Category: Teaching

Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 combined with his religious motivations for making it led Pope Alexander VI to issue a Papal Bull in 1493.  

Picture this: Thousands of warriors, clad in jaguar skins and the feathers of birds of paradise, armed with atlatls and obsidian-studded clubs, move steadily through a rainforest toward a distant cluster of pyramids and temples. Like every warrior on the eve of every battle in all of human history, they wonder if they will survive the coming fight.  Some of them probably think about the circumstances that had brought on the war in which they have found their generation cast, and perhaps a few of them even consider the part they are playing in the greater socio-cultural drama unfolding in northern Guatemala in the 7th century CE.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight’s historiorant centers around those quarrelsome city-states of the Classical Maya.  On this Columbus Day (a/k/a 7 Muluc 12 Yax), I invite you to take a break from Republican vileness and winking wannabe-veeps, and join me for a tale of the first Star Wars – a struggle between ancient Mesoamerican superpowers punctuated by some very recognizable story lines and subplots…

Being rather bored Thursday, while proctoring a midterm exam in Computer Literacy, a couple of my former professors came up in conversation, including my adviser, Frank Anderson.  Frank studied the lattice characterization of C-Spaces, which won’t mean much to many, but the thing is that he studied in a field of mathematics called analysis.  By the time I met him, he was an algebraist.

So I’m an algebraist as well, having studied the homology of torsion theories.  My degree was awarded in 1981 at Oregon.  Frank got his in 1954 at Iowa.

And there was time to keep going.  Frank studied under Malcolm Smiley, who received his degree from Chicago in 1937, having studied Discontinuous Solutions for the Problem of Bolza in Parametric Form.  Smiley studied under William Reid, who received his degree in 1929 from Texas, having studied the properties of solutions to infinite systems of ordinary differential equations with boundary conditions.  His adviser at Texas was Hyman Ettlinger, who received his degree from Harvard in 1920, where he studied self-adjoint, second order linear systems of differential equations under George Birkhoff.

I perked up a bit, remembering that when I took my Russian exam in grad school, I had been given the task of translating a Russian version of Witt’s Theorem and having more than a cursory interest in the Birkhoff-Witt Theorem.  So I plowed onward.

Christopher Columbus:

The Christian Crusades had ended in 1291, the Black Death had been deliberately blamed on innocent Jews who said what their Christian torturers forced them to, that they poisoned water wells, causing the Black Death.  

This is my fourth diary on the melamine scandal (but first here on Docudharma), and like the financial scandals it shows no sign of going away any time soon. To this day 10,666 infants are still in Chinese hospitals fighting for their lives.

Rosa L. DeLauro (CT-3), chairwoman of the Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration Appropriations Subcommittee, issued the following statement about the FDA’s announcement that, despite potential harm to the kidneys, some melamine would not raise health concerns:

“While other countries throughout the world, including the European Union, are acting to ban melamine-contaminated products from China, the FDA has chosen to establish an acceptable level for melamine in food in an attempt to convince consumers that it is not harmful. Not only is this is an insult to consumers, but it would appear that the FDA is condoning the intentional contamination of foods.”

Given you are stuck in your current dwelling for the winter and wish to be warm when it is cold outside…what are the least expensive ways to stay warmer while conserving money? (instead of shelling it out to the heating oil, propane, and natural gas cartels).

Any suggestions please offer with estimated costs so folks can assess what they can do.

The modern history of the Great Lakes region can be viewed as a progression of intensifying use of a vast natural resource.   At first it was a matter of making use of the natural resources while avoiding its dangers.

My (almost) last batch of photos were taken in Debbie’s brother’s neighborhood.  I had an hour or so on our last day in Los Angeles before we returned to the desert.  So I took a walk through the neighborhood.  And I took a camera with me.

Jim’s house is two blocks from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which I wrote about before.  And it’s also two blocks from the La Brea Tar Pits.  Photos were not allowed inside LACMA…or I would be displaying one of a painting of The Death of Buddha.

But I did walk down to the grounds of the tar pits and got some shots.  And I took more photos on the way back.

Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, ladies and gentleman, from 1953.  This was their first hit.  You may be more familiar with the cover versions by either Eddie Cochran (1959) or what’s his name…Elvis Presley (1956).

Life once again is dominated by, as Terry Pratchett called it, the “reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits”, aka echo-gnomics.  It always distresses me when life becomes all about the money.  But I live here and I live now.  And there is next to no market in the political arena for knowledge, justice, stewardship of the planet and other things that would interest me more.  Or any.  

Money-grubbing sucks.  Accumulation of money sucks the joy out of life.  But that’s just my opinion.

Eymology Online is my friend, but don’t blame them for my rewrites.

Physical Characteristics

The Great Lakes – Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario – span more than 750 miles from west to east and are an important part of the physical and cultural heritage of North America.  The complexity and magnitude of the Great Lakes water system is difficult to grasp, even for those who live within the basin.

The lakes cover a total of 294,000 square miles and contain about 5,500 cubic miles of water.  The Great Lakes are the largest collection of fresh, surface water on earth, containing roughly 18 percent of the world supply. Only the polar ice caps contain more fresh water.   Although part of a single system, each lake is different.  

American fascism is the term used by Dr. James Luther Adams, who “was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church.” He said that American fascists would dismantle the open society, using scripture, during “prolonged social instability or a national crisis.” Either of those conditions certainly meets the living conditions on many reservations of their social structure and their Nation. I argue from definition that “Christian fascists” or American fascists are appropriate to be applied to those who christianize Indigenous People as well as to be applied to those who committed  “the slaughters of yesteryear” for the following reasons:  

All right, Chicken Littles.  You wanna play “the sky is falling?”  Okay, I’ll bite.  How ’bout these possible outcomes?:

Cheney becomes Temporary President in January, 2009…or… casts a tie-breaking vote in Senate balloting to determine who will be Succeeder to the Decider…or…Obama is elected President, but is saddled with Cariboucuda as his Vice President…

All this misery – and more! – can be yours, for the simple price of an Electoral College vote of 269-269.  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight’s theme is “The Implausible and its Potentially Apocalyptic Consequences upon Humankind.”  The subject is the ticking time bomb represented by the Twelfth Amendment – and just for fun, let’s look at some best- and worst-case scenarios it might spawn in the event of an Electoral tie.  The suggested headgear for the evening is a tinfoil hat; umbrellas might also be helpful, since everyone knows that the sky can’t be falling if you can’t see it headed toward you.