“Whiplash” — teaching success the old fashioned way, through humiliation, with hurling cymbals.

How to remember everything with or without a mind palace.

Yeats steered Ireland away from science, beginning in 1889: “There are two boats going to sea. In which shall we sail? There is the little boat of science. Every century a new little boat of science starts and is shipwrecked; and yet again another puts forth, gaily laughing at its predecessors. Then there is the great galleon of tradition, and on board it travel the great poets and dreamers of the past.”

Are there not things which our short-sightedness would call trifles in the volume of creation around us? What is the peculiar value of the daisy upon the lawn, or the buttercup in the meadow? Compared with the rolling sea, or the eternal hills, how inconsiderable they seem! Why has the humming bird a plumage so wondrously bejewelled, and why is so much marvellous skill expended upon the wing of a butterfly? Why such curious machinery in the foot of a fly, or such a matchless optical arrangement in the eye of a spider? Because to most men these are trifles, are they to be left out of nature’s plans? No; because greatness of divine skill is as apparent in the minute as in the magnificent.

(from C.H. Spurgeon)

Good afternoon, and thank you for your patience.

As you’ve noticed if you’re a regular reader, my blog posting has been light for more than a year now. You may also be aware that I’ve been keeping dog’s hours (is that a real saying? Sounds right, but most dogs I know generally sleep when they like and work very little) studying online for my Master’s in Library and Information Science.

This, of course, explains my frequent absences. I’m stuffing my head full of high-falutin’ book-larnin’ notions, and now figure I’m too good for simple folk like you.

No, no, no, of course not. The sooner I can get away from academics, the happier I’ll be. I’m a pin-headed Middle American yahoo, and the stress of trying to blend in with my classmates (even online) may kill me before I get through to graduation.

But I’m doing OK. Generally good grades, especially on my papers.

This week was spring break. I didn’t actually relax much because the Norwegian publisher I’ve been translating for, with exquisite timing, dropped some more work on me. I’ll get the translation back to them later today, so that worked out. The book, by the way, is supposed to be titled The Viking Legacy now, and seems to be coming late spring or in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.

In other news, my bad hip continues to improve under a regimen of stationary bike riding and mobility exercises.

So life could be worse. Thanks for your interest.

“Where We Started offers a reminder of how prosaic sin frequently is: it’s neither murderous villainy nor forbidden secret pleasures, but simply broken people breaking themselves a little further. . . . It’s also a picture of what Christian cinema could be, if only Christians had a bit more imagination.” Luke Harrington reviews an indie film that doesn’t try to topple the Golden Gate Bridge with CGI.

Barnabas Piper, who studied at Wheaton and worked at Moody, says it’s sad but not surprising to hear of racial insensitivity at both institutions. “The American church has never been ahead of society when it comes to race,” he says. “The white church has remained silent on race, comfortable in our majority culture and the benefits of it. And what should we expect?”

The Irish Independent has gathered response from several Irish young people who love to talk about being Irish. The Irish on YouTube are flagging themselves with #WhatItMeansToBeIrish, both there and on Twitter.

James Mitchell says they have a great sense of humor. He “discusses how much everyone wants to be Irish – and how much the Irish hate it. ‘I once had someone tell me they were Irish… (because) they loved the colour green… Seriously.'”

In Kevin Ashton’s new book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, Ashton predicts the demise of the word “creativity.” It’s a relatively new word intended to describe the process of a genius’ insight, as described in these words created for Mozart’s mouth:

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, and of good cheer, my ideas flow best and most abundantly. My subject stands almost complete in my mind. When I write down my ideas everything is already finished; and it rarely differs from what was in my imagination.”

Ashton says Otto Jahn, a Mozart biographer, told us those words were fabricated back in 1856, but people still use them to illustrate “creativity” because, he says, they have little else to go on. Studies that claim to show the spontaneous insight they call creativity cannot be validated, and other studies demonstrate “ordinary thinking” leads to creative results for most, if not all, people.

This appears to follow the pattern Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. He describes how top-percentile students perform at Ivy League schools and second-tier schools. The key to lasting success after college appears to be excelling within your class, not the relative prestige of that class. Students in the top 10 percent of a second-tier university tend to outperform most students in the upper 20 percent of an Ivy League school (I’m pulling those stats off the top of my head, so I may be off a bit). You might think a large percentage of the Ivy League students would outperform all of the students in “lesser” schools, because of the supposed superiority of Ivy League education, but that doesn’t bear out in life.

The moral of the story, Ashton writes, is to see the truth in Newton’s famous statement, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” by recognizing “he was standing on others’ shoulders by quoting George Herbert, who was quoting Robert Burton, who was quoting Diego de Estella, who was quoting John of Salisbury, who was quoting Bernard of Chartres.”

“There’s no such thing as a writer who yearns to be ignored. But writers thrive only in hushed vassalage to their own imaginations, shackled to their desks, trying to hear hints of that ancient inward thrum. When Montaigne proposes ‘an unimportant life without luster,’ you take his point. ‘A talent,’ said Goethe, ‘is formed in stillness.’ It’s called the limelight for a reason: Sooner or later you get limed by the light—burned, smeared, blinded.”

“There was a moment in Rome, writes H.J. Jackson in her new book, Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, ‘when writers were elevated to a place among the immortals,’ and litterateurs have been dazzled by that elevation ever since.” (via Books, Inq.)

The Rabbit Room is having a sale on good books and music.

Steven D. Greydanus writes about the important contribution Star Trek made to American or world culture.

“Star Trek as a whole promoted techno-optimism and wound up instilling countless fans with a love of science, space and technology, not to mention inspiring a number of real-world inventions — but Spock in particular helped make being a scientist, along with being smart and calmly rational, cool for countless Americans.”