{"id":1367,"date":"2011-02-04T18:19:55","date_gmt":"2011-02-05T00:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=1367"},"modified":"2011-02-04T18:19:55","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T00:19:55","slug":"the-world-we-live-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/02\/the-world-we-live-in\/","title":{"rendered":"The World We Live In"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday, 03 February 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

This has been an unusual day. I could tell you about how I began a new semester at Hamline<\/a> today, or how I took the day off of work, or that I picked my son up from Kindergarten, or that I took part in another episode of Atheists Talk<\/em><\/a>. Heck, I could even talk about the fact that it’s the 52nd anniversary of the Day Music Died<\/a>. Instead, I am going to talk about this book:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My great-grandma gave me this book as a gift 20 years ago today. The book is basically a compendium of natural scientific findings. It was published in 1955, so, even at the time she gave it to me, big swathes of it were already out-dated. Still, as it is lavishly illustrated, it was fun to page through; astronomy, biology, geology, paleontology, it’s all there. It was actually the first adult-level book I owned on the sciences. Of course, I had read plenty before, but always books for kids and teens. This was a real<\/em> book – a bok for grown-ups.<\/p>\n

My great-grandma was not a Witness, thank Thor, so she probably wasn’t put off by the naturalistic explanations of cosmology, origin-of-life scenarios, and evolutionary history that fill the book. The introduction states: “Yet our interest in the world, even when it is narrow or specialized, stems mainly from a craving to know and understand, which has developed through ages of evolution as an essential part of our character.”\u00a0 Though I often took the book out and read parts of it, no one in my family was worried that I was reading information that systematically disproved the Greatest Story Ever Sold<\/em> (or, as I used to call it, “the Bible”).<\/p>\n

This tall book, being over a foot in height, never quite fit right on any book shelf, and I was always making concessions for it in ever home I lived in and every shelf I owned. During the past half-decade, it’s become a laptop desk – a great way to keep the heat from my hard drive from killing off my reproductive capabilities.<\/p>\n

Often, I’ll close up my computer and set it aside, and then just page through the book for a few minutes. It’s how nerds unwind.<\/p>\n

My great-grandma passed away over 11 years ago, though her mind had faltered a few years before that. I recall one evening, when my parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents all went out for an anniversary celebration, it fell upon me to sit with my great-grandma for the evening. She sat in one chair, playing solitaire,\u00a0 and reading a magazine. I sat in the chair next to her and read a book about Alfred Hitchcock. We spoke a few times, but her memory was nearly gone, and I couldn’t think of much to say. Too bad. Now that I look back on that evening, I wish I would’ve asked her about her childhood and her young adult years. I’m not sure she would’ve been able to recall much, but it would’ve been fascinating to learn anything I could. Maybe one thing I should have said was, “Thank you for that book you gave me 5 years ago.”<\/p>\n

Well, now it’s been 20 years.<\/p>\n

Though I read big chunks of the book, I’ve never read <\/em>it. There’s a lot of text. It’s a huge book. But maybe it’s time to get started. I read the introduction this evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday, 03 February 2011 This has been an unusual day. I could tell you about how I began a new semester at Hamline today, or how I took the day off of work, or that I picked my son up from Kindergarten, or that I took part in another episode of Atheists Talk. Heck, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1374,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions\/1374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}