images

Which is this park thing that I can't remember the name of or, rather, The Alfred Caldwell Lily Pond, one of those great places in town that you can forget there's a city surrounding you.

Although it is closed for the winter...

From one of my new favorite blogs, Black and WTF?

Fertility Rate

World Fertility Rate (sorry for the cheesy graphic)

The decline in worldwide fertility rates is by far the most exciting prospect for the future of humanity: by 2050 the population of the world will be shrinking (after peaking at 9 billion, which is still insanely high). This means more opportunities for more people (declining population leads to higher standards of living), a light at the end of the pollution tunnel (fewer people means fewer polluters).

That said, 2.4 billion more people than we have today will not be an easy problem to cope with. But I do find it incredibly fascinating that within my lifetime things will peak and level out and we'll be more able, as a world, to move on from there. Demographics always amazes me, because barring a huge disaster, it allows us to extrapolate a lot of information about what our future realities will be.

"The move to replacement-level fertility [2.1 children per woman] is one of the most dramatic social changes in history...it is changing traditional family life by enable women to work and children to be educated.
...

By about 2020, the global fertility rate will dip below the global replacement rate for the first time".

Read more at the Economist: Go forth and multiply less, falling fertility, and their sources

how to eat a chicken wing

I've been doing it so wrong for so long.

Silence

Cline Ave, East Chicago, Indiana, 2009

"[...] Augustine was no die-hard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously, and his "principle of accommodation" would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period. God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it. One of the psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine's time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall. It would be absurd to interpret this text literally. God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today a text like this must be interpreted differently. Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute. And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible. People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor."
-- Karen Armstrong in The Case for God

Having just read Dawkin's new The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, this was a particularly enlightening passage in Karen Armstrong's (also new) book. In the risk of sounding too "see, can't we all just get along?", can't we all just get along? Why must science be the antithesis of religion?

This is a question for both the ardent anti-theists out there (like Dawkins) and the ardent anti-science-ists out there?

(Bear in mind, though, that I say all this as an atheist, so perhaps it is a bit much of me to request that Christians out there demure to my views on science.)

Chicago

Foster Beach, Chicago, 2009

First of all, this picture has little to do with this post. Secondly, I love Chicago and what it has to offer. In a two week period, partly thanks to Julie's job, and partly thanks to Chicago, we'll have done these things here in the city:
1. Watched "Rashomon" on the big screen at the Music Box
2. Gone to the Field Museum (for free)
3. Walked six miles along the lake between downtown and where we live
4. Eaten the best Chinese food ever in Chinatown
5. Gone to a free talk at Columbia College (which was awesome)
6. Gone to a free talk at the School of the Art Institute
7. Watched "Valentino: The Last Emperor" for free at Gene Siskel
8. Signed up for free three credit hours via SAIC
9. Gone to a Bob Dylan concert
10. Been invited to (and hopefully go to!) four or five Halloween parties

Which, I realize, most of which you can kind of do in other cities, but I feel like Julie and I are doing a pretty damn good job of taking advantage of our city.

Wind Turbines, Benton County (?), Indiana, 2009

These guys are now the coolest part of driving between Chicago and Indianapolis. This last time we drove was the first time they were actually moving.

This picture at night gets closer to capturing how many are in the area: each red dot is one turbine.

Wind Turbines, Benton County (?), Indiana, 2009