings, vector spaces, etc). Reasons:
- Deep exposure to math inclines students to the true philosophy: Platonism. Humanities pay too much attention to words, which inclines to nominalism.
- Ability to manipulate people (rhetoric) has greater moral hazard than ability to manipulate things.
- Unlike the classics, modern math has large contributions from Christians (Euler, Cauchy, Riemann, Cantor, etc).
- Scientists and engineers are hard-working nerds. Writers and artists are bohemian degenerates.
- Math does a better job than rhetoric or grammar in promoting clear thinking and rigorous reasoning. In math, one can’t win arguments by manipulating the meanings of words. True, classical students might study Euclid, which has the virtue of being proof-based. However, it lacks the breadth and profundity of modern mathematics, its training in abstraction, the recognition of identical structure in disparate systems, exposure to deep concepts like generators, homomorphisms, cosets, etc.
- The level of memorization required for a Latin-based education is an unnecessary barrier that math-based education evades.
- Math is God’s language.
Today’s quote, Prussian schooling edition
Pity poor Horace Mann, Henry Bernard and other ‘educationists’ trying to sell modern schooling to such people. They had to convince such an educated population to hand over their children’s education to experts. Basically, the educators failed to convince Americans. Mann started pitching Prussian schooling, otherwise known as compulsory age-segregated classroom instruction, before 1837, but it took a dozen years and special circumstances to get the first school off the ground. That first school in 1848 in Boston snuck by because it targeted immigrants. ‘Real’ Americans didn’t send their kids there; those ‘real’ Americans became convinced that it was a good to use the state’s power to beat a little of the right kind of Jesus into the skulls of the Irish Papists kids that were showing up in Boston in large numbers at that time (the Irish Potato Famine began in 1845). From the very beginning down to this day, schooling is seen by the self-appointed Enlightened as a way to correct the moral defects – Catholicism back then, all the ‘bigotry’ and ‘hatred’ today (which of course includes Catholicism) – of the unwashed masses.
Snapshots
In lieu of a substantive post, here are some recent pictures from my garden.
Today’s quote
Kate McMillan at normblog twenty years ago:
Norm: If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be?
Kate: From the present – the American writer and conservative ‘hawk’ Mark Helprin, and rocker Ted Nugent. Helprin is on a lot of shortlists as ‘world’s greatest living writer’, but that’s not the only reason I’d invite him. I figure that given a few drinks, he could help me convince Nugent to beat the crap out of the third guest I’d invite – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the socialist Canadian Prime Minister who set into motion the intellectual, military and political decay of a once proud nation.
No more toxic positivity
Western colors
The Great Penstemon Experiment is returning some preliminary results. While there are penstemons native to every state except Hawaii, species from the eastern half of the country tend to be white or lavender — nice, but generally not brilliant. Out west, however, they’re much more eye-catching, with many blues and reds. I’ve started a number of these from seed and purchased a few plants, focusing on species said to be “easy” or “adaptable.” The following all survived a full year in Kansas and are blooming now.
Prime time
The garden is at its most colorful now. Here are some recent snapshots.
More blues, plus pinks, yellows, whites, etc.
The Baptisias I started two years ago are finally blooming. Blues are (almost) always welcome, and the plants are tough and attractively bushy, but they’re no substitutes for Russell Lupines.
Continue reading “More blues, plus pinks, yellows, whites, etc.”
Springtime blues
Last year’s experiments are starting to bloom. The Penstemons native to Kansas are fine plants, but if you want the vivid blues that the genus is legendary for, you need to look to the arid west. The very blue P. mensarum is found only in a small region in Colorado. Fortunately, it is easy from stratified seed, and the plants seem perfectly happy in Kansas.
Collect the whole set
A bit of color
I took the camera out to the local community college garden this afternoon. It’s early, but I did find a few things in bloom.
Today’s quote
The only reason that’s not doublespeak is that it doesn’t mean anything at all.
The context is the EU, privacy and cyber security, but it applies to all pronouncements of the intelligentsia.
At the same link, see an example of a “future-past perfect singular subjunctive.”
*****
Bonus quote, via The Silicon Graybeard:
It’s a very gentle 10,000 g.
The day after
A couple of items of interest from yesterday.
The People’s Cube has been marching proudly in ideological circles for the betterment of Global Equality™ for two glorious decades now.
*****
Those following the tale of Maomao and Jinshi might find this of interest:
Definitely spring
While the weather can always double-cross us, it does look like winter is really over. Here are a few snapshots from the yard today.
The first lilac of the year.
Geum triflorum, or “prairie smoke,” is grown not for its peculiar little flowers, but for the fuzzy seed heads that follow in a month or two.
Bulletin
Artificial “intelligence” cheats at chess.
90 degrees later
A few weeks ago it was -10℉. Yesterday it was 80℉. Perhaps it’s now spring, but I don’t quite trust the weather.
Up and out
It’s been a while since I last visited the Cosmosphere, so I went there this past weekend to give my new used lens a workout.
Making it easier to fast
The day after tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Eight years ago Amy Welborn took a page from Lileks and published a Gallery of Regrettable Lenten Food. The bag of fish sticks in the freezer looks more appetizing now.