A few words on love

Love each other when you can, accept each other when you can’t, and tolerate each other when you can’t do more than that. We cause each other so much misery because we dip our toes into tolerance, rather than leaping into love without looking. Everyone has flaws or ugliness, whether you can see them or not, and all people are sometimes annoying, even when you start with love. How much more annoying are those we merely try to tolerate, rather than try to love! To only be willing to love the perfect is to set yourself up for never loving at all. Are you letting someone else’s idea of perfect be the enemy of what is good for you- are you holding the good up to someone else’s mirror, rather than before your own eyes? Try starting with love, and moving down from that when you must- rather than starting with something less than tolerance, and moving up from that if you can. The former is a better way to live. Easier said than done, but isn't everything?- at least, everything worth doing?

Scandals, human nature, and ‘Climategate’

What is a 'scandal'? I would argue that is an entertainingly sensationalized piece of gossip, glorified as news, about some instance of particular people, usually influential or important, acting in typically human ways with absurd or criminal results. A scandal is typical human behavior taken out of context. Basically, it is human nature in action, and then people act like they’re ‘shocked’- even though there’s nothing surprising about humans being human. What I mean is that people acting in ways that are sex-hungry, power-hungry, mean, prying, vindictive, conspiratorial, corrupt, and paranoid are just as much parts of us and our nature as all of our more likeable qualities. So, with Climategate-redux: Are scientists human and susceptible to bad qualities? Yep. Does that mean the science is bad? No, it means the merits of the scientific studies in questioned need to be determined by review of the methods of data collection and analysis used, to examine whether data was inappropriately excluded, ignored, or purposely misinterpreted, all of which are possible but, I think doubtful. Repeating what scientists say to each other in their capacity as colleagues with, inevitably, shared interests and a group mentality ('us' v. 'them' springs eternal in the human breast, no matter how intelligent the person) does not constitute systematic review of a body of data: it constitutes gossip that has been interpreted, incorrectly, as calling the data into question.