1. P.J. O'Rourke on "fairness, idealism and other atrocities":
All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I'd be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I've got three kids and three dogs in my family. We'd be eating Froot Loops and rotten meat.
But let me make a distinction between politics and politicians. Some people are under the misapprehension that all politicians stink. Impeach George W. Bush, and everything will be fine. Nab Ted Kennedy on a DUI, and the nation's problems will be solved.
But the problem isn't politicians - it's politics. Politics won't allow for the truth. And we can't blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on utoday's campaign trail:
"No, I can't fix public education. The problem isn't the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"
2. Robin Hanson on faith in physicians
After an entire semester hearing how we get little health value from a wide margin of medical spending, almost every student (21 undergrads & 9 grads) said that a big argument against legal faith healing is that it can discourage people from going to regular doctors. Most also said it is hard to evaluate faith healer quality, and to know if they are just in it for the money.
Sigh. Regular docs are mostly in it for the money, and are also hard to evaluate. If we on average get near zero health from our last units of medicine, we are better off replacing those units with anything cheaper, at least if it also gives near zero net health effect and similar non-health benefits. Faith healing seems to fit this bill.
Sure, we vary in how much medicine we get, and in how much we would substitute legal faith healing for medicine. So yes a general trend toward more faith healing would no doubt produce a few people who sometimes get too little medicine. But that harm should be far outweighed by a reduction in harmful overtreatment. Alas, apparently even econ students after a semester of my indoctrination can't see this (only two mentioned it) - we all just love docs too much.
3. Laurie Fendrich on democracy and aesthetics
She told me that she thinks that people getting so worked up about taste is something that could only happen in a democracy. She says that Tocqueville's book is about how people in a democracy love equality more than anything else. Even though they say they love freedom, when push comes to shove, they'll take equality over freedom any day.
I think this is still true today. The mere thought that some people might have better taste than other people seems to make a lot of people go bonkers. (It's funny, though, how they accept the fact that some people are just plain better at sports than other people, or that some people have better singing voices than others do. Even if you're born with sports talent or musical ability, you have to work hard to improve them, and people accept that. But they don't like the idea that the same things might apply to taste.)
(HT: WorldMagBlog)
4. Social psychologist Daniel Gilbert on human happiness research:
What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you can't tell which futures are better than others, it's hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
5. Top 20 Super Hero Songs -- I especially liked "Aquaman's Lament" by Mark Aaron James and Bob Schnedier's version of "Batman".
6. Quote of the Week: "Headbands...what a tough accessory. When they are right, they are really right and when they are wrong you're Loverboy." - The Sartorialist (HT: kottke.org)
7. Joan Acocella on the paradox of New Yorkers' seeming rudeness:
[New Yorkers] make less separation between private and public life. That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It's hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.
(HT: kottke.org)
8. Religious Americans are generous
A new study shows that people of faith in America have a huge heart in terms of giving to Third World countries - and the study cites a surprising dollar figure.
Carol Adelman of the Hudson Institute cites the information in a study done with Notre Dame University. "We didn't realize it would be as large as it was, and we came out with a number of $8.8 billion worth of goods and services that churches are giving overseas to developing countries," she points out.
That figure represents nearly 40 percent of the foreign aid provided by the United States to the same region - and the money from churches is apparently doing a lot of good, says Adelman.
(HT: One Eternal Day)
9. Skyfarming - Turning Skyscrapers Into Crop Farms
Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. Roughly 150 such buildings, Despommier estimates, could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.
10. The New Republic: We Should Study Conservatism In Schools
[T]he conservative era has been longer than the eras of "either Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, longer than the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era, and as long as the period of liberal reform that stretched from the rise of the New Deal to the demise of the Great Society." Yet we don't learn about it in high schools, and seldom--if ever--in college history courses.
This puts the American left--and indeed, the American public--at a disadvantage, because it leads fair-minded people to assume conservatives are basically just people with bowties or people who like guns (or both)--rather than a serious, rather militant ideological movement to be understood and reckoned with.
(HT: Joshua Trevino)
11. The Toughest Movie Characters of All Times (HT: Neatorama)
12. Andy Baio analyzed Billboard's top 40 songs from the 1960s to today. Among his findings:
How about the length of the perfect pop song? For this, we can look at the mode to find the most common song lengths by decade. For example, in the 1940s, there were 42 songs that were exactly 3:01, making it the perfect song length for that decade.
1950s, 2:30 (95 songs)
1960s, 2:30 (250 songs)
1970s, 3:30 (153 songs)
1980s, 3:59 (142 songs)
1990s, 4:00 (132 songs)
2000s, 3:50 (58 songs)I was surprised at how exact these numbers are. The capacity for 45 RPM records was about three minutes, setting the standard for pop singles well into the 1960s. By the late 1960s, those constraints were removed, and we start to see longer singles. But without artificial constraints, why did exactly four minutes become the de facto standard in the 1980s and 1990s?
13. Learn to Play an Instrument Online
14. P.J. O'Rourke on the world beign "fair":
I have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, "That's not fair." When she says that, I say, "Honey, you're cute; that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that's not fair. You were born in America; that's not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you."
(HT: Greg Mankiw)
15. On Food: Portion Size, Then and Now
Over the past few decades, portion sizes of everything from muffins to sandwiches have grown considerably. Unfortunately, America's waistbands have reacted accordingly. In the 1970s, around 47 percent of Americans were overweight or obese; now 66 percent of us are. In addition, the number of just obese people has doubled, from 15 percent of our population to 30 percent.
(HT: kottke.org)
16. U.S. wastes "27% of food available for consumption"
Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don't use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week's Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.
The study didn't account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at the end of the day?
(HT: Boing Boing)
17. Timewaster of the Week: Quest for the Crown (HT: Neatorama)
18. One Woman Team: Bonnie Richardson of Rochelle High School in Texas scored 42 team points to win the Texas 1A track title...all by herself.
Richardson's title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0). On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).
(HT: kottke.org)
19. How Much Is Your Mother Worth? Edelman Index Says: $802,690
The job-market value of the role of a mother has increased to nearly $803,000, according to financial advisor Ric Edelman's Annual Mother's Day Index.
Edelman has been compiling the lighthearted annual study for ten years. The basis of the index is that the typical mom actually does many jobs: 17 of them. Using average annual compensation data from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, Edelman totals up the average salaries for those 17 key occupations to arrive at each year's Index number.
20. Survey: Mobile phones more important than wallets
More than one-third of workers would choose their mobile phone over their wallet, keys, laptop or digital music player if they had to leave the house for 24 hours and could take only one item, a new survey has found.
The survey, conducted by market research firm IDC and sponsored by Nortel Networks Corp, found that while more than 38 percent of the 2,367 people polled chose their mobile phones, less than 30 percent chose their wallets first.
21. 15 Infamous Top Secret Bases And Compounds From Around The World (HT: The Presurfer)
23. Brain uses a third of its energy on "housekeeping"
It is well established that the brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body's total haul. Until now, most scientists believed that it used the bulk of that energy to fuel electrical impulses that neurons employ to communicate with one another. Turns out, though, that is only part of the story.
A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA indicates that two thirds of the brain's energy budget is used to help neurons or nerve cells "fire'' or send signals. The remaining third, however, is used for what study co-author Wei Chen, a radiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, refers to as "housekeeping," or cell-health maintenance.
(HT: Boing Boing)
24. Psychology test: Spot The Fake Smile (HT: The Presurfer)
25. LOLCat of the Week
more cat pictures
26. The fine print on serving alcohol at universities
At the University of Chicago there is a twist on this relationship between brackish finger food and alcohol. Student groups that want to hold events that serve alcohol must agree to guidelines that include the following restriction: "Adequate quantities of non-salty food must be served."
The non-salty food requirement is not unique to Chicago. It is standard at U.S. universities (see Washington University, UPenn, and Texas A&M as examples.) How much an "adequate" amount of non-salty food is remains vague, but at the University of Kansas, the requirement is "two servings" of non-salty food for every person in attendance.
27. Protestant Evangelicals: Five Things You Should Know
28. The CIA has posted the full text of one of its guidebooks, "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis." (HT: Boing Boing)
29. Study: Kids think eyeglasses make other kids look smart -- Young children tend to think that other kids with glasses look smarter than kids who don't wear glasses, according to a new study. Children between the ages of 6 and 10 who were surveyed for the study also thought that kids wearing glasses looked more honest than children who don't wear glasses.
30. Educated People In US Living Longer, Less Educated Have Unchanged Death Rate -- A new study finds a gap in overall death rates between Americans with less than high school education and college graduates increased rapidly from 1993 to 2001. The study says the widening gap was due to significant decreases in mortality from all causes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and other conditions, in the most educated while death rates among the least educated remained relatively unchanged.
31. Teens' Perception That They Are Liked Found To Be At Least As Important As Actually Being Liked -- Interviews conducted among ethnically and socio-economically diverse 13- and 14-year olds found that teens who felt good about their social standing did well over time, regardless of their actual popularity. These teens who had positive perceptions of their own social success were increasingly less hostile and more frequently sought out by their peers as compared to teens who lacked a strong sense of their own social acceptance and were rated as unpopular by their peers.
32. Intelligence And Rhythmic Accuracy Go Hand In Hand -- People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.
33. James Brown & Pavarotti sing "It's a Man's World"
Regarding #s 12 and 15:
It's obvious that the increasing length of pop songs is causing our obesity epidemic. Or vice versa.
Your video shows as being no longer available.
Re: #5 One of the great disappointments in the second Fantastic Four movie (besides the story) was the non-use of Joe Satriani's tune "Surfing With The Alien". At least it was included in this guy's list.
In regards to number four, believe Aristotle's definition of happiness is appropriate. That definition states that: Happiness is a condition of the soul, in accordance with reason, as the man of practical wisdom would see fit.
I still hold the belief that implementing the practical syllogism, enabling one to live a virtuous life, is the best way to achieve happiness, or the blessed life.
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