antiorario

Atheism and Ricky Gervais’s holiday message

Ricky Gervais, on giving explanations:

Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

A must-read, this holiday season.

About narrative understanding

Jason Mittell (a.k.a. @jmittell):

Lost is a show featuring time travel, smoke monsters, and clairvoyance—do we really need to understand how everything works enough to recreate the island in our basement?

That’s exactly what I think too. Wanting to understand everything about a story often leads to missing the point of the story itself. (Another reason why I keep thinking of Donnie Darko when I watch Lost. But that’s another story, indeed.)

About being corn-fed

Michael Pollan:

We’ve come to think of “corn-fed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you’re referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous.

From The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I.4.3 (Kindle location 1312).

I wasn’t prepared for the amount of new information I have been finding in this book. I’m glad I’ve been gradually changing my eating habits—not in the sense of abandoning meat (not going to happen), but of trying to stick to more sustainable and healthier ways.

Real work and computers

Fraser Speirs:

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

The original article was published almost two months ago, after Apple announced the iPad. I stumbled upon it again today, still appreciating how much sense it makes.