Look I know we’re only 6 quarters into the season, but this Nebraska football team looks WAY better than they did last year. This is fun to watch.
Sitting out on the drive with a fire going and the football game on. The kid is there in person. #GBR #football
PRd my 5k this morning! (27:55 still has lots of room for improvement!) Beautiful chilly morning for a race.
There are days where work drives me bonkers; there are other days when I come away deeply appreciative that I work with some fantastic engineers doing really good stuff. Today is one of the latter. Thankful.
Nice cool morning to get out and run. 5k nice and steady. Running my first real race in several years on Saturday.
Caitlin Clark with a garbage rebound at the end of the game to make it a triple-double. What a performance!
As a first year WNBA follower, one of my big takeaways is that the league needs to upgrade their refs. So many poor and uncommunicated calls every game. Women’s college basketball has better officiating.
The blessing of the dedicated civil servant
There’s a wonderful long-form profile on the Washington Post right now about Chris Mark, a man who eschewed an opportunity for a upper-class education to (literally) go work in the coal mines, and ended up revolutionizing coal mine safety. (That’s a gift link, so you can read it whether you’re a WaPo subscriber or not.) It’s a compelling story of a man, driven by some complex family dynamics, who found his niche and ended up in a government job where he could follow that interest in a direction that has resulted in countless miners' lives saved over his career.
The value of experts in government driving regulation gets stated explicitly late in the piece:
Every now and then, however, Chris’s work slipped into public view. His coal mine roof rating was used all over the world and, in his own narrow circles, he was well known. In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the Journal of Technology and Culture. The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”
Government functionaries can be an easy target for criticism, but this profile highlights the key and dedicated role that so many play in today’s society. In my own work I have encountered many Federal Aviation Administration employees who fit a similar profile. They found some particular niche interest related to flying, and they made it their life’s work to make it better and safer. It’s often a thankless job, and on a government pay scale that pales next to what they could likely make in industry.
(As a side note, this is part of what makes Trump’s Project 2025 intentions to politicize the civil service so terrifying: it would eliminate protections on just these dedicated experts to replace them with people who don’t know the topic but who donated to the right political cause. You wanna see the country (literally) crumble? Ditch all the regulatory experts like Chris Mark and replace them with Heritage Foundation interns.)
Youngest daughter has her school permit and is driving herself to school for the first time this morning. End of an era of doing drop-offs and pick-ups. Phew.
Brisket turned out great! I’d give myself maybe a 8.5/10. Think I could’ve pulled it a little sooner. Still, great flavor, texture is fine, lots of leftovers… yum.
David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”
With some of my recent reading getting my mental wheels turning about the nature of who God is, I figured it was a reasonable time to pull The Experience of God off my shelf. Right off the bat in the introduction, Hart promises what I was hoping for: “My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’…” Unfortunately, 332 pages later, what David Bentley Hart has written isn’t at all simple, and approaches a definition of “God” only from an oblique angle.
Hart structures the book in three major parts. In the first, he clarifies that the “God” he is describing is the ultimate deity, the prime mover, from which all other creation and being have their source. It is here even in the beginning section that he starts taking aim at what appears to be his actual target with this book: the arguments of the popular atheists of the late 20th and early 21st century. (Richard Dawkins is a regular whipping boy.)
The second section (comprising the bulk of the book) is structured around three characteristics which Hart points to as the core aspects of God: being, consciousness, and bliss. Each of these (long) chapters seems less interested in enlightening the reader on who God is than in disputing with the atheists and materialists. God is the root of being, declares Hart, and anyone who says differently is just stupid. There is no materialist explanation for consciousness, says Hart, and the materialists who argue for an evolutionary reason and dismiss God are illogical and foolish. There is no evolutionary reason for a search for beauty, truth, and goodness, says Hart, and those who would try to argue thus are intellectually dishonest. So it goes.
Hart’s arguments are at his strongest when he’s arguing for something instead of railing against something. The first part of his chapter on bliss was particularly good in that regard. Sadly, most of the book goes the other direction.
It’s very hard to review Hart without taking his blustery style into consideration. He’s never met a big word he didn’t like. He makes huge sweeping assertions without any hint of supporting justification. He seems to think that just by declaring something “obviously” wrong that it’s obvious to everyone and doesn’t need explained. In doing so he dismissively waves away not just the weak sauce of people like Dawkins but also more substantive scientists and thinkers who deserve better. Hart falls almost into self-parody at the beginning of chapter six: “[W]e should not mistake every pronouncement made in an authoritative tone of voice for an established truth.” While aiming this at popular atheists, it’s an argument that is equally valid against Hart himself.
There’s an old joke about a preacher, who at one point in his sermon notes has written: “weak point, pound pulpit”. As a lay theologian and not much of a philosopher at all, my trouble with Hart’s book is that he does so much pulpit pounding it makes me suspect the strength of his points. Even in places where I find myself in agreement with his conclusions I have a hard time feeling like the book was beneficial.
Nervously doing my research as I prepare to smoke my first brisket on the pellet grill tomorrow. Well, starting tomorrow night, going overnight into Monday. Getting hungry thinking about it.
I grew up in Nebraska, a huge Husker fan, and never made it to a football game. My kid is now a freshman at UNL and attending their first game today. I’m kinda jealous, but mostly grateful. #GBR
Looks like I’m going to need to buy a new suit for some work events. Last one was 60 lbs ago and cheap off the rack at Kohl’s. Think I’m ready to invest a little more this time. Not a fan of the shopping process, though…
Wow, Jannik Sinner, the 1 seed at the US Open, dropped his first set to unseeded Mackenzie McDonald, and is already down a break in the second set. Feels like a little karma after his failed doping tests.
I live in Iowa and work with a bunch of 30-something white guy engineers who ought to be in the MAGA demographic. To overhear their conversations about politics, though, gives me hope; they see the corruption of the media and of huge corporate wealth and MAGA’s moral bankruptcy.
Bullet Points for a very hot Monday Afternoon
- First day of school today for our two oldest kids… both at college so we won’t get chalkboard pics this year.
- Back to a full work week; the summer grind seems to set in here in late August. I think our European friends have the right idea, just taking most of August for vacation.
- A friend pinged yesterday to note it had been a year since a retreat we attended. That got me reflecting. It’s been quite a year.
- Turns out some combination of time, therapy, improved habits, loving family, and patience can produce good results, even in the midst of sadness and chaos.
- How am I old enough to have two kids in college?!?
- I’ve been umpiring rec league softball again this year and tonight is the end of our tournament. Forecast heat index: 115F. Oof.
- Once we get past Labor Day, life speeds up… a lot of business travel this fall.
- Related to a couple of these bullets: time to shop for a new suit. Think this time I’m gonna invest a little bit and not just buy whatever I can find cheapest off the rack at Kohl’s.
- I keep thinking that if my life gets too slow once the kids are out of the house, I could get certified and start umpiring high school softball. Feels like one of those things that you would have to jump into with both feet and make a fairly exclusive hobby during the summer.
- Picked a book up off the shelf for book club yesterday and had forgotten just how good that book is. Time for a re-read, maybe. I don’t re-read too often.
- If I stop and think a moment, I kinda wonder what things will look like a year from now when I look back on the (currently upcoming) year. Life is wild.
One more post for the morning: got a new professional headshot taken last Friday. I remember thinking back in late March when I got the previous one taken that I was looking like I had lost weight; surprising to me how much more significant it looks in this one. (I’m down 60 lbs this year!)
First day of school today for our two college kids! A junior in Mechanical Engineering at South Dakota Mines and a freshman in Accounting at University of Nebraska. Completely up to them whether or not we get FDOS pictures or not. 😂
File under: WTF.
