Bookmarks: Cultural appropriation • Space travel reverses aging • Atheist prayer • Bells, bells, bells
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That side of me which sympathizes with political correctness is infuriated by current Galbani commercials.
Should not Italian foods be off-limits to anyone not of Italian Descent?
Yet many African Descent persons known to me are avid consumers of pizza.
Should white people be allowed to eat watermelon?
Saturday 2016-03-05
Later developments meriting attention:
(1) Why write about tiny sombreros? Catherine Rampell says:
Questions such as “what counts as cultural appropriation, and under what circumstances?” deserve to be debated, probed, openly discussed, with an assumption of good faith among all parties to the discussion.
It troubles me that, as I see it, no such conversations are happening. Political correctness itself prohibits them. I will say more about this in subsequent posts.
(2) Somos tequileros: a personal reaction to the “tequila” party This response to the party, in the campus newspaper, authored by a student of Mexican Descent, is far less mean-spirited than I anticipated.
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“If that weren’t enough, Kelly is actually a little less than 1/100th of a second younger than he would have been if he stayed on Earth. The explanation for that’s a little tricky and it has to do with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. If two objects are moving at different speeds, time runs more quickly for the slower object — a phenomenon called time dilation. Kelly has been moving much faster than us here on Earth for a while now: the International Space Station travels at around 17,000 miles per hour relative to our planet. If you factor in the 340 days Kelly spent on the ISS, that means he is now roughly 8.6 milliseconds younger, according to calculations by Quartz.”
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I’d like to see the complete text of the prayer. I can’t imagine what I’d find wrong with it.
The whole thing sounds to me like a set-up to shut out one religion’s adherents from participation in these exercises.
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I am personally familiar with both the practice carillon and the actual carillon in question.
This musical instrument is of interest to me, given my fascination with the analogues among physics, music, and spirituality — harmony in its intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social dimensions. The carillon is a very simple object lesson for the same.
The Wikipedia article isn’t very good. I found a better resource here.
Related: Coming abstractions Related: Learning curve
Originally posted 2016-03-21.
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