In Which I Take a Productive Break
September 6, 2014
The next day was empty. Almost entirely. I slept recovered and ate lunch with some new people. A welcome break from the hectic schedule I had previously been running under.
In the night I was a little more productive, refreshing my resume, website and doing a little coursework for cryptography. When 9.45PM hit, I set off to Rodin to join a number of friends from the community for nerf-gun capture the flag in the engineering buildings. Unlike the time in February, this time was packed out with over thirty five people playing. It was great fun and great exercise as per the previous time and I was looking forward to the subsequent times we would get to play.
Sunday was a little busier again, with Glee taking up the bulk of the day. The early afternoon was taken up by ‘Grilling with Glee’, an event held to recruit new members that largely involved us standing around free food and chatting with any prospectives as they came by. The day was a hot 33 degrees and very humid and so it wasn’t an altogether pleasant task, but I met a few new and lovely people including Jasmine, one of the tech staff for Glee that had joined the previous year. It was also a good chance to spend some more time with the other new members of PGC that had joined.
The evening consisted of sitting outside auditions to speak to auditionees and make them feel comfortable and enthusiastic about joining club. However, Sunday night was a little low on volume and so I would be returning the next night again to meet more of them.
Chassidic Philosophers
September 30, 2012
I have decided to use this space not only to post updates on what I’ve been doing but also to post the odd article or two. In this case, an article on Chassidic Jews rebelling against their communities to study philosophy in secret: Spinoza in Shtreimels
To use the provided blurb:
This past Sunday, philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel wrote in the New York Times that “the cultural relativism that often underlies Western multicultural agendas [is] a much greater obstacle to a culture of debate than religion.” Today, in an exclusive preview from the Fall issue of the Jewish Review of Books, Fraenkel relates how his theory fared among a group of Hasidim, who gathered secretly to study secular philosophy—an activity their community views as “much worse than having an extramarital affair or going to a prostitute.”