I love high school reunions. For a guy, at least, they are the revenge of the skinny intellectual.

Turns out that being smart and funny has more enduring advantages than being an offensive lineman on the football team. Who could have predicted that back in high school?

I had a blast at my 10th college reunion, but they haven't yet offered to pay me enough to go to a high school thingie.

For a guy, at least, they are the revenge of the skinny intellectual.

This is true even for a not-guy. At the aforementioned 10th, there was a whole lot of standing around saying "holy crap, the geeks won!"

You wanna know how apathetic we were/are? Our high school's 100 anniversary was last year. Big to-do, right? Each decade had it's own tent. Most of them had pictures, decorations the whole 9 yards. The 70's tent (this is my decade)? Almost empty with perfunctory decorations and about 10 pictures from the whole 10 years!!! The only people who I saw in my graduating class was the aforementioned CIA person and one other person, they attended the shindig because they were being honored. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have shown otherwise (my mom dragged me... otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered either) We suck!

I've never been to any of my reunions. A friend went to our tenth and I looked at her reunion booklet - most of the people in my class still lived within 20 miles of my home town. None of the people I was curious about were there.

I think about 30% of my class went on to college - such is rural/small town life in Wisconsin.

A friend went to our tenth and I looked at her reunion booklet -

I think that I have mentioned here before the dangers of the modern version of the reunion booklet. If I vanity google myself, the fourth and fifth entries refer to serious papers of mine describing risk factors for alcohol abuse. The sixth entry includes several pictures of me, very drunk, at my last high school reunion.

More math fun:

I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian....

I asked a question to my calculus professor: “What makes this course distinctly Christian?” He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before...

He said, “Okay, I'm a Christian; you're a Christian.”

I said, “That's not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular university? Are we using the same text? Yes. Are you teaching it the same way? Yes. Then why is this called a Christian college and that one a non-Christian college?”

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eta²:

The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.

-St Augustine

Was St Augustine using the same definition of "mathematician" that I am?

I can't even follow what Jehle is saying in that quote. I gave up and remain happily pagan. Or am I heathen? I can never remember.

Was St Augustine using the same definition of "mathematician" that I am?

I fervently and enthusiastically hope so.

Okay, It's built on Hinduism. Let's look at all the Islamic countries over in Europe.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

I can't even follow what Jehle is saying in that quote.

Another blogger said this:

Every august, James Kennedy - a thoroughly repulsive ultra-fundy preacher from Coral Ridge Ministries - runs a conference called "Reclaiming America for Christ". At this years conference, he featured a speech by Paul Jehle about "Evaluating your Philosophy of Education".

Jehle is... umm... how do we say this politely?....

Ah, screw it. Jehle is a fucking frothing at the mouth nutjob lunatic asshole.

His basic argument - the argument that he expects people to take seriously - is that everything is either christian or non-christian. And if it's non-christian, then christians shouldn't look at it, listen to it, or study it. And you can't ever make anything that started out non-christian christian.

then after his quote of Jehle (that I quoted in my previous post):

Yeah. Seriously. Math is Bad, because it's not explicitly christian. I mean, it uses zero, which was invented by a hindu, and brought to europe by muslims. Algebra was invented by muslims! The word "algorithm" comes from the name of a muslim mathematician!

Uh-oh... I just realized that the alleged "Doctor" Jehle has a very serious problem. The way that we geeks heard his talk to write about it is because it was digitized - using a thoroughly non-christian technology - and posted on the internet, which is built using those non-christian algorithms. And to quite Jehle himself:

But the issue is you cannot combine something by its nature which is pagan and built on humanistic principles and make it Christian by a magic wand.

So the internet, and computers, and digital recording, and the data compression that makes streaming audio work - they're non-christian. And you cannot combine something non-Christian with something Christian.

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