Do Good Things

The crazy kids over at ScienceBlogs have been doing a good deed: running a fundraising campaign for the DonorsChoose charity, an organization that helps out with numerous small-scale projects at public schools across the country. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles has been going all-out, drumming up support for a series of worthy proposals. Many of his fundraising pitches involve making fun of atheists such as myself, calling us cheap bastards and referring to St. Richard Dawkins as a doodyhead. But now he needs our help, to spread the word beyond the insular world of ScienceBlogs and ask people in the larger community to help out with the challenge. That’s what we like about Chad: shamelessness!

So let’s prove that we cold-hearted totalizing materialists can also go soft and squishy in the face of needy children, by opening our wallets and donating to a good cause, either to one of Chad’s challenges or to any of the others. Afterwards, you are free to return to your customary relativistic eudaemonic ways, savoring martinis spiced with the chilled blood of baby seals.

And speaking of things to do, Chad also brings up the topic of N things every person/man/woman should know/do/experience. These lists usually serve as cheap ways for writers who have run out of ideas to fill up a few column inches, and typically consist of a dizzy amalgamation of several things that are perfectly trivial, other things that are actually worthy, and many things that make no sense or are strictly impossible. With that paradigm in mind, some time back I whiled away the minutes during an especially boring seminar by constructing my own List of 25 Things Every Person Should Do Once In Their Life. I think it is just as good as anybody else’s list!

1. Found a utopian colony.
2. Integrate by parts.
3. Decode the Voynich manuscript.
4. Defy gravity.
5. Recover lost treasure.
6. Translate the pre-Socratics.
7. Make love on the 50-yard line.
8. Raise a pig and make sausage from it.
9. Lead a witness.
10. Outrun a bear.
11. Raise a point of order.
12. Memorize Paradise Lost.
13. Swoon.
14. Wake up in Vegas in a stranger’s house.
15. Collapse a wavefunction.
16. Run for public office.
17. Resign in disgrace.
18. Prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.
19. Hack into NORAD.
20. Problematize a binary opposition.
21. Square the circle.
22. Kiss in anger.
23. Batten a hatch.
24. Unscramble an egg.
25. Donate to charity.

How many have you done?