In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago. Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.So when people tell me cities are great...I say "yeah, for everything except living."
There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.Note: "allegiance to the Constitution" apparently trumps ethnic differences, language barriers, and religious divides...but not sexual orientations.
The Tibetan Mastiff also known as Do-khyi (variously translated as "home guard", "door guard", "dog which may be tied", "dog which may be kept"), reflects its use as a guardian of herds, flocks, tents, villages, monasteries, and palaces, much as the old English ban-dog (also meaning tied dog) was a dog tied outside the home as a guardian. However, in nomad camps and in villages, the Do-khyi is traditionally allowed to run loose at night and woe be unto the stranger who walks abroad after dark.
Thanks for your devotional, which I thought was great. Like you and your once-atheist friend, I have this huge appreciation for the universe, its size, complexity, history, mystery, etc. I too find God present in all that. Your devotional resonated strongly with me.
I was talking to my friend Matt last week when he dropped a bomb on me: he had started considering the Almighty "plausible." This was news; Matt was a physicist and during college he'd taken pride in his atheism. I asked him what was up."Well, you just can't ignore the absurdity of it all," he said. He went on to describe his newfound lack-of-lack-of-belief: apparently he had read that astronomers have recently updated the estimate of the number of stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way) to around 400 billion. That got him thinking about the total number of stars in the known Universe. He told me that current estimates are that there are around 70 sextillion stars in the Universe (a 7 with 22 zeroes after it).
He then went on to tell me about the "Drake Equation," a formula that takes probabilities of planets being habitable, number of stars in the Galaxy, and so forth, and estimates that in the Milky Way there are maybe 2-12 alien civilizations at any given moment. "The Drake Equation isn't hard math, though," he told me. "None of the variables can be nailed down to an exact number, so you get wildly different estimates of the number of alien races out there depending on the interpretation."
Then Matt went on to describe a concept called "The Fermi Paradox," which basically states that even if intelligent life is extremely rare, and statistically unlikely, given the sheer number of stars in the Universe, there must be tons of alien civilizations. The paradox is that there should be all these aliens all over the place, and yet astronomers can find none of them.
He then said to me "So which is it? Are we in a Universe teeming with intelligent species, on hundreds of thousands of star systems? Is 'intelligence' something that naturally evolves and the Universe has filled itself with beings that can zip around in spacecraft and interact with one another? Or, are humans alone? Are we some sort of improbable oddity of science that, despite 70 sextillion other stars, we and we alone are the only species in the entire Universe that can build telescopes and stare into the deep Heavens searching?"I told him I did not know.
He smiled then, and said that was why he had started to doubt his atheism. "Either scenario," he said, "leads me to believe that this isn't all random. In the first case, you have a Universe filled with amazing, varied species that all have somehow evolved to the common point where they can speculate, wonder, and create. That is really a pretty decent argument for God. But in the second case, you have an even stronger case for God: if we are alone in the Universe, if humans really are the only intelligent life amongst a nearly infinite number of stars, then our solitude has so overwhelmingly defied statistics that you almost have to believe something supernatural has occurred to bring our very existence about."
What a wondrous thing, I mused, is this world we live in.
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