The Milagro Beanfield War
Book hunting at local used dealers the other day I found this great book and now I have begun reading it. I watched the movie before, not knowing it was connected to a book, and the movie was delightful.

The prose and the structure of the book give it a heavily authentic Mexican-American feel. It seems to wander, to tell local legends as a backdrop necessary to understand the current story.

It is a great book that feels like something from an oral tradition.

Enjoying the Dealt Hand
Spring Break isn't what I planned on, but I'm having a good time anyway.

I intended to visit my Uncle, Ron Silliman, in Philidelphia. My ride to Philly, planned out a month ago, fell through and I'm still in South/central Michigan. It's snowing, and it's the Midwest and not much of a get away. But then a break is a break any time I can sleep in and read a lot and learn without the restrictions of classes.

And I'm enjoying myself even if I am banished/stranded to this place.

I stayed the first few days my friend, fellow student and student journalist Elliot Wild. He was also a homeschooler and we had fun relaxing, cooking, watching movies and playing. One night we stayed up until 3 a.m. playing a presidential/history/geography trivia game. When we were almost done with the game as it was meant to be layed we changed the rules and then it lasted until 3 a.m. This is the kind of fun that just happens, it can't be intentional.

Now I am at another friends home. I'm staying with the Stacks in Hillsdale. Emily, a friend of mine, has gone to Boston for Spring Break and I am staying with her parents and brother. They are great people, very real and practicle and unpretensious in a solid Midwestern way. I knew them before, I ate dinner at their home once and attend their church, and am very comfortable. You learn a lot about someone staying in their home and sleeping in their childhood room.

I am enjoying myself beyond making the best of things.

Good Art
A good peice on great art by a great artist, Rembrandt van Rijn, a believer who reflected the faith of the Reformation.

The Reality of the Horror
Jonah Goldberg wrote an excellent column today on the terrorist attacks of last September and the media's recalling of them now. This piece has serious relevance to discussions on journalism and journalistic ethics.

Escape Velocity
Feeling overwhelmed? Just want to get away? This may be the answer I was looking for.

Looking through note to a class in astrophysics I took last year and found the answer in my notes--escape velocity.

All it takes to break loose from the endless orbit is a speed greater than the square root of two times the gravity times the mass divided by the radius of the object holding you in orbit.

I expect to pull out any day now.

Of course, if your situation is huge (a lot of mass or a large radius) or weighty (gravity) then you may be stuck going in circles, but at least this equation tells you what effort (speed) is required to escape.

Dear Dan:

My handwritten letter from the school president on the subject of progress and art.

Stomping Osama
Because programers are patriotic, we have a new game to keep everyone inspired.

Editor Blues
Sometimes editors are lousy. Writers soon find that editors don't always have journalistic principles in mind. I'm not sure if a cautious editor or an uncautious editor is worse. In recent news from the New York Post we have a story about a reporter getting canned for writing about the NY Post business partner Walt Disney and an editor getting canned by her editor because she had her own ideas.

This was the same woman who, before she was an editor, got the information the headline: Headless body in a topless bar. That was surely one of the headlines in headline history and proved, if there ever was any doubt, that crime reporting is strange.

I've had good editors so far. Of course part of that is because I write good stories and they leave me pretty much alone. I really liked my editor at the daily I worked at over the summer (and may work at again this summer). His main concern was the story and that is the way I like journalists.

Aesthetics
Recieved a hand written letter from my college president today on the topic of art. It is his response to the opinion piece I wrote for the college paper. He asks intelligent questions about how I see the nature of art.

He seems to think we disagree on questions of history and progress. I think once I define art and successful (good) art the questions will change. I admire the way he has dealt with our disagreement and how he has responded to what he sees as a student in error. He hasn't used anything but reason in our arguments thus far. He has not pulled rank, age or experience or in anyway tried to change my position without changing my mind.

I plan to respond with a full letter over Easter break and also to invite him to a Fairfield presentation I am going to give on the topic.

When I have a moment I will post the letter in full on the docuements page.

Pi, all 6.4 billion digits
From the site linked to below:
"Hiroyuki Goto, 21, the current world record holder for the most digits of Pi memorized, required over nine hours to recite 42000+ digits [Seattle Times, 2-26-95].
To recite all the known digits of Pi (6.4 billion digits) would take 133 years with no pause for coffee or sleep."

A good site to read all about pi.

Pi in the Sky
More evidence that the universe is a knowable place, built on a logical system that can be understood and described.

I was reading The Second Creation today, a history of 20th century physics I am trying to read inbetween classes and homework, and came accross the description in the book of the discovery of the quatification of the subatomic particles.

Particles are simple, they have no smell, taste, color or any of the things that distinguish objects in the world we live in. Particles can be described with a few numbers. You can fully describe a particle if you can quantify its energy, angular momentum, orientation in space and rotation speed. A complete set of these numbers are called quantum numbers. The numbers are mostly fixed. Everyone of the numbers except orientation in space is a fixed number.

Trying to determine the number for the rotation of the electrons, the speed with which they spin as they circle around the nucleus, scientists (two Dutchmen named Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck) discovered the number is Planck's constant (the ratio of a photon's energy to its frequency, given as E = hv) divided by twice pi. I find this fascinating and exciting and amazing because of the numerical relationships.

Why should pi, a number we find in the relationship between the diameter and the circumfrence of a circle and a strange number at that, help to quantify subatomic particles. I am a believe in an ordered universe and in the possibility of mathamatical explainations of this logicla system. I think this supports that belief but I am ignorant enough that I will have to keep reading to know if that is true.

---Daniel

My life is going to be crazy this week before Easter break. I have two midterms and three papers--one every day of the week--plus multiple stories I'm supposed to pull off for the newspaper.

Watch for sanity-saving posts.

Ireland
In honour of Patrick and the Irish and my own Irish blood, I am posting the words to my favorite Irish Martyr song.

Roddy McCorely
See the fleet foot host of men
Who speed with faces drawn
From farmstead and from fisher's cot
Along the banks of Ban.
They come with vengence in their eye,
Too late, too late are they
For young Roddy McCorely, he goes to die
On the bridge of tomb today.

Up that narrow street he steps,
Smiling, proud and young
About the hemp rope on his neck
The golden ringlets flung.
There is never a tear in his blue eye,
Both bright and sad are they,
For young Roddy McCorely, he goes to die
On the bridge of tomb today.

When he last stepped up that street,
Shining pike in hand,
Behind him marched in grim array
A stalward marching band.
For Ireland! For Ireland!
He led them to the fray,
And young Roddy McCorely, he goes to die
On the bridge of tomb today.

Well there never was one of all your dead
More bravely fell in fray
Then he who marches to his fate
At the bridge of tomb today.
True to the last, true to the last,
He walks the upward way,
And young Roddy McCorely, he goes to die
At the bride of tomb today.

The Holy Trinity, who shall have dominion forever and ever

I wanted to post the closing hymn from the service at Christ Church today. Is there a clearer presentation of the Trinity and His dominion?

Holy Father, Holy Son
Holy Spirit, three we name thee;
One in essence, only One,
Undivided God, we claim thee.

And adoring, bend the knee,
While we own the mystery.

Holy God we praise thy Name,
Lord of all we bow before thee.
All on earth thy scepter claim,
All in heaven above adore thee.

Infinite thy vast domain,
Everlasting is thy Name.

Wanderlust

Today at lunch I was talking about the west coast--the mountains and the ocean and the valleys and the canals and the fields and the trees. Mentaly I drove from the North Olympic Peninsula through the mountains of Oregon and the San Juaquin Valley and the California desert.

I spent time in Seattle--riding the ferry east across the sound, standing on the back deck in the wind, watching the space neddle in the dark. I spent time in San Francisco, with fog rolling in from the Bay, and Berkely, hanging out Telegraph avenue with the students and having a picnic on Indian Rock. I crosse the Columbia river into Portland, eat pizza at Rocky's and spent hours in Powells, the best used bookstore in the world.

I drove back along the coast and saw the Redwoods and the cliffs and got a tan on my left arm from hanging it out the window as I drove.

I guess I'm feeling some wanderlust right now, strangely mixed with homesickness.

Today is beautiful. The sky is clear and blue. A slight breeze is blowing.

I'm missing my mountains and my ocean. The sky is so blue I look to the horizon to see the mountains in their beautiful clarity. I breathe the air to taste the salt, to feel the ocean in my lungs. The skyline is empty and the breeze is saltless.

The Day that Music Died
Dave Van Ronk and Waylon Jennings are dead and the great music of America--our native blues, folk and rock--has passed a little more into history.

Waylon Jennings cheated death on "the day that music died." Giving up his seat to J. P. Richardson, Waylon wasn't on the plane that crashed with Buddy Holly, Little Richie and Richardson--called the Big Bopper--when it crashed. Music didn't die, Waylon carried his bass sound onward for another 43 years.

He was a native of Texas and played the outlaw with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson while they rejected Nashville and held forth with the sound of hard living, hard work and true confessions.

Van Ronk, 1936-2002, taught Bob Dylan the Blues. Dylan said he heard House of the Rising Sun for the rist time when Van Ronk played it. Van Ronk was know as the founding father of the 1960s folk music. He was active in the hootanannies, helped the Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs and Janis Ian when they were rising artists, and was a king in Greenwich Villiage.

Out music is richer today because he lived. When he died on February 10 our connection to our musical roots died a little. But Van Ronk's work will live on whenever beat of blues, folk or rock are heard, whenever the music entwined with sweat and blue jeans and earth is played.

Thanks to Rolling Stone Magazine for the obituaries and the memorializing of these two men who forged our musical roots with the sounds of their guitars.

Physical threat
Today I have crossed a new threshold of journalism. In response to a story I wrote about the arrest of a Hillsdale College student and former basketball star I received a phone call from an angry unidentified male.

He said I had no right to write the story, should send my resume to the National Enquirer, some foul statements and then told me if he ever ran into me at a party he would hurt me.

I don't expect anything to come of it. I don't attend those parties and I think if he intends to act he would have already. The student directory lists the address as well as the phone number.

I knew that I would get such a reaction eventually and am glad to have crossed the line. The joke among my friends is that I am celebrating my first death threat.

A good journalist can't afford to be soft.

Race Card?

Seraphim, friend and fellow student journalist here at Hillsdale, thinks the Ed Carter case of stolen credit cards, one that I reported for the paper, may have some racial implications.

I doubt it does, beyond the fact the administration will avoid mentioning Carter is black. It seems fairly open and shut. The cards were in his pockets. A lawyer would probably have a rough time with this one. Carter could plead stupidity (do you begin to write your own name when signing for a purchase with a stolen credit card and then scratch it out and write the name on the card?) but that wont get him far.

A few points do seem to have potential chinks if they are to be found. 1, the suspicion of the jewlery store clerck may have been aroused by a black man buying jewlery (the clerck would be high on my list of people to find and interview). 2, the arrest may not be valid (meaning the evidence would be thrown out) and may be based racial description. Police arrested Carter upon recognizing him from a description given by a jewlery store clerck. Can they arrest you if you fit a description? If that description said something like "tall black male" then race could be brought in. (Carter has a large tatoo on his elbow but I don't know if that was covered up).

Intersting issue. Race certainly is hot, especially in this anti-affirmative action private school and the surrounding Midwestern culture.

I personally don't think racism is as prevalent as it is generally portrayed to be. It will be interesting to see the results of the investigative journalism.

Read the paper
Further evidence that televison news is a bastardization of journalism.

Want news? Read the paper.

Dualism, language of the universe, res cogitas and bianary code

In a previous post I quoted Einstien's reaction to the proposition that everything can be expressed scientifically. He said that describing a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure would be meaningless.

I though of this in philosophy class today when discussing dualism, and had a few thoughts.

All nature can be described in mathamatical formulas. All mathamatical formulas should be transferable into bianary code, a language/program used to run computers that uses only 1s and 0s. Shouldn't we then be able to program a computer to observe the universe in as good a way or in a superior way to humans?

We could program a computer to measure the pressure variations in a Beethoven symphony but at this point we would still say the computer does not listen to the symphony in the same way we do because we understand it and because we hear it as more than pressure variations. But, if everything can be expressed in mathamatical formulas and all mathamatical formulas can be written in bianary, then shouldn't we be able to discover the mathamatic description of our understanding and whatever "more" it is that we hear in a symphony, and translate it into bianary?

The computer then, with a bianary system, could be programed to understand in a way equal to the way a human understands.

I think this leaves us with a man made consciousness and artificial intelligence or man as physical machine. Is man merely a computer or can a computer become a man?

I'm certainly not happy with either conclusion. Hopefully I'm missing something in my logic or my premises.

Kant doesn't know what he's talking about
A philosophy paper writen last night about Immanuel Kant and some logical problems he has when trying to establish the catagorical imperative.

The only problem with education, from the position of someone who loves to learn and does so incessantly, is the limit of time. I am forced to work for classes, which limits time spent reading about physics or poetry or any of the other scores of things I am want to study.

Can you get an excuse for your late assignment because you were reading Dante for the fun of it? Can you miss class to delve into the intricacies of chess? Can you ignore homework to study epistomology?

Life is cruel in offering so much. The abundance of our world is glorious.

An Encounter
My good friend Jeff Nelson has writen and posted a piece of work called Encounter. If ever there was a romantic writing about restraining ones emotions this is surely it.

I read this when Jeff wrote it, a year or so ago, and was moved by it. I still am. It is strong, beautiful and a clear expression of Jeff's sober and hopeful additude toward romance, an additude with which I hearily concur.

Art, imitating life the way life is if we doubt or disbelieve everything we know about the world?

Listening to Simon and Garfunkel's album "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" and going a little crazy with Kant I hear the lyrics:

"Through the corridors of sleep
Past the shadows, dark and deep
My mind dances and leaps in confusion
I don't know what is real
I can't touch what I feel
And I hide behind the sheild of my illusion"

These lyrics, from the opening of the song "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall," sure sound like Descartes with Cartesian doubt and the Veil of Ideas and the general state of confusion he leads himself and his reader into.

So, art is imitating the way life is if we can know nothing about life and if we doubt or disbelieve everything about the world we know?

It is a good song. I'm going a little crazy here.

Kant

I'm in the middle of a paper about Kant and the logic leading to his Catagorical Imperative. Kant's writing is dense, practically inpenatrable. His writing is practically a parody of bad philosophy writing.

I think Kant ofuscates because his ideas aren't as profound as he wants them to be.

I'm supposed to lay out his premises leading to the conclusion of the Catagorical Imperative. Finding his premises are no easy task, but linking them to his conclusion is a bear. I am looking for a logical error--that's the second half of the assigned topic--which might be why logic seems so hard.

Working with moral theories, we are looking at the is/ought problem. The problem being the logical impossibility of deducing an ought, a command about the way man lives, from an is, empirical facts about the world.

Kant, I think, has this logical flaw but undersatnding his logic enough to find the errors has been quite a challenge. None of the books in our school library or the sources on the web I have looked speak of logical problems with Kant's Catagorical Imperative or the is/ought problem. I find this strange and suspect my prof is a canny old man.

I let you know how the results of my search/paper go.

A Conservative Revolution:
How the American War for Independence sought to defend the old order.
By Daniel Silliman

The English ideal of self-government stretches far into the past. The idea of men governing themselves has roots in Hebrew law, Greek democracy, and the Roman Republic. Yet, the ideal of self-government was an idea Englishmen clung to as uniquely their own. It was a habit; a sentiment confirmed in the hearts of all Englishmen, it had become a self-definition.

Contined...

Student facing 21 years imprisonment
Former basketball player had stolen credit cards, marijuana in his pocket when arrested
By Daniel Silliman

A Hillsdale College student was arrested for allegedly stealing two credit cards Saturday.
Edward James Carter, 23, is facing six felony charges and one misdemeanor after he allegedly stole two credit cards from fellow student Adam Schaper. When arrested, Carter had Schaper’s Visa and Discoverer credit cards as well as a plastic bag of marijuana in his pockets.

Continued...

Physics and the Unification Theory
I've just started reading a book (outside of class) on the history of 20th century physics. It is called "The Second Creation" and promises to be very interesting. It is all about the history, focusing on the people involved, but not ignoring the ideas. I hope to gain a greater understanding of the concepts involved.

The book starts with Unification Theory or, as some physicists like to call it, the Theory of Everything. The conscepts, and the idea of the concepts, can be fascinating. "A complete description of the foundations of matter, space and time, a set of linked equations containing the elements of the cosmos," as the book, writen by Robert Crease and Charles Mann, says, would be a great breakthrough and have to be restled with among philisophical fields. It would deal with the disonance and the gap between Newtonian and Quantum physics, certainly a dissonance and gap where unification is needed.

Mathamatics, the language of the universe.

"So I asked Einstien one day, 'Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?'
"'Yes,' he replied, 'it would be possible but it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning -- as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.'"

--Hedwig Born in "Helle Zeit"

Documents

I am adding a documents page. Over there I will post papers and longer stuff that might clog up this main page.

Where do Christians hide the real books?

"There on the shelves were personal affirmations of faith by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, a born-again diet plan, a transcription of the horrible (though rather unimaginative) things you can hear if you play rock and roll records backward, and a weighty tome arguing that every time the New Testament says "wine" it really means "grape juice." But I couldn't find anything you'd actually call a book. The Bibles themselves had names like A Bible Even You Can Read and The Bible in English Just Like Jesus Talked."
—P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell

Interesting piece on passing languages by John J. Miller, of the National Review, in the Wall Street Journal.

We Were Soldiers had quite a few reviews that didn't get it, here is one that does.

This movie heroized soldiers in the way only the men of WWII have been heroized before. Conservatives--notably those posting on National Review Online--didn't like the violence, and indeed We Were Soldiers has footage in the same league as Saving Private Ryan and Blackhawk Down. Liberals still don't like the war.

Vietnam War movies have had a hard time. In my opinion they were all bad until this one. They either make it a pure war movie, Rambo/Terminator style, and avoid all philisophical content, or they make the story a conflict with ourselves, way too political, partisan and biased. We Were Soldiers gives us a good story that feels like history. It doesn't sell us a presupposed reality or avoid the moral questions of the war.

The reviewer does a good job at showing the Boomers' moral development and how their emotional additude has shifted enough to respect the "Greatest Generation" and glorify WWII but hasn't yet allowed many of them to look on Vietnam unjaded.

This is the first Vietnam War movie that was intended to be timeless and wasn't exclusivly made for vets and protestors.

Besides, the photojournalist character and scences were awesome and should be required viewing in all journalism classes.

Good weather blamed for spike in Oakland murders
According to Oakland police, the sunshine brings more than picnics. Does this seem like an excuse to you?

Changes:
Note the links added to the page. These are sites I read. Enjoy.

Coming:
Reviews of "The Searchers" and "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance," John Ford films 4 and 5.

APOLOGIES--
Every once in a while you realize you don't know as much as you think you know. The lack of an end quote resulted in the monstrosity you see in the "My Darling Clementine" posts. The error was done in such a way that it cannot be fixed so we will have to live with them.

I promise never to do it again.

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (John Ford film 2)
I didn't like this film. It tells the story of the gunfight at the OK corral but is wrong on almost every historical detail. having seen more recent and accurate films and read a few books on the subject, I disliked the complete recreation of the story. Everything from why the Earps come to Tombstone to their relationship to Doc Holiday to Holiday's death is historically wrong.

What is interesting is why Ford bent the story. With his version we see Fordian (excuse the phrase) themes emerge. Holiday represents savagery in competition with Clementine and the Earps' representing civilization. Holiday represents the loner outside the community who will be vital to the survival and the future of the community but can never partake.

I find the reasons for the bending interesting but would have told him to find a story that fits his themes.

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (