I miss college

I was blog-cruising through knitter sites, clicked on an odd mini-banner link, and ended up at the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" -- an pro-evolution site aimed at all of the hoopla in Kansas in 2005. (The pirate portion of the debate amused me. Yarr. Love the x-axis values.) The site has been kept up to date, and there was a post from exactly a month ago that had a video of a lecture on (the flaws of) Intelligent Design by a Brown professor, Kenneth Miller. It's almost two hours long (and the questions are as interesting as the lecture). If you want something to entertain you as you knit, I recommend it highly.

I have a terrible guilt complex when it comes to biology. The last course I took was as a freshman in high school. My sister graduated with a college degree in it; I'm marrying someone who earned a minor in it and earned his masters in a bio lab. I wish that I'd taken at the very least the freshman bio weed-out course (taught by the aforementioned Prof. Miller), so that I could at least pretend to keep up with either of them. But I didn't, and while I may know, thanks to Kevin, way more about maps of proteins than would be expected, I regretfully admit that most of my bio knowledge comes from news snippets and political debate.

The lecture captured on youtube is all interesting to me because it's personally timely -- Kenneth Miller is coming to town this weekend to talk to the alums. Neat! But I also wonder -- if his guest lectures are up on youtube, what else might be? It certainly deserves more investigation. I was listening to him talk, and remembered that this sort of mind-expansion was a twice daily luxury in college (not to mention the rest of the day, where socializing was equivalent to the Q&A session)... Brown was so interesting. I miss learning. There were so many perspectives in college, and so many experts (some real, some self-imagined). My view of the world deepened by the week, and I was always reading or hearing something that took what I knew and would spin it completely around. There were informed opinions from every side. Now, very few things upend all of my theories. New bits of information change my opinions marginally. I gravitate towards what I already know, and assume that I have a framework that new knowledge will mesh into. The stability is nice: a sign of independence/confidence/calm. Too bad that the lecture's made me think that it would be nice to be overwhelmed with totally new ideas again. :-)

p.s. I enjoyed the response to the final question in the video, given all of the recent Gonzales trials, etc. Uplifting.

p.p.s. I'm generally totally opposed to posts without pictures. So, here's what I knit while I listened to Kenneth Miller and pondered the post-college picture: a few rows of Fetching from knitty, using the extra ball of yarn from the premie sweater. :-)