Peter from Oranckay recently commented, over at Marmot’s blog, about his approval of the now increasingly common term “unqualified foreign [English] teachers”. It’s a term that’s bandied about whenever troublesome foreign English teachers get arrested, advertise their sexual adventures with Korean girls online, and so on. Oranckay’s (er, Peter’s) interpretation of the term is that “the implication is that there are those who are qualified,” he says, and I am not sure whether I’m in any position to disagree, not having the ability to read the articles using the term in the original Korean. However, I would like to ask …
Month: April 2005
Once again catching up
Over at Pharyngula, there’s a lot of stuff going on worth reading—if you can resist getting pulled into the comments-section debates and the religious wingnuts who love to post piles and piles of silly arguments. This guy has so many enemies that he has even suffered a DOS attack on his site; luckily, he isn’t the type to attack back in anything more vicious than this fun method… and even that, he used on himself. But there is an issue that comes up time and time again on his site, which is whether creationism belongs in the classroom. As a …
Edge Science News
From KurzweilAI.net, some bleeding-edge science news and speculation: Freeman Dyson has an interesting—and though I respect him, I feel, not wholly convincing—argument for space exploration. Fish oil may be good against Alzheimer’s disease! Wired reports on a useful new biolaser for looking inside cells, which may help us figure out how the hell stem cells work. And NASA engages in a little fun speculation about what a Martian mission might look like in the future, and reports on the current state of automated exploration. Which, if you ask me, is really the way to go for now.
The Pope Is Dead. Who’s Next?
The death of the Pope is not big news for those who’ve been paying attention to the news and knew of his critical condition. Personally, I assumed it would happen in the next day or two. But the list of potential successors to the Papacy, it looks rather interesting. If nothing else, it reinforces a sense of that non-monolithic nature of the Church that commenter Joshua occasionally mentions here.
Hello, Buenos Aires! Hello World!
Unlike some bloggers, I don’t get a lot of mail from readers. Not much love-mail, not much hate-mail. And I haven’t particularly minded; the fact that most readers either comment in the comments section, trackback to me, or just don’t feel like commenting at all is fine with me. But sometimes mail from a reader is a real treat. Like this morning. I woke to find an email from a very enthusiastic reader in Buenos Aires who wanted to let me know how much he enjoyed my email about my post on Kierkkegaard. He said that he will be translating …