Entries Tagged as ''

Lisa reads The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

Here’s a tip: driving through downtown Chicago traffic is not the time to try and absorb the details of quantum physics. Dangerous stuff, that. The Grand Design is part history, part philosophy, part science. It goes back to Ptolemy and Plato, forward to the probable end of the universe. It strives to answer the great questions of life:

“How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where does all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?”

Those are weighty questions and a tall order for any book. Of course, there are no concrete answers, but modern science has made a lot of progress, despite those who would hold it back. This book was a fascinating look at one of the approaches to the answers. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
1 Comment »

Doing your best under the circumstances

Recently, I posted on my blog as a “thought for the day” this quote from Jean de La Fontaine: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”

My own life offers evidence in support of this. I was the editor of my college newspaper (co-editor, actually: I shared the duties with a colleague, because I was also the main editorial writer), but when I graduated I had no intention whatever of becoming a journalist, principally because the idea of facing deadlines on a daily basis did not appeal. [Read more →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
No Comments »

Bad sports, good sports: Nineteen inning game ends on atrociously bad call

In this age of instant communication and an extraordinary number of sources of distraction, sitting down to watch an entire sporting event on television is a commitment. For some, it is only done for big games, where something is on the line beyond the mundane won-loss record. For others, myself included, it is an activity that occurs a number of times a week. I can’t say that I spend an entire baseball game, for example, focused on nothing but the game, though. I have a family, and I also have a laptop that is rarely off. Other things are grabbing at my attention, but I still manage to watch most of any game I set out to enjoy. Rarely does the game end with me feeling any kind of regret for having spent the time, even if the result was not to my liking. Tuesday night, I would bet that any Pittsburgh Pirates fans who made the six-and-a-half hour investment in the team’s game against the Atlanta Braves were pretty unhappy at 1:50 AM, when the game finally ended on one of the worst calls I have ever seen. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
3 Comments »