fling93 loves fishies

Katrina Bleg

By now, I hope you’ve heard about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. If you haven’t yet donated, please do. Give to the Red Cross or to the charity I gave to, America’s Second Harvest (we already give regularly to the Red Cross), or pick a charity of your own choosing. Pretty please! With a cherry on top!

If that’s not enough motivation for you, well consider some of these:

Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy had an interesting challenge, where his donation would increase from $200 to $1,000 if enough readers promised to do the same. He’s already reached that $1,000 level, but he’s welcoming further $1,000 matches.

For a challenge that hasn’t yet reached its goal (and for those of you of a more liberal persuasion), you can contribute to the Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief, who have a goal of $1,000,000 (link via Liberals Against Terrorism).

If you want a more tangible incentive, consider Jane Galt’s tantalizing offer:

Being a journalist, I’m afraid I can’t afford matching funds, nor do I have anything nifty to offer like the folks at Crooked Timber have. But I’ll offer this: for every hundred dollars you donate to a recognized charity (or the Lake Providence effort), I will mail you a homemade pound cake. I’m a pretty good baker. If you donate $250, I will write a blog post about anything you like*. It’s on the honor system; just use the NZ Bear registry, or email me.

Mmmmm! Pound cake from the ever-effervescent Jane Galt! That’s a deal I couldn’t (and didn’t) turn down. But for those of you watching your belt line, the Crooked Timber offer she refers to is Ted Barlow’s promise to burn you a custom mix CD if you donate at least $100.

Me, I don’t know what I could offer. I have quite a few artistic talents, but all of them are quite unremarkable. Well, how’s this? If you donate at least $100 to a hurricane-related charity, I’ll write at least an eight line rhyming poem about you and post it here. You can see the silliness I’ve composed before. It’s not exactly fine art, but probably the best I can offer in terms of entertainment value.

We’ll go by the honor system. Just e-mail me the name of the charity and the amount, plus enough information about you for me to work with (at least your name, occupation, and a hobby or interest or two). No promises on when the poetry will be done, as I’m taking two night classes this semester. And definitely no promises as to the quality. But I’ll do my best!

Short Thought on Science and Religion

Well, the fall semester has started, and I’m taking two night classes this semester (statistics and microeconomics). This means that blogging is likely to be light — but then again, it was already light. I think I’m going to start treating this place less like a collection of thoroughly researched essays, and more like… well… a blog. Which means shorter posts of quick thoughts.

For example, this whole debate on Intelligent Design. This is basically a quick thought I mentioned to Rich Thomas at a recent Giants-Phillies game. Anyway, I consider myself an agnostic, so maybe there’s something I’m not understanding, but I just don’t get why some religious people seem to be so threatened by science. The two are not in conflict:

Science seeks to figure out how the universe works.

Religion tells you why it works that way.

They supply answers to two completely different questions. Science explores how things work in our physical universe just to see what all of the rules are. It makes no attempt to figure out whether or not the rules were created by anybody — indeed, science has no way of determining that anyway.

If anything, the only field that religion ought to have a beef with is philosophy. So what’s the big deal about evolution? Why do they attack that area of science, but not quantum mechanics or the theory of gravity? I don’t get it. And really, science has absolutely nothing to say about matters of faith. It can no more disprove the existence of God than it could disprove the existence of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. And it doesn’t even seek to try.

Not surprisingly, Intelligent Design is not science. It does not come up with theories and verify them empirically, and indeed, it makes no attempt to do so. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, but that you shouldn’t be teaching it in a science course. Teach it in a religious studies course instead — preferably a comparative religion course which will “expose people to different schools of thought.”

So I just don’t get what the issue is. I guess maybe the real issue is not between religion and science, but between organized religion and science. I’ve long considered most churches to be primarily political entities, not spiritual ones, and a political entity might see science as a threat to its power and influence.

Serenity

Well, this is just a rough sketch, but for those of you who recognize it (and no, it’s still not the Flying Spaghetti Monster), you should know what the rest of this post is going to say. Yes, this is the ship, Serenity, from the short-lived Joss Whedon show, Firefly. The movie Serenity, which is a continuation of the story, will be opening on September 30th.

What’s it about? Well, via Dan Drezner, M.E. Russell at The Weekly Standard said it best: “Think of it as Star Wars, if Han Solo were the main character, and he still shot Greedo first.” Yeah, that’s Captain Malcolm Reynolds all right (you’ll see what I mean if you watch the two-hour pilot episode). Actually, it isn’t really like Star Wars in that you don’t have a lot of spaceship combat, but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of action and special effects. Yeah, the show doesn’t really look at all like my rough pencil sketch — maybe I’ll turn it into a painting someday. And yes, I also drew this (no, I didn’t trace it) in Corel Painter 8, which I blogged about earlier. As always, click on the image for a larger view.

But anyway, enough about my stupid drawing. What I really want to talk about is Firefly. Since it’s too late to alert you to the Sci-Fi channel’s rebroadcast of the show, I very highly recommend checking it out on the four-disc DVD set, because you need to see it from the beginning, and in order. Yeah, the main reason the show got canceled so early is that Fox, in its infinite wisdom, aired the pilot last and showed the rest of them out of order and often preempted it for baseball. Yeah, maybe that would be fine for some shows that don’t have an ensemble cast to introduce or multi-episode story arcs, but can you imagine a show like Lost or 24 or The Sopranos gaining an audience if subjected to conditions like that?