Christopher Mackay's Blog

“Failure is an option, but fear is not.” A great talk by James Cameron at TED, February, 2010; touches on his early love of science fiction, his love of diving, working with Stan Winston at Digital Domain, and his work on The Abyss, Titanic and Avatar.

By way of Vanity Fair magazine:

Hitchens dissects the best-known commandments (there are, of course, far more than the top-10 that they teach in Sunday school) and proposes 10 new ones (begins at 6:16):

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their colour.
2. Do not ever even think about using people as private property or as owned or as slaves.
3. Despise those who use violence — or the threat of it — in a sexual relationship.
4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
5. Do not condemn people for their in-born nature. (Why would god create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?)
6. Be aware that you, too, are an animal and dependent on the web of nature; try to think and act accordingly.
7. Don’t imagine that you can escape judgement if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
8. Turn off that fucking cell phone (you can have no idea how unimportant your call is to us).
9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repressions.
10. Be willing to renounce any god or any faith if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

There was a thread on Reddit.com recently titled “What’s the dumbest thing a teacher has ever said to you?”

I don’t know if this qualifies as dumb, exactly, but it was wrong and it has stuck with me for a long time.

When I was in second grade, I noticed the moon up in the sky as I was walking to school in the morning, probably around 8:45 am.

With a child’s knowledge of astronomy, that didn’t fit with what I thought I knew — that the sun was up in the daytime and the moon only came out at night.

Excited by my ‘discovery’, I told my second-grade teacher about it when I got to class, and she proceeded to tell me — in front of everyone — that I was wrong and that everyone knew the moon only came out at night.

I was 7. I wasn’t a rebel, and I wasn’t about to tell her to look out the window. I was taught that teachers were authority figures, and that they were to be respected.

Looking back on it, I suppose she was just a kid herself; probably new to teaching, overwhelmed by having 30-some 6- & 7-year-olds to deal with, maybe not enough time for coffee that day, and who-knows-what kinds of problems outside of the classroom, but the way she dismissed me out-of-hand was wrong.

While it may have seemed like an easy way to deal with a question that didn’t line up with the day’s lesson plan, or maybe made her feel insecure about her lack of astronomy knowledge (I have lectured in introductory astronomy at the undergraduate level — trust me, even most educated people have a very limited grasp of astronomy), it was wrong.

She no doubt forgot it immediately, if not sooner. It was more than 30 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday.

It wasn’t a crushing humiliation; I wasn’t scarred by it. I don’t remember the other kids teasing me about it or even mentioning it.

‘Teachers pretend to know more than they do’ was the most important thing I learned in second grade, though. I guess she did me a big favour.

Print Roger Ebert: The Essential Man:

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

—Roger Ebert

Via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.

CBC News – New Brunswick – Vandals damage Fredericton cenotaph.

Wow. Just wow. It’s hard to believe people would do something like this.

CBC News – New Brunswick – Mansbridge named Mount Allison University chancellor.

This morning Mount Allison held a gathering at the Wallace McCain Student Centre to announce Peter Mansbridge’s replacement of John Bragg as chancellor.