Thirty Three Things (v. 14)

In his famous essay "A Plea for Excuses," the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin complained that philosophers of art typically spent too much time focusing on beauty, when most people's aesthetic interests are less grand. Austin expressed the hope that "we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy"! Maybe some creative theologian looking for a new topic could take a hint here and get down to talking about cuteness. Babies and kittens are cute, and they get a lot of attention from many people--the evidence is there at YouTube.

G. K. Chesterton offers a possible clue to explore in one of his chapters in Orthodoxy. He suggests that God's way of appreciating things is less like that of an adult human and more like that of a child. Children love repetition, he observes. A favorite childish refrain is "Do it again!" A little kid can enjoy the 20th reading of a favorite story or poem as much as she enjoyed the first. God too enjoys repetition, says Chesterton. Every morning God says to the sun and to the hawk and to the whale, "Do it again!"-and God takes delight in what he sees.

11. Weird Converter makes comparisons between things you normally wouldn't consider. For example: The height of the Empire State Building is equal to 14773 American cockroaches. (HT: Neatorama)

12. Charles Spurgeon on How to Read Scripture

13. According to author Ray Bradbury, his book Fahrenheit 451 is not a cautionary tale about government censorship but rather "a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature."

14. A gallery of underwater sculptures (HT: The Presurfer)

15. 20 years of Bill Gates' tech predictions: Some prescient (speaking about newspapers, Gates predicted that the Web would ultimately create a "substitution effect," shifting readers away from print and onto Web sites) and some a bit off (2004: "Two years from now, spam will be solved."). (HT: Lunch over IP)

16. David Smith poses an intriguing electoral question:

What would happen if a candidate for political office told voters he/she was going to take the political positions that gave him/her the best chance of being elected and then once elected, support the political positions that were the most popular with the voting public? What would happen if a candidate for political office told voters his/her personal opinions would never be a factor in setting government policy?

Americans prefer candidates that claim their independence and willingness to take unpopular stands while doing exactly what the polls say he should do. The contrast can be seen in the leadership styles of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Clinton was an inveterate poll-watcher (and follower) and became, not surprisingly, wildly popular. Bush--who appears not to have a pollster on his staff--ignores the polls and trusts his own opinion. Also not surprisingly, he pays the price in cellar-dwelling approval ratings.

17. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank was at a recent press conference with a Sudanese ambassador who made an unusual threat:

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."

As diplomatic threats go, that one gets high points for creativity: Try to stop the killings in Darfur, and we'll take away your Coca-Cola.

18. Time Waster of the Week: Screamin' Beans

19. Macht provides a surprisingly compelling defense of Jacques Lacan-style jargon-laden obscuratinism:

In attempting to get somebody to understand something, a writer who attempts to write with clarity will often try to write with familiar terms in an attempt to get the reader to think about new things in terms he or she is already familiar with. This is one of the major complaints against abstruse writers like Lacan (and Dooyeweerd, I might add) - they use terms that we aren't familiar with or they mean something by the terms that we don't usually mean by them. If something like this is what we mean by clarity, then a problem with clarity is that it can serve to reinforce the reader's own self-understanding, rather than allowing the reader to be open to something new.

20. Marvin Olasky notes a fact that I had never heard before: Every state constitution--all 50 states--make reference to God.

21. The Encyclopedia of Earth, is a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public. (HT: The Presurfer)

22. The Social Norm of Leaving the Toilet Seat Down: A Game Theoretic Analysis:

The issue of whether the toilet seat should be left up or down after use seemingly generates a lot of passion among the parties concerned, however, scientific inquiries into the matter are almost non-existent. Notable exceptions are Choi (2002) and Harter (2005). Choi (2002) argues that the rule of leaving the toilet seat down after use is inefficient in the sense that there is at least one other rule that outperform this rule. The unit of analysis in Choi (2002) is the household and the efficient rule is defined as one that minimizes the total cost of toilet seat operations per household. Choi (2002) does not model the issue as a situation of conflict, hence ignores the game theoretic aspects of the problem.

(HT: BoingBoing)

23. Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales and children:

There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures--the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger and anxiety. Instead, we want our children to believe that, inherently, all men are good. But children know that they are not always good....

Contrary to what takes place in many modern children's stories, in fairy tales evil is as omnipresent as virtue. In practically every fairy tale good and evil are given body in the form of some figures and their actions....

The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent--not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality.... Presenting the polarities of character permits the child to comprehend easily the difference between the two, which he could not do as readily were the figures drawn more true to life, with all the complexities that characterize real people.

Ambiguities must wait until a relatively firm personality has been established on the basis of positive identifications. Then the child has a basis for understanding that there are great differences between people, and that therefore one has to make choices about who one wants to be.

(HT: Wittingshire)

24. The Washington Post on Haunting Echoes of Eugenics

On this 80th anniversary of [Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court decision which upheld Virginia's involuntary sterilization laws], let's not foolishly believe that victims of eugenics are an artifact of history. So long as we speak in terms of good genes and bad genes, recognize a life with a disability as an injury, and allow health policies to value some lives over others, we continue to create human rights violations every day.

(HT: Right Reason)

25. The Evangelical Left Gets a Clue (Part I) -- Jim Wallis: "I'm believing more and more that politics alone cannot overcome poverty and our other great social problems."

26. The Evangelical Left Gets a Clue (Part II) --Tony Campolo -- "[I]t is time for us to name the hypocrisy of the Left in complaining about how the Religious Right is violating the first amendment while turning a blind eye to their own candidates' use of churches as places to campaign." (HT: Acton Institute PowerBlog)

27. Courtship compliance: The effect of touch on women's behaviour

A good-looking man approached 120 women in a night club over a period of three weeks, and asked them to dance. It was in the name of science - the man was an assistant to the psychologist Nicolas Guegen. Remarkably, of the 60 women who he touched lightly on the arm, 65 per cent agreed to a dance, compared with just 43 per cent of the 60 women who he asked without making any physical contact.

Note: This study was conducted in France, and Guegen cautioned the findings might not translate to other cultures. "It is possible that in a non-contact culture, the effect of touch in a courtship relation would be perceived negatively by women," he said.

28. Science Fiction in the National Interest (Part I) -- Sci-fi writers join war on terror

Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers.

"We spend our entire careers living in the future," says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of writers the government brought to Washington this month to attend a Homeland Security conference on science and technology.

Those responsible for keeping the nation safe from devastating attacks realize that in addition to border agents, police and airport screeners, they "need people to think of crazy ideas," Andrews says.

29. Science Fiction in the National Interest (Part II) -- John Brownlee commenting on the previous story:

A spokesman Homeland Security then goes on to talk about science fiction's remarkably prescient history predicting the future. He points out that almost every aspect of our modern life -- the flying cars zooming through our skies, the Marilyn Monrobots vacuuming our apartments naked, even our thirty year space war with the evil Xenu and his terrible galactic empire -- were all described with complete precision over fifty years ago.

Essentially, it's a group of sci-fi writers feeling important by sitting around and having a game of make believe on Homeland Security's dime. That's awesome, and as far as I'm concerned a fine application of tax money (really), but ridiculous none the less.

30. The correct spelling is definitely. (HT: The Presurfer)

31. A paper published in the June 1st issue of the journal SLEEP is the first literature review and formal classification of a wide range of documented sleep-related disorders associated with abnormal sexual behaviors and experiences. These abnormal sexual behaviors, which emerge during sleep, are referred to as "sleepsex" or "sexsomnia".

32. Susan RoAne (via Guy Kawasaki) on the Top Ten Tips of Schmoozing.:

#1 Think analog, not digital. We still have to interact with people although the digital world has afforded us many ways to stay in touch using technology. We must know how to meet, mingle, make small talk and connect with others in the analog world both in our professional and personal lives. You can IM, text, ping, or Twitter and yet, you will still get invited to an office party or a cousin's wedding and have to do the face-to-face.

33. The Bloody Olive (1996)

This clever short film by French filmmaker Vincent Bal contains more twists in ten minutes than you'll find in a dozen feature length film noirs.