Intellectual Devotional, Day 15: Sparta vs. Athens

Day 15 gives a quick overview of ancient Sparta and its rivalry with Athens. It touches on well-known points like the rigorous military training, regular infanticide, and relative lack of cultural achievements. I've never really been into Greek history, so I find this particular topic hard to write about without just repeating the facts presented in the article.

Intellectual Devotional, Day 14: Noah

Ho Boy, this here is a doozy! Today the ID covers Noah, the storied Biblical figure who purportedly built a giant ark, shoved a bunch of animals onto it, then puttered around the world while the Big Man in The Sky rained cats and dogs on everyone else and flooded the whole dang thing.

First, I'll address some of my own issues with this story, despite knowing it's surely a parable and not supposed to represent actual events.  First of all, let's allow that a ship large enough to hold 2 of each animal in the world can be built.  How's a guy going to feed all of those animals for almost an entire year (290 days (40 days of rain, 150 days sailing while the floods receded, and 100 days stranded on top of Mount Ararat)) ?  Not to mention the number of carnivores there must be in that bunch.

I did find a couple of things interesting in the ID reading, however.  Firstly, apparently the story of Noah contains the first mention of wine in the Bible.

Secondly, apparently there's some mild disagreement between the Christians and the Jews as to the interpretation of this story.  The Christians view Noah as having ultimate faith in God, considering that he built a giant ark based solely .  The Jews, on the other hand, choose to look at the order in which people boarded the ark.  Noah was last to board, the Jewish tradition holds that this is actually depicting Noah's reticence, and thus lack of ultimate faith in God.  It's always interesting to me to see how different groups (whether along religious, cultural, or other lines) can interpret the same story in vastly different ways.  Neat.

Intellectual Devotional, Day 13: Socrates

I'm finally making my return after Thanksgiving and a boatload of computer trouble. Next up is Socrates. I had no idea that he was a soldier at one time; that completely goes against the stereotypical view of Socrates that I've always held. I like that he apparently focused on taking down people who pretended to know things they didn't actually know.

Unfortunately I can't claim to know much about Socrates, as I've never really cared for philosophy much. It often seems like it degenerates into word games when compared to science or math.

Intellectual Devotional, Day 12: Melody

We return, after much slack!

This topic should really have gone to the Professor, as he's much more musically inclined than I am.  I'll give it a shot anyway.

So, melody.  Melody is a sequence of notes that are "tuneful" - whatever that means.  In my mind, they sound good in the particular order that they're arranged in.  Within a melody are musical "phrases", and something these phrases sound (I guess to the more musically inclined) like a question and corresponding answer.

According to the ID (and I disagree with their wording here), melodies were, and still are, often "shared" among composers, especially in the middle Ages.  In particular, it cites L'homme_armé as a frequently shared melody.  To me, "sharing" is a bit of a misnomer - someone obviously came up with this melody first, and many other borrowed it for their own compositions.

In modern day music, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is an oft-shared melody, according to the ID.  However, in further reading the Wikipedia article (and we all know that Wikipedia is never wrong!), Twinkle is actually a poem put to an older melody, "Ah! vous dirais-je, Maman" that was written some 40 years before the poem.

An interesting English translation of one of the original French versions:

Oh! Shall I tell you, Mommy
What is tormenting me?
Daddy wants me to reason
Like a grown-up person,
Me, I say that sweets
Are worth more than reasoning

Not quite the happy-go-lucky poem about stars that we're used to!