Pet Peeves--Back with Sweet Vengeance!

Revenge, is, as they say, best served cold, and my peeves have quite a few dishes to serve up.

• When people say "Pop" when they clearly intended to say "Soda".
• When people pronouce "orange" (o as in saw) as "orange" (o as in more)
• Similarly, when people mispronounce forest in the same way.
• Whenever people say "whenever" whenever they really mean "when." (Whenever I was six, I used to...)
• When people say they were "up to" somewhere instead of "up at". (Well, I was up to the gas station...)
• Of course, saying "infer" when one means "imply".

Stay tuned for the up-and-coming sequels, coming with all the timeliness of The 10th Kimgdom's sequel and the Prince Caspian movie!

Bring Back Geography!

Bring Back Geography is a fascinating article I read recently in ArcNews, a periodical focused on Geospatial Technology. Geospatial Tech. often deals with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and GPS. But the focus here is on geography. If you have any interest at all in geography or even education itself, I encourage you to read it. But here I will summarize what impacted me.


Geography is to space what history is to time.


So often people think of geography and they think of the names of countless insignificant countries--and remebering the difference between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. But place-name geography is only the "tip of the iceberg" with geography. It includes many other fields most people don't even consider. Saying geography is about "where things are" is like saying history is just about "when things happened" and not the study of these events. Geography studies culture, spatial analysis, information technology--in the words of J. Illick quoted in the article, it is "why people do what they do where they do it".



Many schools do not teach geography anymore.



Another misconception about geography is that it is only an elementary school subject. They do not understand the vast amount of careers in this field. Colleges even eliminate geography from study--when it is included it is given a new name like "area studies". This is completely due to ignorance--the universities think geography is only about remembering where the Yangtze River is and ignore it place in cultural and spatial studies. But this removal is not limited to higher education. Most schools either do not teach geography or include it in "social studies" that eliminates spatial thinking. Even place-name geography is ignored--how often have you heard children (or even adults) call Hawaii and Africa countries? How many children (or adults) do you know that could point to Romania on a map? Or even India or Russia? This lack of study is responsible for the gross isolation of Americans from other cultures. There are so many Americans who don't know or care that Tigers do not live in Africa and that China has a distinct culture from Japan. They don't know that there are many types of English accents or that Brazil is not a Spanish nation. There's little wonder world opinion of America is so low--we don't know anything about other people and cultures and we don't care.



Geography is pointedly ignored.



With the recent surge in the use of the Global Positioning System, especially to make interactive, multi-layered maps (the primay application of GIS), Geospatial Technology is "in". Yet many refuse to call it what it is--an application of Geography. Harvard specifically stated they would teach GIS but not geography. They did not realize their mistake--without Geography as a field in which GIS can work, GIS will be reduced to an application used by other fields--not an industry of its own. What institution would dare remove history from its classes? And where would its applications, like anthropology, fit? Yet this is happening with geography--it is not recognized as a field, and its applications, like GIS and GPS, will have no place once their fad is over.

The conclusion? Geographers must fight for this field--increasing world awareness that it is not just a physical science and bringing it back to the schools.

The Power of God--No, Really

When we think about the Power of God, we all have to admit we tend to understate it. To be truthful, our minds are too finite to do anything but understate it. But do we really attempt to fathom just how great God is?
I've been taking a Creation Science class this year, and it has really impressed me with how Great God Is. Just the fact that He Is (in Hebrew, YHWH) is too great for us to understand, because our existence is just a shadow of true Being. Before we were born, before time even was created, He IS. Not was, IS. When we die, and after time is no more, He IS. In the far reaches of the universe, and beyond the limits of space, and in the tiniest molecule, and in our hearts, He IS.
In my Creation Science class I learned that a single pinhead sized amount of the plasma from the center of our sun, if put on earth, would destroy everything within a hundred miles. The sun is but a tiny star in a tiny system, in a galaxy among countless others, in a universe that God created with His voice alone! If our entire universe, and the perfection of our own personal creation, and the complexity of the human soul, and the mystery of Christ coming to earth and dying for our sins--the greatest thing we can ever know--was all part of a single plan that God created with His voice, what else has He done? Can we fathom it? People often wonder if God has created alien life for His own pleasure, even if we never meet them. But I ask you this--what if God has created something even greater than life as we know it, something completely different from space and time? This is all completely theoretical, obviously, but the point is this--we have no idea how much God has done. We can never know--maybe even when we get to heaven--the full extent of His greatness.
The application? We are small people in a little world, around a dwarf star in an insignificant galaxy, all created by a God who did not even strain a muscle doing it. How Great and Incomprehensible His love that He puts up with us! And how dare we defy this God? How dare we do anything but love Him, and serve Him entirely?

Pet Peeves (first installment)

Yes, some things just bother me. Many things that polite society considers acceptable. Many things that I must endure, because I cannot change them. But perhaps, by voicing these concerns, I can throw back the proverbial starfish, and maybe--just maybe--be a part of the solution to these problems.

The first of my peeves is this--products, especially beverages, that announce something to the effect of: "New Look, Same Great Taste". Obviously it has a new look. That is quite apparent. If it had a different taste, it would say so. Undoubtedly the title would change, or be added to. We can figure out for ourselves whether or not it tastes the same--especially since the name of the new taste (i.e. the words "Code Red" on Mountain Dew) is much larger than the words declaring "New Look, Same Great Taste."
Furthermore, a new design is in itself a marketing ploy. Do not market your marketing ploy. This is akin to television advertisements informing you of an online ad. (and yes, these exist)
Finally, the addition of the words, "New Look, Same Great Taste" is part of the design. Part of the design advertising the design itself creates a paradox. When you remove these words, as the design becomes no longer new, the product, now free from these unnecessary words, has a new design. Will the company then re-add the words? Or will it just choose to change designs again? As long as the design has a similar color scheme (as new designs should, if the company wants loyal customers to be able to find it) one can tell it is the same product. Please, just keep the words off.

More peeves coming soon.