Doing the right thing

I just saw this other awesome TV show (and, no, I don't just sit around and watch TV all day) and it was PBS - The Path to Nuclear Fission: The Story of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahm (you can see it here). It was about a lady who was a great physicist in Austria in 1906, but in the middle of her career she was booted out of the country because she was a Jew. Meanwhile, she still collaborated with her scientist friends, and help them discover nuclear fission! Which is so awesome! But they didn't credit her contribution, so as not to discredit themselves in front of the Nazis I think. Then, she was invited to go to Los Alamos to build The Bomb... and she turned it down, and did not do much momentous work ever after. It is hard to imagine that someone with so much thrill for and skill in physics then would not want to go work on a project with unfathomable amounts of funding, and make awesome discoveries. But she didn't want to because it was a bomb. But plenty of the other great physicists of the era did, because they wanted to stop the Nazis. So these physicists did opposite things, but everyone was doing what they thought was right.

I think the idealist says you don't make weapons like that, and the practical person says you have to. It would be awesome if there were a leader who is practical person who could politically manoever well enough so we wouldn't need a weapon like that. Could that really happen? Can diplomacy always work if you do it right?

There is a great storyteller named William Clay Howe, who, to inspire obedience in his children, told us the speckled wombat story. I think it would be sort of cheating the storytelling tradition to write it down, but most of my favorite stories and reflections translate fine into the online format and will put them on Speckled Wombat.

My first one is about America's Next Top Model. I am sort of embarrassed at myself for watching this, but I am trying to be less judgemental than I was in the old days. On the show, one of the loveliest ladies is booted from the competition because they say she is too hoochie. But in general, if the judges say the ladies look very sexy, then that is intended a good compliment. Where is the hoochieness / sexiness line supposed to be? I sure don't know.