This page is my personal "blue ribbon".
Here I state my opinion about facts and circumstances that occurred in my life and in the world.
Most of these articles I published in local newspapers, either as a
Guest Column or an Editorial Letter.
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High school coach sets bad example for soccer players - Columbia Tribune (11/12/07)
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Lies and stats populate the editorial page - Columbia Tribune (10/7/07)
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Rhetoric fails to solve stem cell research issue - Columbia Tribune (7/17/07)
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Evolution vs. Creation - Guest Column for Journal and Courier (9/8/01)
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Fountain Fences: We plant, we harvest -- also published by Journal and Courier
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Sweatshops and Third-world Countries -- published by Journal and Courier
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Did anybody else notice that the new millennium won't begin until January 1st, 2001?
High school coach sets bad example for soccer players - Columbia Tribune (11/12/07)
There is a sport known by the rest of the world as football, fútbol,
fotbal, le foot, or, for a Brazilian like me, just futebol. This sport
is somewhat similar to what is referred to in US as soccer.
However, over the years, and to the surprise of many parents and the
varsity coach at Hickman High School, I have come to the conclusion that
the two sports are not the same.
One critical difference between the two sports became quite apparent in
a recent game against Rock Bridge High School.
In futebol, a coach never gives up in the middle of the second half
after taking in a single goal. Unfortunately, our varsity coach did.
With more than 25 minutes to play in the second half, the coach stopped
talking to the players. He kept our key midfield and attack players
sitting on the bench and even pulled them out when they decided to sub
themselves in after the coach had made clear his lack of interest in the
remainder of the game.
It is sad and frustrating that our coach has set such a bad example for
our kids. Luckily, they are not that young and impressionable anymore. I
am sure they will remember this season for more than the coach’s words
at the end of the game: "You can’t play" and "you lost this game." They
should remember it as a great season where they played beautiful futebol,
despite being taught and coached on soccer.
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Lies and stats populate the editorial page - Columbia Tribune (10/7/07)
Seventy-five percent of all statistics are full of lies, and 100
percent of the Tribune’s chief editor is full of statistics.
Tired of lying about the percentage of Missourians that voted for
Amendment 2, the mathematically challenged editor of the Tribune used a
new approach. Because he no longer can claim that 49 percent of voters
constitute a "minority," he now uses the statistics on the number of
districts that voted for and against Amendment 2. According to him, 90
percent of the 114 districts voted for the amendment. (Population-wise)
that is still the same 51-49 split, but, hey, that is what statistics
are for, right?
So one can lie like a good journalist: by only saying the truth.
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Rhetoric fails to solve stem cell research issue - Columbia Tribune (7/17/07)
It is disappointing to realize that those who should be best informed
are the ones whose minds are most closed. The editor of the Tribune fits
this stereotype when he resorts to false arguments that are known to be
so.
The Nov. 8 editorial did a disservice when it failed to recognize the
rights of almost 50 percent of Missouri residents. Instead, that
editorial called the nearly half of Missourians "frightened people" who
"wrongly chose to oppose Amendment 2." Now, in a recent editorial, the
Tribune went farther in its distortion and called the opponents of stem
cell research a "minority of citizens" - apparently 49 percent is a
minority nowadays.
Both sides of this debate are constantly forcing their views on the
other side. While Michael J. Fox, Sen. Chuck Graham and others advocate
their personal interests and talk less than altruistically about the
wonders of stem cell research, the other side waves Bibles and expects
all to also accept their beliefs.
Sadly enough, neither of these approaches will lead to a solution
because we can’t ignore that this is an ethical and moral issue that
lies on a gray area of people’s judgment and interpretation of the same
Judaic-Christian principles that justify our current laws. And as so, it
can only be resolved if we first acknowledge and respect the other
side’s views instead of aggressively dismissing it as "anti-science and
anti-intellectual stance" for "preachers in their churches, not their
public legislature."
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Evolution vs. Creation - Guest Column for Journal and Courier (9/8/01)
I
have been following this "never-ending recent" debate about Science vs.
Religion, or Evolution vs. Creation, and I find very surprising, and
yet predictable, how both sides can be so narrow- minded.
Along
history, people have always polarized over issues regarding science and
religion. Nevertheless, there haven't been few the examples of great
scientific and, at the same time, religious minds in history. So, even
though it may sound an over simplistic view of thousands of years of
discussion, I can't help asking: why should we pose these questions in
such a dichotomous way? Why must science be so arrogantly
self-contained and religion so fanatically literal that they have to
assert so contradictory ontologies?
Despite the traditional
dichotomy, science has its roots in religious thoughts. In different
ways, ancient thinkers such as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, etc. tried
to deny, diminish, or confirm the tight relations between science and
religion (Nature and God). Still, without exception, they spent a great
deal of their lives trying to explain and defend theories about the
existence of a soul, the different realms of existence, and the
"metaphysical" creation of the universe.
More recently, great
scientific minds such as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, etc. coined
remarkable phrases like: "I want to know how God created this world.
... I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details" -- Albert
Einstein. Unfortunately, the more contemporary and apparently not so
"educated" scientific minds seem to have grown more arrogant regarding
all that science cannot explain.
On the other side of the
coin, some religious minds, specially within some Christian traditions,
have tried to teach us a somewhat fanatical, literal interpretation of
the Scriptures. If we were to read those Scriptures always literally,
how could we explain the diversity and yet similarity between species?
Or more pertinent to our discussion, how could we justify the
continuous formation of galaxies, stars, etc in the universe? Maybe, we
are still living the fourth (longest) day of creation, and heavens and
earth are still being created.
I prefer to believe that God
created the universe by creating the physical, mathematical,
biological, and chemical laws that govern all His creations. I prefer
to believe that at the bottom of all these discussions is God's message
to His arrogant scientific children that they may study the universe
and its creation as much as they want. But the answer won't be found as
easily as His fanatic religious children want us to believe.
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Fountain Fences: We plant, we harvest -- also published by Journal and Courier
Reading the newspapers in the last couple of days, I could not help but thinking two things:
First,
it is a shame that Purdue officials can be so hypocritical and
"proudly" announce that the decision to fence the fountain came out of
fear that lawsuits be filed against Purdue. By doing so, Purdue makes
clear that the safety of kids and students that play around the
fountains is not at all the issue here, and it did not motivate the
decision. What truly motivated the decision was fear, money,
cost-benefit, and many other materialistic concerns that have nothing
to do with the wellbeing of people. That is why they are not concern if
the fence will bring even more danger to those who will certainly jump
over to play in the water. Also, that is why they discarded the use of
signs warning for the "danger" of playing in the fountains. Because it
"would do nothing to decrease the university's liability", but the
fence will -- as one Purdue official wrote in the Journal and Courier
on April 12th.
Second, this unpopular decision by Purdue officials
should be a lesson for the society about our own excesses when taking
issues to the courts. In a society where people blame a fast-food chain
for our own stupidity in getting burnt for holding a cup of coffee
between the legs, it is not completely surprising that Purdue officials
be hypocritical and decide to save the university a few million dollars
from lawsuits. This all should be a message to judges, lawyers, and the
society in general, that what goes around, comes around. Or, as a
Portuguese saying goes: we harvest what we plant.
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Sweatshops and Third-world Countries -- published by Journal and Courier
I
certainly cannot condone any corporation that exploits human beings for
profit, and we should all praise those who raise their voices to help
others. However, we must be much less simplistic than Jim Keady and
Leslie Kretzu when we claim to understand what really happens in
third-world countries.
I was born, raised, and lived most of my adult life in
such a country, and I can testify that the reality of absolute poverty
is much more complicated than it would appear to someone that only
spent a month there. First, the costs of living here in US and in any
of these countries are much different, and the argument that sweatshop
workers make $1.25 a day sounds unfairly worse than it indeed is.
Second, in order to understand these countries' reality, one must
accept that the existence of sweatshops, when confronted with the
possibility of their nonexistence, is more a "solution" than a problem.
Attacking sweatshops and demanding that these corporations pay higher
wages without solving the very problems that brought sweatshops to
exist is at best naive and unwise.
I
hope Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu have a more realistic and thought out
solution than the one that could cause these corporations to evade
"expensive" third-world countries. After all, it is easy to lose a few
pounds living as a sweatshop worker when you know that you have where
to go when your summer job is over.
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Did anybody else notice that the new millennium won't begin until January 1st, 2001?
If you still don't know that, here is your chance:
The
measurement of a year is based on one revolution of the earth around
the sun and is called a seasonal, tropical, or solar year. A solar year
contains 365 days, 5 hr, 48 min, and 45.5 sec. Despite the fact that
the existance of the solar year has been known for quite a long time,
many ancient civilizations calculated a month as being the time between
two full moons. This measurement, called a synodic, or lunar month,
resulted in a lunar year of 354 days, which is 11¼ days shorter than a
solar year. In modern calendars, the length of the months is
approximately one-twelfth of a year (28 to 31 days) and is adjusted to
fit the 12 months into a solar year.
The earliest calendars based on lunar months eventually
failed to agree with the seasons. A month occasionally had to be
intercalated (added) to reconcile lunar months with the solar year.
Calendars that made periodic adjustments in order to compensate for
this difference were called lunisolar calendars. Such a calendar was
the one used by the ancient Babylonians, whereas the ancient Egyptians
were the first to replace the lunar calendar with a calendar based on
the solar year.
In 45 BC Julius Caesar decided to use a purely solar
calendar known as the Julian calendar. It fixed the normal year at 365
days, and the leap year, every fourth year, at 366 days, with the extra
day in February. It also established the order of the months and the
days of the week as they exist in present-day calendars. Later, in
1578, Pope Gregory XIII abolished the Julian calendar and instituted
the Gregorian calendar, which provided that only century years
divisible evenly by 400 should be leap years with 29 days in February.
Thus, 1600 was a leap year, but 1700 and 1800 were common years. The
Gregorian calendar is used today throughout most of the Western world
and in parts of Asia.
The Gregorian calendar is also called the Christian
calendar because it uses the birth of Jesus Christ as a starting date.
Dates of the Christian era are often labeled AD (Anno Domini, latin for
"in the year of our Lord") and years before His birth were labeled BC
(before Christ). Since the years were represented by the Roman Numeric
System, where for example, the year 1999 is represented by MCMXCIX, and
since there was no Roman numeral for "zero", the year of the birth of
Jesus Christ was referred to as year I AD (1 AD). Similarly, the year
before that was referred to as I BC (1 BC).
As you can see, there has never been a year 0, and
therefore, the first decade (the first ten years) of the Christian Era
was completed on December 31st, 10 AD. In the same way, the first
century (one hundred years) didn't end until December 31st, 100AD and
the first millennium (one thousand years) on December 31st, 1000AD, and
so on.
Now, if you want to go ahead and celebrate the millennium
at the end of 1999, before it actually begins, that's your problem. But consider yourself warned otherwise. :-)
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