[Note: The following are the #1 items from the first 33 Thirty Three Things posts.]
3. On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B
4. Constitutional Law: The Five-Minute Crash Course
5. A Scientific Analysis of the 5-Second Rule*
On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.
Suggested revision:
If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating.
The old adage that if you drop food on the floor but pick it up within five seconds, it’s okay to eat it. (HT: Freakonomics)
6. Could You Have Won the Battle of Gettysburg? This simulation of the battle is a test to pit your decisions as Robert E. Lee against what actually happened. If the South had won a major victory, some historians believe that it would have caused the Confederacy to gain international recognition and support from England and France, humiliated Abraham Lincoln, and resulted in a negotiated end to the war on the Confederacy's terms.
7. A Brief Primer on the Problem of Evil
8. The New Criterion's Roger Kimball on conservatism:
"Conservative": that means wanting to conserve what is worth preserving from the ravages of time and ideology, evil and stupidity. In some plump eras, as Evelyn Waugh observed in one of his essays, the task is so easy we can almost forget how necessary it is. At other times, the enemies of civilization transform the task of preserving culture into a battle for survival. That, we believe, is where we are today.
(HT: Right Reason)
9. One-Minute Pro-Life Apologist: Can you make the pro-life case in one minute?
10. While my English teachers failed at the task, theologian Fred Sanders has succeeded in explaining what exactly it is that poets do that makes them invaluable:
After all, one of the things we want poetry to do for us is to name an experience which hasn’t yet been named, or which has been laboring under a false name. We learn names easily enough for a certain range of experiences –chiefly the useful experiences that we want to be able to repeat on command– but for the rest of our lives we wander around encountering all sorts of phenomena which we can’t describe. When it’s time to name something so subtle it’s escaped our powers of description, we call in the poets…
Most of us have things we want to get done and people we want to communicate with, so we narrow our range of concerns, and agree to name and describe things within the acceptable range. Can’t quite put a word to that sense of nostalgia for a place you’ve never been? Not sure how to describe what’s wrong the world when your eyes are a bit unfocused after too much reading? A bit overwhelmed with the surge of emotion brought on by a song you don’t even like? Call in the poets: they’re especially skilled at naming the just barely nameable.
11. JP Morgan’s Guaranteed Formula for Success (HT: Steve-Olson.com)
12. How to Encourage a Blogger
13. Transformational geometry and iteration in cornrow hairstyles (HT: Kottke.org)
14. Johnny Cash, Aristotle, and Eudaimonia
15. The Washington Post hired Joshua Bell, a world-famous violinist, to play for spare change outside a D.C. Metro station (the stop where I commute to work every day) in order to see if anyone would notice. "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?" The result--"Pearls Before Breakfast"-- is one of the most fascinating newspaper articles I've read in a long, long time.
16. A Virtual Tour of Dante's Inferno
17. Interactive website Musicovery creates free playlists for users based on a mixture of factors: mood (you can choose among “dark,” “energetic,” “positive,” and “calm”), era, tempo, genre. (HT: Very Short List)
18. Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography
19. Fred Sanders on The Theology of Sleep
20. "What the Beatitudes Teach", an essay excerpted from Tod Lindberg's new book, The Political Teachings of Jesus
21. Five things about blogs that no one ever needs to say again
22. Is There Sex in Heaven? Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft says "yes." (HT: CounterCulture)
23. 1. YouTube University: YouTube has struck deals with major universities, creating dedicated channels from which schools can distribute their media content. Check out the channels for UC Berkeley and University of Southern California.
24. Carl Trueman on Going Bald for the Glory of God:
Yet baldness is nonetheless a great gift from the Lord, in that it imposes a certain dignity on the ageing process by cutting off the various less dignified options (e.g., ponytails, which shouldn't be sported by anyone over 30; and mullets which, frankly, should not be sported by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Period.). Of course, there are those, even Christians, who fight against this divinely-imposed dignity. Dreadful toupees abound in the church, along with frightful transplants, and the ubiquitous 'comb-over' or 'sweep.' The latter seems predicated on the false notion that, if you have six hairs to stretch across the barren landscape of your otherwise shiny pate, nobody will notice that you have gone completely bald. Or perhaps there is a belief somewhere that, in the country of the bald, the one-haired man is king. Come on, gents, parade your baldness with pride and accept the dignity which your divinely-imposed hair loss brings with it.
Don’t let this humorous excerpt fool you into thinking this is a fluff piece. As Justin Taylor notes, the article "contains serious, insightful points about youth, culture, and the priorities of the ministry."
25. Even Good Vampires are Bad
26. Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?
27. YouTube has released the "Remixer", a video editing tool which remixes your YouTube clips using a Flash-based in-browser application. The tool enables users to create more professional-looking videos by splicing together media such as video clips, photos, music, graphics and other effects. (HT: Lifehacker)
28. Lewis Carroll's Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing (HT: Mere Comments)
29. Woody Allen and Billy Graham together? While it may sound like a meeting in an alternative universe, Ann Althouse has found a charming video clip of Allen interviewing Graham.
30. Douglas Wilson poses this question in a debate with Christopher Hitchens:
Now my question for you is this: Is there such a thing as atheist hypocrisy? When another atheist makes different ethical choices than you do (as Stalin and Mao certainly did), is there an overarching common standard for all atheists that you are obeying and which they are not obeying? If so, what is that standard and what book did it come from? Why is it binding on them if they differ with you? And if there is not a common objective standard which binds all atheists, then would it not appear that the supernatural is necessary in order to have a standard of morality that can be reasonably articulated and defended?
(HT: Pseudo-Polymath
31. email bankruptcy n. choosing to delete, archive, or ignore a very large number of email messages without ever reading them, replying to each with a unique response, or otherwise acting individually on them. (I've considered this option myself after realizing I'm 30, 60, even 90 days late in responding to email from my friends. Although I'm regularly late, I attempt to catch up so don't give up on me if I owe you; I don't want it going on my credit-as-a-person report.) (HT: Kottke.org)
32. Kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children, according to a new study that is the first to look at the effects of religion on young child development.
33. Like... could you just say it?
Slam poet Taylor Mali on our "aggressively inarticulate generation." (HT: PyroManiacs)
The Gettysburg simulation was fun but faulty. A Confederate victory at Gettysburg would not have meant the South won the war. Vicksburg still would have fallen, as would have middle Tennessee (to Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland). The Army of the Potomac would have fallen back to prepared positions and Lee's exhausted army could not have defeated it again--to say nothing of taking Washington. Re-inforced and resupplied, the Army of the Potomac would have come out to fight again and Lee would eventually have had to retreat.
Meanwhile, by the summer of 1863, foreign recognition was no longer an option. That hope had been dashed the previous fall following the twin repulses in Maryland and Kentucky. England had decided to stay its hand, and so did France (following England's lead).
Gettysburg may have been a psychological turning point, but militarily, it wasn't THE turning point. (See Archer and Hattaway's How the North Won for a great explaination.)
Hi JP
I saw from the comment I left that i left another friend's name on it that I was writing to.
Unless you often go by the name, Bishop Alan, I'm thinking that went over like a ton of bricks!
Anyway, I hope you will still consider helping me learn how to get the good news out more effectively on my blog.
Take care and God bless!
Pastor Rob
PS The Gettysburg thing was pretty fun!
Congrats on the 33rd edition of 33 Things. These are always interesting collections. Thanks for the time you put into compiling them.
Have you read through the Reagan Biography you link in this piece? It's a pretty nasty piece of work, reciting a bunch of shopworn media talking points to try to deny Reagan any credit for ending the cold war, making claims about the economic impact of Reagan tax cuts which most liberals wouldn't even agree with, and otherwise attempting to shatter what it refers to as the Reagan `myth' on almost every page (except for the first few).
It even recycles the conspiracy theory, once popular in the more fringe-y left wing circles, that Reagan arranged for the hostages in Teheran to be held longer than the Iranians wanted to hold them!
Surely these aren't your positions, are they?
Thanks for the time you put into compiling them.
That one-minute pro-life apologist information (that you posted) is great!
Kyl Schalk
Atheist hypocrites and the transcendent moral code that binds them? Ayn Rand's Fountainhead may be informative for this question.
The work featured two characters, the protagonist Howard Roark and a "fallen angel" type character Gail Wynand.
Roark was an architect who strugged in years of toil, poverty, obscurity and criticism to create a modern architectural techniques that was highly efficient and visually studying. His techniques were original and groundbreaking, they were the very best buildings in form and function that could be made, given modern material and building technology available to him. He resisted the temptation to use tried and true retrograde design, appeal to arbitrary fashion or popularity, or otherwise produce irrationally built buildings for the irrational whims of prominent architecture firms and clients.
Wynand also came up hard and struggled for years to build a publishing conglomerate, and became extremely wealthy when he succeeded in doing so. But his publications were either consumer pablum or collectivist-leaning news and op/ed. In other words, Wynand use his intelligence, wealth, individualism and self-determination to endorse indolence, meagerness, collectivism and slavery to social whims. Throughout the book, Wynand has a great deal of angst and self-conflict that culminates in him being a victim of the masses he helped to create when he attempts to repent and use his publishing empire to defend Roark.
Each of these men demonstrates an atheist, Objectivist morality: the use of the mind and effort, to produce something from nothing for the facilitation of the life of a human being qua a human being, and thus deriving self-esteem from that achievement. Roark is honest in that what he produced promoted intelligence, effort, creativity, confortable preservation, and pride. Wynand was hypocritical in that what he produced went against these values.
Thus there is a transcendent atheist moral code, and thus atheist moral hypocrisy. Morality occurs by putting oneself in the place of God, making your power, creativity and esteem the focal point of your philosophy rather than the worshipping God's power. Hypocrisy occurs when you stultify, humble and debase yourself, or stultify, humble and debase others who's existence and productivity would benefit your rational self-interests. Ayn Rand the atheist would thus accuse both fellow atheists Mao and Stalin of hypocrisy.
The appropriate counterarguments are as follows:
(1) all objectivist are hypocrites by not being a god with boundless power and creatively, but being at some point in life stupid, listless, incontinent and powerless over circumstances; and
(2) There is no smoking gun reason why you shouldn't steal or subjugate other people for your benefit, as objectivist claim goes against objectivist morality. I.e. You're on a deserted island with someone, you don't like him or find him to be as enlightened as you or having any benefit to offer you, he doesn't like you but still leave you alone--why not take his stuff, enslave him to your will, or kill him if you could get away with it?
(3) Objectivists agree that humans share human characteristics such as consciousness and creativity. Yet there is no natural reason for these abilities to perceive, alter and dominate the natural world. The reasons must be supernatural and pre-exist from the natural world.
About 6 months ago the department director approached me with the proposition of purchasing some new database servers to replace our aging Sun V880 servers. We were able to purchase a few new Sun X4600 servers. This was the starting proposition for this project. A loose directive to replace the servers and a general idea of what we would replace them with.
Filed under: Women's Issues , Sexism , Family , Gilbert Martinez , Culture & Society , Presidential Primaries , Election '08 , Politics , Democrats , Hillary Clinton '08 Get Permalink or trackback 2 Responses to“ Competence and Appearance” Nathan Said: on March 17th, 2008 at 11: 19 am Stuart O'Neill Said: on March 17th, 2008 at 4: 10 pm Discuss It: Our goal is to engage members and readers in civil conversation and discourse. Name- calling, bashing or attacking members of The Democratic Daily, Democratic...
The obstetrician calls in to see how you are progressing when the contractions are occurring every 3 or 4 minutes. S/ he examines you to assess how far the cervix (the opening into the womb) has opened, how far down the birth canal the baby has progressed, and the position of the baby’ s head. This examination will be repeated regularly by doctors and midwives throughout labour. As events progress, you are moved into the delivery room. Sensors are attached through the vagina onto the baby’ s head to monitor...
One of the salon’ s special features at the Palms Place location is the Infinity Sun Custom Airbrush Theater. Each treatment is customized with a unique mixture of anti- aging and sunless tanning formula based on the client’ s skin type. The technology delivers the appearance of tanned, healthy, radiant skin in less than five minutes that lasts for seven to 14 days.
No Ginebra, no San Miguel in the PBA Finals, but still (in my perception) getting good views and good crowds? Thanks to the two teams who match up well from players 1 to 12 and coaching staff 13 to 16. And both teams genuinely look like they want to win this championship bad. Without a doubt, coliseum will be packed this Sunday despite the absence of Purefoods gunner (and officially, a HITMAN in two connotations) James Yap. SLR’ s own JY (Joseph Yeo) will likely be out of game 5 too for the hit he gave Noy Castillo. ...
Thanks for the time you put into compiling them.
The results, published earlier this week in the journal PLoS Genetics, established that the two main culprits previously believed to be primary contributors to the aging process— increased inflammation and slowed metabolism— are indeed guilty parties. But the researchers did find large disparities depending on the different tissues of the body. For example, expression profiles in the liver, brain, and muscle changed little with age, whereas the lungs, eyes, and thymus (an immune organ) experienced more...
A. It’ s always risky to suggest that one exercise is“ best” as what works for one person may not work for another. Still most people find that crunches seem to stimulate the abdominal muscles the best. Unlike those old- fashioned sit- ups that were all the rage for decades, crunches eliminate most of the hip flexor involvement that plague sit- ups. Crunches are far less stressful on the lower back than sit- ups as well. You can do crunches on the floor or using one of those big colorful exercise balls.
Gina Kolata has done it again. Her Personal Best series in the NY Times is inspired. The latest piece: Staying a Step Ahead of Aging is well worth studying:
On the diet side, drink plenty of water throughout the day, adding a small amount of bicarbonate of soda, which will make your urine more alkaline. It's important to avoid sweet refined foods, including chocolate, and make sure you are having three wholesome meals each day. Replace caffeinated drinks like tea, coffee, cola and chocolate with natural alternatives. In addition, take the Cran- Biotic Formula, made by Vega (11. 79 For 60 vegecaps), which provides a specific combination of natural antibacterial...
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Body contouring is a procedure takes away the excess tissue and fat from the inside surface of the skin, thereby shaping and toning the body.
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good archives thanks you
Thanks Muchks!
thank you very good article
For those of you thinking that if they implement this it will eliminate some of the waiting and lines...
Ok, I have an inkling (pun not intended) to modify that book image to the right to say "Schneier on Squid."
"The closest the squid industry has to a rock star."
Hello. And Bye.
http://www.godfewrddg.com >godfewrddg.