Project 365: Day 31

My room! Finally, getting settled in BHouse. It took a ton of work, but it's worth it. Come visit us!

Project 365: Day 30

I dropped AJ off in Ithaca, NY where he'll be this summer. I was going to take a picture of us, but I got distracted and kind of upset and didn't manage it. Anyway, here's one of the gorges Ithaca is so famous for. They're really quite beautiful.

Project 365: Day 29

We rented a car and headed up to Ithaca, with AJ's bikes strapped on the back. An adventure, of sorts...

Project 365: Day 28

Sometimes at work, a particular book stands out. This was one.

project 365: Day 27

Coming soon!

project 365: Day 26

D'awwww!

Jae and Skylar snuggle on the floor of sketchy bpartment.

project 365: Day 25

 After the insane move-out madness, and getting everyone and everyone's stuff tucked away somewhere safe, we headed up the hill to Adam and Annie's house, where Ben is house-sitting. Joe and Hayley had never seen Top Gun, so we educated them. And played the Top Gun drinking game, except without the drinking. (Drink for "Damn it, Maverick!", homoeroticism, and finish your drink for buzzing the tower.)

project 365: Day 24-- Graduation

Project 365: Day 23-- Class Day!

Class Day!

It's the Bingham Family, together again on the other side of 4 years.

project 365: Day 22

Baccalaureate was today. This obviously merits more than one picture for today... But I think I'd pick the last one if I could only have one today. 

Chris, Casey, Amy and I getting ready in the Trumbull courtyard. Aw!
Chris and I, looking adorable if slightly silly in cap and gown. Tassels still on the left though-- haven't graduated yet!

Processing down the middle of College Street to Woolsey for the ceremony. Kind of amazing! We took up the entire block, and that was just a third of Yale College's senior class. 

project 365: Day 21

Memorial Gate, which I won't walk through until I have my hard-earned degree in hand. Superstitious? Absolutely. But I refuse to take chances. :-)

project 365: Day 20

Ken very generously hosted a brunch for '09. He made banana crepes with nutella! Quite delicious, and great to have almost the whole class assembled for a meal again.

project 365: Day 19

From the filming of our senior sketch. No more details provided until the cinematic premiere. :-)

project 365: Day 18

After months of waiting, AJ and I finally went on our date-auction date. We had a picnic in the park and went to the Peabody. He didn't realize I had my camera out to capture the beautiful vista, but this was much funnier.

Project 365: Day 17

As part of senior week, the Yale Farm held an open house. They were making and serving homemade pizza, which was delicious.

project 365: Day 16

Today, I have to start to deal with this. Wooooooooo.

Hurray for senior week and moving out.

Project 365: Day 15

We took off about sunrise to drive back to New Haven. The sunrise over the beach was a bit muted because of weather, but it was still gorgeous. Hence, I'm putting up two pictures again, because I really couldn't decide.

And we could still see the moon, even as the sun was rising. Gorgeous.

project 365: Day 14

This was dinner tonight. Oh man. Real Carolina barbeque, sweet potatos, hush puppies, amazing slaw, rice with red gravy and sweet tea. All for less than $7. Man, I love the south!

project 365: Day 13 (with bonus pictures!)

Yay! Today was a great beach day despite the persistent threat of rain. Greg and Andrew got all the beach pictures. After the clouds made the beach sad, we went to a tacky tourist mall, which was a lot of fun! I can't pick just one picture today, so I'll put three up. (Is that cheating? Maybe, but so what?)

Take 1. (Note: we didn't actually go to Tiki Jim's; we just found this awesome and quite suited to the general level of tackiness typical of Myrtle Beach.)

Take 2.

Nearby, we found dinosaurs! Yeah!

Project 365: Day 12 (with a bonus picture!)

This (above) is the picture for the day-- inside of Spoad's (actually called the Spanish Galleon) which is the North Myrtle equivalent of Toads dance party (except way classier, with cages, and a cover. Oddly, all these things can go together.) This one really captures that defining myrtle moment really well. 

The one below (12a!) captures the pre-Spoad's atmosphere pretty well: it is Carly calling Rachel outside Hot Diggity Dogz. :-) 

project 365: Day 11

And all that driving yesterday was worth it because this is the view from our hotel suite this morning. Amazing! Beach view room, complete with kitchen, queen beds, balcony, everything! We spent a lovely day getting our hair cut (nothing very exciting) and sunning on the beach.

Project 365: Day 10

What a day! Woke up before 5:30am to get on the road by 6... then a 15 hour road-trip to Myrtle Beach! Most of the day was full of the boring road-trip scenes of I-95 south. All the way! But finally, as we crossed the border between North and South Carolina, we found:

South of the Border! It's a huge rest stop/shopping mall/motel complex/convention center/ethnic stereotype fest. The racial insensitivity was remarkable, as was the general sketchiness of the whole place. We stopped and had dinner at the Sombrero Restaurant, which was not as bad as it looked, despite the 70s era cow-print vinyl everywhere.
And lo and behold, just an hour or so later, we arrived in scenic Myrtle Beach!

project 365: Day 9

Tonight was the my last meal in the dining halls. Dinner itself wasn't that great, but still, it will be sorely missed. Oh Trumbull, how many great meals and conversations I've had! 

project 365: Day 8

Rosa really loves llamas, so she was pretty delighted when Steve brought her this whole clan of llamas. I think she decided it was mom, dad, baby and mistress. 

project 365: Day 7

After seeing Bob Ballard, and dinner, and Star Trek (which was great!), it was amazingly foggy. It was after midnight, so it totally counts! Other highlights of today: last Blunch ever, being done with college, completing my last final...

project 365: Day 6

Bob Ballard , geologist and deep sea explorer, has had an amazing career. He came to speak at the Peabody , and he was pretty great. He discussed his ~10,000 accomplishments, the nature of deep sea exploration, and his plans for having robots explore the future (and the past! <3 underwater archaeology!). Seriously awesome. I did his Jason Project when I was in grade school, and really appreciate it a lot more now than I did then.

Project 365: Day 5

I love these. I know I'm a little behind the times-- all the crosswalk buttons on campus had clever replacements. Now, they're almost all gone. I do really like this one though, and I think it merits being today's picture.

project 365: Day 4

AJ, being very studious. Darn finals.

Project 365: Day 3

The edible table decorations at the Trumbull Senior Dinner.

Did I ever have readers? Do I now?

Hey there. This blog has been inactive for so long! There's a tiny chance I'll revive it for real in the late summer/early fall as I head off to graduate school. Until then, if you're interested, check out these other blogs I write for:
BHouse 2009: The blog of the Members of... living together in New Haven this summer.
YPMB '09: The collective blog of the Members of... class of 2009. We're all moving on to bigger and better adventures, but we'll write all about them.

Also, a Project 365 blog is coming soon!

Project 365: Day 2

The celebration of graduating seniors and confirmation at the Episcopal Church at Yale.

Project 365: Day 1

Harkness Tower from the Branford Courtyard.

Bringing it back?

I guess if I have access to the internet while I'm in Egypt, I should be blogging about it. And maybe in advance of that, I should have something published here since June!
So, with that thought in mind, here is an interesting article which takes Buffalo, NY as a model for urban decline, and suggests some good policy to correct the slide: education. Without educational advantages, Buffalo will slip into the history books as a great industrial city lost to the digital age.
Thus, I present
Can Buffalo Ever Come Back? by Edward L. Glaeser

Things to do

So, I'm in Chicago this summer. It's an interesting story of how that came to pass, but I don't want to tell it. Anyway, I've been compiling a list/calendar of things to do in the city for the summer. They're basically all free or nearly so-- for example, I'm not averse to listing concerts that aren't free but college students get in for free. (For example, college students get free admission to all CSO concerts at Ravinnia.)
Here is what I have so far, and if you want to add events to the list or join the facebook group if you'll be in the city for the summer, then let me know somehow.
This is the best city to be in for the summer, and if you're here, you're lucky.

This morning, my grandmother died. She was very old, 90, and was not really living a good life any more. I know she's at peace now, and it's honestly for the best. She will be missed as she was loved, but she hasn't known me for over a year, and even stopped recognizing my immediate family weeks ago.
However, I am going to disappear from Yale this week, since I am going home for the funeral. The wake will be on Tuesday night and the funeral will be on Wednesday.
If you're the praying type, then keep Nonnie (Jeanette) and my dad Mike in your prayers. If not, then send happy karma his way.

So, while I like Blogger a lot better than Livejournal for nealy infinite reasons (it's classier, it has not yet earned it's reputation of having angsty preteens gnash their teeth about acne and failed romance, and my html coding does what I want it to when I tell it to, unlike on LJ where I never fail to fight with code, etc), people still seem to like the easy-to-stalk format of LJ.

Anyway, I guess it's about time to link to the LJ, just in case there is someone out there who ever looks at this, and has failed to find it on their own. Neferkatie9.

Also, in new and exciting news, Amy and I decided to start a web comic. It is clearly still in very formative stages, so please don't judge us (unless you like it or have constructive criticism to share). It's called Two Chicks at the Same Time.

The New Atheism

A few bits out of this neat article about the New Atheism: (really long, so these are the best bits... it's still worth reading, though!)

Like Dawkins, Slade rejects those who might once have been his allies: agnostics and liberal believers, the type of people who may go to church but who are skeptical of doctrine. "Moderates give a power base to extremists," Slade says. "A lot of Catholics use condoms, a lot of Catholics are divorced, and a lot don't have a particular opinion about whether you are homosexual. But when the Pope stands up and says, 'This is what Catholics believe,' he still gets credit for speaking for more than a billion people."

Now that people are more worried about the fatwas of Muslim clerics, Slade says, this concern could spread, become more general, and wake people up to damage caused by the Pope.

For the New Atheists, the problem is not any specific doctrine, but religion in general. Or, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers."



and...


Suddenly I notice in myself a protective feeling toward Harris. Here is a man who believes that a great global change, perhaps the most important cultural change in the history of humanity, will occur out of sheer intellectual embarrassment.

We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. "There would be a religion of reason," Harris says. "We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it's in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit."

I do call it prayer. Here is the atheist prayer: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.


and...
The Center for Inquiry is also a storied landmark. True, it is not as striking as the Angelus Temple, being only a bland, low structure at the far end of Hollywood Boulevard, miles away from the tourists. But this building is the West Coast branch of one of the greatest anti-supernatural organizations in the world. My favorite thing about the Center for Inquiry is that it is affiliated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, founded 30 years ago by Isaac Asimov, Paul Kurtz, and Carl Sagan and dedicated to spreading misery among every species of quack.




The New Atheists never propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. For instance, the Catholic Church opposes condom use, which makes it complicit in the spread of AIDS. But among the most powerful voices against this tragic mistake are liberals within the Church – exactly those allies the New Atheists reject. The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically.



When I arrive at the farm, I find him in the midst of a difficult task. He has been asked by the President's Council on Bioethics to write an essay reflecting on human dignity. In grappling with these issues, Dennett knows that he can't rely on faith or scripture. He will not say that life begins when an embryo is ensouled by God. He will not say that hospitals must not invite the indigent to sell their bodies for medical experiments because humans are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Ethical problems must be solved by reason, not arbitrary rules. And yet, on the other hand, Dennett knows that reason alone will fail.

The New Atheism

A few bits out of this neat article about the New Atheism: (really long, so these are the best bits... it's still worth reading, though!)

Like Dawkins, Slade rejects those who might once have been his allies: agnostics and liberal believers, the type of people who may go to church but who are skeptical of doctrine. "Moderates give a power base to extremists," Slade says. "A lot of Catholics use condoms, a lot of Catholics are divorced, and a lot don't have a particular opinion about whether you are homosexual. But when the Pope stands up and says, 'This is what Catholics believe,' he still gets credit for speaking for more than a billion people."

Now that people are more worried about the fatwas of Muslim clerics, Slade says, this concern could spread, become more general, and wake people up to damage caused by the Pope.

For the New Atheists, the problem is not any specific doctrine, but religion in general. Or, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers."



and...


Suddenly I notice in myself a protective feeling toward Harris. Here is a man who believes that a great global change, perhaps the most important cultural change in the history of humanity, will occur out of sheer intellectual embarrassment.

We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. "There would be a religion of reason," Harris says. "We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it's in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit."

I do call it prayer. Here is the atheist prayer: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.


and...
The Center for Inquiry is also a storied landmark. True, it is not as striking as the Angelus Temple, being only a bland, low structure at the far end of Hollywood Boulevard, miles away from the tourists. But this building is the West Coast branch of one of the greatest anti-supernatural organizations in the world. My favorite thing about the Center for Inquiry is that it is affiliated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, founded 30 years ago by Isaac Asimov, Paul Kurtz, and Carl Sagan and dedicated to spreading misery among every species of quack.




The New Atheists never propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. For instance, the Catholic Church opposes condom use, which makes it complicit in the spread of AIDS. But among the most powerful voices against this tragic mistake are liberals within the Church – exactly those allies the New Atheists reject. The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically.



When I arrive at the farm, I find him in the midst of a difficult task. He has been asked by the President's Council on Bioethics to write an essay reflecting on human dignity. In grappling with these issues, Dennett knows that he can't rely on faith or scripture. He will not say that life begins when an embryo is ensouled by God. He will not say that hospitals must not invite the indigent to sell their bodies for medical experiments because humans are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Ethical problems must be solved by reason, not arbitrary rules. And yet, on the other hand, Dennett knows that reason alone will fail.

While I'm being mocked for my supposed militant feminism...

I present for you this article, which is long but very worth it, about the "War Against Boys". There has been a recent statistical trend toward lower achievement in school for boys, and it is widely seen as a reaction to all the energy that has been pumped into programs to help girls do well. The logic here goes that if we're helping girls, then we must be ignoring the boys, and that is why the boys aren't doing well. Another view that I can hardly even parse says that school is inherently feminizing to men, and school and teachers are trying to turn boys into "pussys" instead of "real men". This is ridiculous for any number of reasons, well described in the article.
As I risk turning this into "an angry feminist rant", I'd just like to point out that I'm not particularly extreme on any of this, nor am I a "feminazi", though I have been called that rather seriously at least once. (Not even counting the several times a day Steve tells me I'm an angry feminist.) I do have a sensitive spot for discrimination on the subject, however, and with this (as with everything else) I rarely hesitate to make my feelings known.

In London Town

What an awesome day!
Pictures should be on facebook soon...
First, I went to breakfast, then class. Both good, but fairly standard.
Then, I went to the afternoon Eucharist at St Martin in the Fields church in Trafalgar Square. It was great.

Then I explored Trafalgar a little more. I didn't get to go into the National Gallery (soon!) but I did take a look at Allison Lapper Pregnant, the statue that is currently on "the empty plinth". (For the record, I have never seen, heard, read, or thought combined the word plinth half as many times as I have used it this past week.) That was cool.

Then I was supposed to meet some people at Harrods. It's nearly a 3 mile route directly, but I didn't go directly. And I got lost. So lost. No streets are straight, and despite my three excellent maps... well, I got lost. So I missed my appointed time to meet my friends there. It took a long time. But on the way there, I walked past Buckingham Palace, as well as these awesome people with insane hats.





Also, I went through Belgravia, which is where most of the embassies are. As well as these signs.



And then I finally made it to Harrods. Where I saw:


I would seriously kill for this lamp. Whoa.
And from there, I took the bus to Picadilly. (Close to Trafalgar, where I started.) From there, I explored a lot. I visited St James' church, and found a nice little market, where I happily bought a watch and a sweatshirt.

I also stole sugar for my tea from several coffee shops. (One opened in my bag. It was the karma price, I think.) I wandered around, eventually finding dinner (fish and chips), Covent Garden, the LSE, the BBC, theatreland, Drury Lane, and some armed dudes in bearskin hats.
I kept walking, with the vague notion of going home. I didn't end up in the direction of home (north and a little east), but ended up on the Strand/Fleet Street (a lot east and a little south). I ended up walking to St. Paul's again to catch a bus home. But while I was on Fleet Street, I found the Twinnings HQ (amazing sign!)

and St. Bride's. St. Bride's was very cool. The site it occupies has been a site of Christian worship since there were Christians in Britain. There are visible old Roman foundations in the basement! And a great crypt. They were also having a festival, which I stopped at. And of course, the modern church was designed by Sir Christopher Wren (architect of St. Paul's) and damaged by the WWII bombings of the area. John Milton also lived in the courtyard. Sweet!

Again, the direct route (which I most certainly did not take) was about 2 miles. Then I actually did make it home, to write this and upload my photos.
Hurray. I love cities. They're so great. London especially, since that is where I am.

Look at me!

That's the before picture.
Now take a deep breath and prepare for the after.


















It was a pretty big day for me today.