Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Update

I finished reading E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. I'll try to put up my thoughts about the whole thing soon, but I'm having trouble putting them into any sort of order, mostly because Schumacher doesn't do as much with his thoughts, either. I shall endeavor to do the book justice, in any case.

In other news, the new Star Trek film is surprisingly good, whether or not you are, as I have claimed to be, a moderate and completely reasonable fan of Star Trek. The film was even found to be highly enjoyable by my resident less-than-moderate Trekkie (my wife), who has admitted to reading books (yes, plural) about Worf's difficult time making human friends at Starfleet Academy. I wish I could ask a truly unbiased person their opinion on the flick, but everyone I know who saw it is pretty much a geek. No offense, everyone. I saw it too.

Also, I haven't forgotten about this blog, even if you have. I just haven't posted anything on it for a rather long time. I seem to enjoy doing so when I get around to it though, so maybe I'll pick up the frequency a bit.

Serve Me Up One Of Them Slices O' Life!

Now, according to the Font Of all Human Knowledge, "gender" is a rather complicated term, one which ought to be applied only with a great deal of caution, if at all. I understand that it's supposed to be distinguished from "sex" (even though in most cases, by almost any definition, the two aren't appreciably different), but this question on an online job application had me puzzled:

Now, even if you regard your gender as being different from your sex, couldn't you still be expected to, y'know, know it? I'm just asking.

Maybe they ought to have included a few deep epistemological questions dealing with how hard it is to really know anything, as well as asking whether or not the applicant is currently undergoing some sort of existential crisis.