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St. Augustine:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

Thank you, Mythbusters

From the very beginning, when your producers seemed to think that people were actually interested in watching folklorists talking more than watching stuff blow up, I loved Mythbusters.

It's gone through some times that I didn't like it as much - in one season, it seemed that every episode had to end with a bigger explosion than the last - but it's always been a fun show. And what's always kept me interested is what could be the motto of the show: failure is always an option.

I love that they fail as often as they do, as spectacularly as they do, and don't just learn from the failures but revel in them. The learn, they adapt, they laugh and joke about complete and abject failure. I mean, they have the usual frustration that comes from experimentation, the times when they can't even get to the point where they have the option of failing, but, for the most part, they just seem to love what their doing.

On tonight's episode, they mocked up a few crude (Syrian) torpedoes. They put in a rocket motor that, well, blew up. The torpedo became a missile. It was a total failure of the concept of the myth, but rather than getting frustrated, both men were excited by it and set about fixing the experiment to make it work.

Thanks, guys. I love that there's a show out there that I can use to show my boys the joy of failure.