1. Jennifer Roback Morse on Feminism: An attack on the human body
...[F]eminists don't view gender differentiation as a biological reality to which sensible people must adapt. Sex differences are a cosmic injustice. No demand for social change is too extreme in the service of wiping out these differences. This is great if you happen to be a radical, intent on justifying revolutionary social changes. But if you are a normal person, living in a normal body, this ideology is more than a nuisance. We have painted ourselves into a corner. Under feminist tutelage, we have insisted that women change their fertility in order to accommodate the labor market. We have insisted on the right to raise our children alone, and to spend larger and larger portions of our lives alone.
2. Harvard research reveals the prejudices of babies
One area into which Spelke's team would like to delve deeper is the origins of bigotry in human beings. In the case of skin colour, newborns respond to individuals of all races equally. By three months, however, a baby from a Caucasian household will prefer to gaze at a white face, and a black baby at an African American face. By the age of two or three, they are drawn to their own gender, too. 'There are some very intriguing parallels between the patterns of social preference we find in infants and what seems to go on in adults,' Spelke says.
(HT: kottke.org)
3. Ilkka Kokkarinen on obesity and the laws of physics
There are quite a few of fat people out there who claim, in all apparent seriousness, that food consumption has no causal relationship to their weight and that they maintain their bulk by eating maybe only 1,500 kcal/day. However, none of these people has ever been able to do this under controlled conditions where they can't sneak in snacks, such as this prison unfortunately seems to be compared to the outside world that is abundant with food. And of course doing so would be an instant Nobel prize in both physics and medicine (and Randi prize, and what else) for establishing that a human body is able to generate energy out of thin air, so I'm pretty confident to be that none of these guys will ever do it. Physics is not everything, but it does set absolute constraints and lower bounds to everything else.
(HT: The Buck Stops Here)
4. NYT: Appeasing the Gods, With Insurance
We buy insurance not just for peace of mind or to protect ourselves financially, but because we share the ancient Greeks' instinct for appeasing the gods.
We may not slaughter animals anymore to ward off a plague, but we think buying health insurance will keep us from getting sick. Our brains may understand meteorology, but in our guts we still think that not carrying an umbrella will make it rain, a belief that was demonstrated in experiments by Jane Risen of the University of Chicago and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell.
(HT: EconLog)
5. Reality TV's Most Memorable Christians (HT: Christ and Pop Culture)
6. Future Fireman
My new favorite commercial.
7. "I See Dead People's Books," a catalogue of the libraries of 33 deceased luminaries, including Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, and Tupac Shakur. (HT: VSL)
8. Pew Survey: Religion Ranks Above Wealth
Who says Americans worship at the feet of the almighty dollar? Not the American public. Only 13% of adults say it's "very important" for them to be wealthy, ranking this personal priority far behind six others measured in a new survey by the Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends project.
But don't get Americans wrong - a majority certainly wouldn't mind being rich. According to the survey, another 43% of adults say being wealthy is "somewhat important" to them, while about the same proportion say it's "not too important" (33%) or "not important at all" (10%).
9. Making Meaning in a Meaningless World: Five Ways that Won't Work
10. Religious Bias and Church/State Separation -- An extract from Roger Trigg's 'Religion in Public Life: Must Faith Be Privatized?'
The founders of the United States may have had their reasons for not having a religious establishment at federal level, but they did not think that they lived in a secular nation. As James Hitchcock comments: 'The Founders simply assumed the reality of a Christian nation, and thought that liberty was made possible through the discipline forged by religion.' They certainly did not believe that religion was only a private matter. As Hitchcock sums up the situation:
"The overall result was the emergence of what has been called a 'de facto establishment' of a generalized kind of Protestantism that manifested itself in numerous public and official ways, a pattern present not only from the beginning of the Republic, but already part of the processes by which that Republic was called into being."An unfortunate aspect of this was a latent, and sometimes overt, anti-Catholicism, which was itself often the motive for the insistence on the separation of Church and State. Particularly after major immigration from Catholic countries, there was a fear of the influence of the Catholic hierarchy. The fear of Establishment had even deeper roots. It was often voiced by groups such as Baptists, who, like the Amish, believed that the people of God should be kept separate, and that Christ's kingdom had different purposes from that of the civil State. One such was Roger Williams, who was banished from Massachusetts in 1635, and went on to found 'Providence', Rhode Island. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, those who had rejected the Anglican Establishment in England went on to make a new one of their own. Congregationalism was in fact established in the state until 1833.
11. The rising cost of money: "It now costs more than a penny to make a penny. And the cost of a nickel is more than 7½ cents."
12. Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation
Lesson One: Herd Your Black Sheep
The Quarterly: How did your first project at Pixar--The Incredibles--shake things up?
Brad Bird: I said, "Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody's listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door." A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well. We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here.
(HT: kottke.org)
°°°°°°
13. In the UK, Practising Muslims 'will outnumber Christians by 2035'
By 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians, according to calculations by Christian Research, a think- tank. The figures are published in the latest in a series of reports entitled Religious Trends.
The think-tank has warned that 4,000 churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to shrink at current rates.
14. Don Bosch on nuclear power:
There is a close correlation between public health and access to electricity, as noted by the UN Human Development Index slide he presented. The ideal amount of electricity (say some) is where the curve levels out, or somewhere around 4000 kWh per person per year. The US and other major industrialized nations are well to the right of this as you can imagine. Rather than castigating us for "excessive" energy use (which is mostly tied to the West's enormous production) [retired Admiral Skip Bowman's] point was to note all the nations on the left who will be moving up and to the right as they modernize. Electricity demand is increasing exponentially around the globe.
15. Real Housewives of NYC -- A Lot of Them
If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.
More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.
The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed - that's larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
16. How Many Teeth Are in That Cigarette Pack?
A one-pack-a-day smoking habit can cost you the loss of at least two teeth every 10 years, reports the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD).
Smokers are about twice as likely to lose their teeth than non-smokers, according to the results of two separate 30-year studies that investigated the relationship between smoking and tooth loss among males and females at Tufts University in Boston.
(HT: Neatorama)
17. Timewaster of the Week: Chronotron (HT: Neatorama)
18. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson on "Darwinism":
Surely we must assume that a biosphere generated out of any circumstances able to sustain life is as good as any other, that if we make a desert, for example, and the god of survival turns his countenance upon the lurkers and scuttlers who emerge as fittest, under the new regime, we can have no grounds for saying that things have changed for the worse or for the better, in Darwinist terms. In other words, absent teleology, there are no grounds for saying that survival means anything more or other than survival. Darwinists praise complexity and variety as consequences of evolution, though the success of single-celled animals would seem to raise questions. I am sure we all admire ostriches, but to call a Darwinist creation good because it is credited with providing them is simply another version of the old argument from design, proving in this use of it not the existence of God but the appropriateness of making a judgment of value: that natural selection, whose existence is to be assumed, is splendid and beneficent, and therefore to be embraced.
19. Learn Nuclear Physics in One Easy Sentence: "When nuclei get bigger, they get bigger, but when atoms get bigger, they get smaller."
20. Bimbo-Proof the Nursery: How to be sure your daughter doesn't turn out like Lindsay Lohan
Here's where things become complicated. Because despite being a dad and having all these noble dad concerns about my daughter and all the daughters of the world, I still gaze at media sluts on occasion.
What I've come to realize is that there are really two people inside me: the Dude Self and the Dad Self. The Dude Self has an evolutionary mandate. Namely, to get his DNA into all available fertile females. This is how I explain the compulsion toward media sluts, who, after all, sow the fantasy that women exist only for the carnal pleasure of men.
But then there's the Dad Self. The Dad Self has to worry about the survival of his wife and offspring. It might be said that his genetic material is heavily mortgaged. He regards women differently, especially if he has a daughter. Now he must think about the kind of world in which he'd like her to grow up, and especially how he'd like other males to treat her, which is to say not as a sexual chew toy, but with kindness and respect.
It's here that my old Dude Self and my brand-new Dad Self come to blows. Because as much as I want to check out Paris and Lindsay, I know I'm harming my daughter by doing so. For one thing, I'm sending her a very clear message: Daddy loves sluts. Be a slut and Daddy will love you. And if you don't believe that a 1-year-old picks up on messages, you've never seen my daughter in action. She is intensely focused on everything in her environment, especially whatever I happen to be looking at.
(HT: Locusts & Honey)
22. Mind's Limit Found: 4 Things at Once
Early research found the working memory cut-off to be about seven items, which is perhaps why telephone numbers are seven digits long (although some early telephone dialing started with a two- or three-letter "exchange," often the first letters of a community name, followed by four or five figures, e.g. Pennsylvania 6-5000). Now scientists think the true capacity is lower when people are not allowed to use tricks like repeating items over and over or grouping items together.
"For example, when we present phone numbers, we present them in groups of three and four, which helps us to remember the list," said University of Missouri-Columbia psychologist Nelson Cowan, who co-led the study with colleagues Jeff Rouder and Richard Morey. "That inflates the estimate. We believe we're approaching the estimate that you get when you cannot group. There is some controversy over what the real limit is, but more and more I've found people are accepting this kind of limit."
23. The Effect of the Global Food Crisis on Yuppies (Part I) -- WaPO: Clipping, Scrimping, Saving:
The last thing Marti Tracy wants to do on a Saturday is clip coupons. But last month the 34-year-old Bowie resident felt she no longer had a choice. She'd already given up organic meat and decided to buy organic milk only for her 2-year-old son, not for the whole family.
Tracy and her partner also stopped buying the cereals they like in favor of whatever was on sale; stopped picking up convenient single-size packs of juice, water or crackers; and, in order to save gas, stopped going to multiple stores. "I find the whole thing a huge hassle, but I've reached a tipping point," said Tracy, a government human resources specialist who is pregnant with her second child. "Clearly, I'm not unable to feed my family. But I just can't feed my family the way I'd like to feed them."
24. The Effect of the Global Food Crisis on Yuppies (Part II) - Jared Bridges comments on the WaPo article:
Indeed, the horror of having to do all your shopping at one store is hard to stomach, as is the thought of having to eat a box of bad cereal. But, if the level of "crisis" has reached this point in America, think of how hard it must be on those poor folks in third-world Africa --- I bet they're having a hard time even finding organic milk.
25. LOLCat LOLGroundhog of the Week
more cat pictures
26. Cat Urine is an Aphrodisiac for Mice
Tom and Jerry may never get along, but cats could help mice get lucky in love.
Cat odor is known scare mice away, but it also seems to act like an aphrodisiac for the rodents, a new study shows. The smell makes male mice more macho, helping lure in females, researchers said.
(HT: Neatorama)
27. Sitting straight 'bad for backs'
Sitting up straight is not the best position for office workers, a study has suggested. Scottish and Canadian researchers used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show it places an unnecessary strain on your back.
They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning slightly back, at about 135 degrees.
28. Too much, too little sleep tied to ill health in CDC study
People who sleep fewer than six hours a night -- or more than nine -- are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies.
The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use.
29. Journalism created initial awareness of nation's history, MU study finds -- American history is referenced in news features, profiles and analysis pieces, giving meaning to current events, discoveries and individuals. A University of Missouri researcher recently completed a study on the use of historical references by journalists in the 19th century, a time when the United States had little or no published history records. The study revealed that 19th century American journalism was significantly influential in shaping the nation's early history.
30. Language skills develop at 6, say researchers -- Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults. In a study conducted by the University's Child Language Study Centre, children aged between six and nine were given sentences containing made-up verbs such as 'the duck likes to spling' and were asked to judge the acceptability of possible past tense forms. The study focused on the process the children used to come to their conclusions rather than whether their answers were right or wrong. They found that the children's judgments followed a virtually identical pattern to those of linguistics students who took part in a similar study at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US.
31. High self-esteem is not always what it's cracked up to be, says UGA psychologist -- High self-esteem is not the same thing as healthy self-esteem. And new research by a psychology professor from the University of Georgia is adding another twist: those with 'secure' high self-esteem are less likely to be verbally defensive than those who have 'fragile' high self-esteem.
32. Too much information? Study shows how ignorance can be influential -- USC researchers provide a challenge to the classic economic model of information manipulation, in which knowing more than anybody else is the key to influence. Instead, economists Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo present a situation - commonly observed in real life - in which all parties have access to the same information, but one party still manages to control public opinion. For example, a pharmaceutical company such as Merck may be obliged to make public the findings of all studies related to a new drug. Preliminary trials may indicate no short-term side effects, and the company may elect not to perform follow-up trials before releasing the drug on the market.
33. Penguins
Film maker and writer Terry Jones discovers a colony of penguins, which are unlike any other penguins in the world.
"It now costs more than a penny to make a penny. And the cost of a nickel is more than 7½ cents."
I say keep the penny but have the Treasury charge 7.7 cents for one (and 7.5 cents for the nickel)! People will respond to the shortage of pennies and nickels by digging them out of old coin jars and piggy banks. Stores will repond by setting prices so more sales ring up evenly so pennies & nickels are not required. Those that insist on setting prices in pennies can pay the price necessary to make change.
Sometimes it is fun to put together some of these things:
For example,
If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank
with
We have painted ourselves into a corner. Under feminist tutelage, we have insisted that women change their fertility in order to accommodate the labor market. We have insisted on the right to raise our children alone, and to spend larger and larger portions of our lives alone
There it is, NYC would appear to be the least feminist while, maybe, Mississippi is the most!
Darwin again:
In other words, absent teleology, there are no grounds for saying that survival means anything more or other than survival. Darwinists praise complexity and variety as consequences of evolution, though the success of single-celled animals would seem to raise questions. I am sure we all admire ostriches, but to call a Darwinist creation good because it is credited with providing them is simply another version of the old argument from design, proving in this use of it not the existence of God but the appropriateness of making a judgment of value
Except the 'good' is not coming from Darwinian theory but outside it. You may think it is good that ostriches have survived today. Quite frankly, they do nothing for me and if they had been one of the millions of species that gone extinct long ago I don't think my life would be that much less off. On the other hand, there are all sorts of wacky extinct creatures that would be cool to see alive today. Hollywood CGI is only so good after all.
Likewise while you may think it's good we have ostriches it certainly isn't so good that HIV is so good at dodging vaccines and drugs. Whether what the ostrich hater or ostrich lover views of good are valid, though, is not answered by Darwin's theory.
Mind limits:
Early research found the working memory cut-off to be about seven items, which is perhaps why telephone numbers are seven digits long
Ahhh but I've read that Chinese people can remember 10 digits as easily as we do seven. In Chinese the words for numbers are only one syllable long.
I'm not sure the first piece is at all fair. Certainly none of the feminist 'blogs I've read argue that "Sex differences are a cosmic injustice." They do argue against pigeonholing people based on sex, but that's another thing entirely (in fact, Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog has a direct response to this kind of comment; here's what they say about sex differences. (Hope the html works)
The link on fatherhood is much closer to what the feminists seem to be saying, though I suspect they would still have problems with it:
"The Dad Self has to worry about the survival of his wife and offspring. [snip] Now he must think about the kind of world in which he'd like her to grow up, and especially how he'd like other males to treat her, which is to say not as a sexual chew toy, but with kindness and respect."
#13
By 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians, according to calculations by Christian Research, a think- tank.
It's odd that they would compare Muslims and Christians. Assuming no increase in the population overall, there would be 1.96 million active Muslims, 1.63 million active Christians, and something like 56 million who are neither. The comparison of 1.63 million Christians to 56 million secularists in what was historically a majority Christian nation is the real story.
I guess a comparison of Christians to Muslims is more scary, but Muslims are projected to be a tiny minority, too. If the population increases beyond 60 million, then that 1.96 million becomes even less significant.
How did they define active Muslim? People who check 'Muslim' on a box that says "religion?" or do they only count Muslims that prey 3 times a day and have made at least one trip to Mecca (or are planning it) and who observe Ramadon as 'active Muslim'?
Without following the link, it seems to me a think tank with an agenda would produce their 'newsworthy' study by setting a high bar for 'active Christians' (regular church going, New agey "I feel Christ in my everyday life" Christians do not count) and a low bar for "active Muslims".
It would be interesting to see the dynamics of 'religious intensity' and what direction they are going.
NBooth
I'm not sure the first piece is at all fair. Certainly none of the feminist 'blogs I've read argue that "Sex differences are a cosmic injustice." They do argue against pigeonholing people based on sex, but that's another thing entirely (in fact, Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog has a direct response to this kind of comment; here's what they say about sex differences. (Hope the html works)
The post Joe cited falls into what I call argument by sterotype. The author doesn't cite any actual feminists he is disagreeing with but is instead attacking a sterotype of what he thinks a feminist would say.
If you called him out on it, though, he would respond by employing Google to find someone who did in fact say something like that. But the problem with that is with Google you will always find that somewhere sometime someone will have said just about anything you can imagine.
For example, suppose I wrote up a long post attacking people who think Jesus was a space alien. If you respond by saying no one thinks that, I have over 659,000 Google hits to attack back. But the fact remains if I'm talking about mainstream religious thought this is something no one serious holds (serious, of course, being somewhat subjective but also somewhat objective!).
If the author thinks that feminism has asserted this he should be able to produce an array of serious citations to back up his claim. I suspect, though, that he cannot.
I can't see God, so he doesn't exist! Bush is Hitler! Trees are morally superior to humans! We're all enslaved to Big Oil! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
"If the author thinks that feminism has asserted this he should be able to produce an array of serious citations to back up his claim. I suspect, though, that he cannot."
I agree. I do suspect that so-called "first wave feminist" may have used language dangerously close to these statements cited(to make a point), but I doubt subsequent generations have followed their example to any large extent.
By the way, none of them work. Deep down, everybody knows that meaning isn’t one of those things that can be made, it must be received. But go ahead and join the game of trying out these diversionary tactics. After all, if the world is meaningless, you’ve got nothing, literally nothing, to lose.
Nonsense, it is just the opposite. Read Victor Frankl.
"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."
Man's Search for Meaning, p.172