Osler's Razor

My Sunday School teacher and mentor, Bob Darden, was justly and thoroughly honored at the undergraduate commencement yesterday. This year he won not only the Centennial Professor award, but was named most Outstanding professor in research. Now, that may not strike you as as big a deal as it really is-- the thing to remember is that a journalism professor won the research award, on a campus blanketed with people doing scientific research of all kinds.

Of course, the other irony is that Bob is an incredible teacher. I've learned more from him and his wife, Mary, than I have from most of my own professors, and that group was no slouch.

Bob won the award on the strength of his project to save the legacy of gospel music in America. Is there anything better to hope to accomplish than to change the world in a way like that?

Here's what makes it special-- doing something like that (or stopping coal plants) will make the future better. Bob's house contains an amazing collection of comic books. The stories in those books, over and over, are of superheroes saving the world from some temporary and imagined threat. But what Bob does (and Mary, with the coal plants) changes the future in a much more profound way, saving us from a permanent threat to our future. A rogue cyborg, after all, won't stick around forever, but once the song "John the Revelator" is lost to the world, it will never come back.

That's my kind of hero.