1. A Virtual Tour of Dante's Inferno
2. What socioeconomic class do you fall under? Take this test by the New York Times on "How Class Works" to find out.
3. Does it pay to save money? Not if your poor, says a new study by the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. From the Boston Globe:
Low-income households face "astronomical" penalties for saving, according to the report by the National Center for Policy Analysis. For example, each $1 saved by a single mother earning $15,000 a year would cost her $2.60 in higher taxes and lost government benefits.
"We’re constantly told that we need to save early and often to prepare for retirement," said Laurence Kotlikoff, professor at Boston University and author of the study. "Yet government policies tell low-income families, ‘If you save for the future, you won’t get our help today.’ "
4. I've heard of a "gay blade" but what's the deal with a "gay bomb?"
Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb." […]
As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."
(HT: PoliBlog)
5. A new study claims that while thirty-five million Americans feel the physical effects of hunger each day, every household and individual in our nation feels the economic effects. The study, titled “The Economic Cost of Domestic Hunger: Estimated Annual Burden to the United States,” finds that the U.S. pays more than $90 billion annually for the direct and indirect costs of hunger-related charities, illness and psychosocial dysfunction and the impact of less education/lower productivity. These costs are borne by all Americans.
Distributed on an individual basis, it means that on average, each person residing in the U.S. pays $300 annually for the hunger bill. Distributed on a household basis, it means that the annual cost is closer to $800 each year. And calculated on a lifetime basis, each individual’s bill for hunger in the nation is nearly $22,000.
6. Mark Driscoll on The Difference between Religion and the Gospel (HT: Irish Calvinist)
7. The Profit Calculator -- A fascinating series on "making a dollar in New York...for everyone from a drug dealer to Goldman Sachs."
8. 27 Skills Your Child Needs to Know That She’s Not Getting In School
9. Forget the Mason-Dixon Line. The real demarcation between North and South is the Sweet Tea Line. (HT: Neatorama)
10. Jennifer Roback Morse on Single Mothers by Choice: A valid lifestyle choice, or another example of dumb sex?
Family scholar Paul Amato of Penn, did a calculation, asking what the world would be like for adolescents today if the rate of married parenthood were the same as it was in 1970. Not the Dreaded Ozzie and Harriett 1950's (queue up scary music), but the beginning of the groovy 1970's. Amato calculates there would be:
--643,000 fewer American adolescents failing a grade each year.
--Over a million fewer adolescents suspended from school,
--453,000 fewer involved in violence
--62,000 fewer youth would attempt suicide.
Putting the percentage of kids living with their two married parents back to 1970 is not a utopian pipedream: it would require an increase of about 9 percentage points.
11. Got bad kids? It may be the fault of your genes rather than your parenting. A study appearing in the June issue of Psychological Science shows that, in children, a highly reactive autonomic nervous system, which regulates our cardiovascular, digestive and respiratory functions, paired with a stressful family environment leads to increased instances of maladaptive personality change. This is the first study to show that the interaction of family adversity with a biological characteristic is associated with longitudinally measured change in childhood personality.
12. Anthony Bradley asks, Why Does America Have Orphans If It Has Christian Churches? (HT: Justin Taylor)
13. Ever wonder what celebrity you most look like? You can use FindMyLookAlike automatically determine which celebrities look most similar to the person in a photo that you submit. It does this by using advanced facial recognition technology that was developed by AOL Labs in collaboration with Oxford University and Caltech University.
Since it said I most resemble Pierce Brosnan (I wish!), Patrick Dempsey (in my McDreams maybe), Billy Bob Thorton (ehhh), and Ron Howard (eeck), I'm a bit skeptical of the results. Most people think I look like a homelier version of Tim Roth. (HT: The Presurfer)
14. Dutch students invent alcohol powder:
Dutch students have developed powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors. The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gramme packets that cost 1-1.5 euros ($1.35-$2). Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
15. A CDC study finds that violence costs the U.S. more than $70 billion per year, as much as the total costs of Katrina damage and federal education spending. (HT: Freakonomics blog)
16. Can you guess what the second most popular name for baby boys in Britain? You might be surprised. (HT: Freakanomics blog)
17. 29 Ways to Experience Joy in Church
18. Not sure which movie reviewers match your taste in films? Compare your personal reviews with the reviews of some of the most prolific movie critics to find out which one comes closest. (HT: The Presurfer)
19. Why does foreign money seem like play money? A study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research found that people spent less in real terms when the face value of the foreign currency is less than that of their home currency (e.g., for a U.S. consumer in Europe, US$ 1= € 0.80). Conversely, when the face value of the foreign currency is higher (e.g., for a U.S. consumer in Japan, US$ 1= ¥ 120), consumers spent more.
20. Man in wheelchair takes wild ride:
A 21-year-old man got the ride of a lifetime when his electric wheelchair became lodged in the grille of a semitrailer and was pushed down a highway for several miles at about 50 mph.
Ben Carpenter was unharmed but was taken to a hospital as a precaution. He had been secured to his wheelchair by a seat belt. Carpenter, who has muscular dystrophy, told a television station that he thought he might not make it through the ride.
(HT: Neatorama)
21. Can life have meaning if everything is coming to an end?
22. Naomi Wolf on The Porn Myth:
The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.
But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.
(HT: Jennifer Roback Morse)
23. Wendy Shalit on modesty:
I first became interested in the subject of modesty for a rather mundane reason — because I didn't like the bathrooms at Williams College. Like many enlightened colleges and universities these days, Williams houses boys next to girls in its dormitories and then has the students vote by floor on whether their common bathrooms should be coed. It's all very democratic, but the votes always seem to go in the coed direction because no one wants to be thought a prude. When I objected, I was told by my fellow students that I "must not be comfortable with [my] body." Frankly, I didn't get that, because I was fine with my body; it was their bodies in such close proximity to mine that I wasn't thrilled about.
(HT: Boundless Line)
24. Too much of a good thing? While it’s understandable to feel ambivalent when presented with both positive and negative evidence, people often feel ambivalent even when all the news is good or bad, anticipating conflict before it arises. The first empirical demonstration of this reaction appears in new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
25. Tone deaf? Have perfect pitch? Test Your Musical Skills In 6 Minutes
26. Pirate Lore #1: From Colin Woodard's The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Then Down
The Golden Age of Piracy lasted only ten years, from 1715 to 1725, and was conducted by a clique of twenty to thirty pirate commodores and a few thousand crewmen. Virtually all of the commodores knew one another, having served side by side aboard merchant or pirate vessels or crossed paths in their shared base, the failed British colony of the Bahamas. While most pirates were English or Irish, there were large numbers of Scots, French, and Africans as well as a smattering of other nationalities: Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Native Americans. Despite differences in nation, race, religion, and even language, they forged a common culture. When meeting at sea, pirate vessels frequently joined forces and came to one another's aid, even when one crew was largely French and the other dominated by their traditional enemies, the English. They ran their ships democratically, electing and deposing their captains by popular vote, sharing plunder equally, and making important decisions in an open council -- all in sharp contrast to the dictatorial regimes in place aboard other ships. At a time when ordinary sailors received no social protections of any kind, the Bahamian pirates provided disability benefits for their crews.
(HT: AlbertMohler.com)
27. Pirate Lore #2: Did pirates really say "arrrrr"?
Probably not. Both that phrase and the accent that goes with it are strictly Hollywood. The pirate phrase "Arrrgh" appeared in film as early as 1934; a character also uses the phrase in a 1940 novel by Jeffrey Farnol…."Arrrrr" is mostly fiction, as are a number of the other affiliated signifiers: People very rarely walked the plank*, and nobody has ever discovered an actual pirate treasure map.
28. Pirate Lore #3: From the abstract of An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization, an economics paper by Peter T. Leeson:
This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. These most treacherous rogues terrorized the waters of the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans during the 17th and 18th centuries. Pirates formed a loose confederation of maritime bandits outside the law of any government. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two institutions to overcome these obstacles to successful organization. First, I look at the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or England.
(HT: Professor Bainbridge)
29. Knit graffiti
30. In a survey of 15,000 European hoteliers through Expedia.com, Americans are considered the second best tourists in the world behind the Japanese. We're still the worst dressed, though, so we may not be able to shake the "ugly American" label just yet. (HT: In the Agora)
31. How to determine the doneness of a steak by using your hands.
32. Researchers say that PG-13 films may not be safe for kids. The films, which contain a lot of “happy violence” (violence is that which is “cool, swift, and painless"), don’t consider the consequences of violent acts, such as injury, death, and the shattered lives of the people involved.
33. The Prediction
Follow the instructions and you'll be surprised by the eerily prescient prediction. (HT: The Presurfer)
Can you guess what the second most popular name for baby boys in Britain?
It's interesting that Mohammed is the only Muslim/Middle Eastern name in the top 10. The article doesn't say what percentage of Muslim boys are named Mohammed, but it must be very high if none of the other options made it into the top 10 overall. I guess your average English Mosque must be a bit like our church, where something like 50% of the women are named Jennifer (yes, most of our congregation is aged 25-35).
I've noticed the Jennifer thing too. There are a LOT of Jennifers in my church.
The Mason-Dixon line doesn't demark the difference between the North and the South anymore anyway. Maryland is a lot of things, but a Southern state it is NOT, and hasn't been for years.
I have been telling people for years that the true marker between North and South is the sweet tea line. I can't tell you how shocked I was the first time I was asked by a waitress if I wanted sugar in my tea - of course, how else would you drink it? You might as well ask if I wanted any flame applied to my steak, or just eat it raw.
True Northerness seems to occur, though, where tea is by default served hot rather than iced...
Maryland is a lot of things, but a Southern state it is NOT, and hasn't been for years.
Parts of it still are. Mostly on the Eastern Shore and in St Mary's County, though in 15 years or so I suspect you will be right.
"The Prediction" is nothing but pure mathematics.
I live in southeast Iowa, and there's an area here (around a town called Kalona - Amish and Mennonite) where sweet tea is the default. 'Bout knocked me over this far north. Plus, I can never drink the tea at church gatherings. Bleh!!