1. The Greatest Question Ever Asked by the Devil
The great question of the Book of Job is not "Why do the righteous suffer?" but "Why do people serve God?" Would you serve God if there were no blessings attached? What if God were to show you no mercy? What if there were no heaven? What if there were no hell? Would you still serve God? Why or why not? The Devil asked a legitimate question.
2. David Mills on how some people like the idea of the "natural family" until it means changing or re-thinking their own lifestyle:
When a pastor says something in a sermon that you do not like, goes the old joke, he has "gone from preaching to meddling." He has stopped telling pleasant and comforting stories (or enjoyably convicting stories about the sins you don't commit) and started interfering with your life....
You go from preaching to meddling when, for example, you assert that the Natural Family has a "quiverful" of children; that it requires a permanent, unbreakable bond between the husband and wife; or that it is marked by what are called "sex roles." This is too much nature, it is nature untempered by technology and culture, as if you were asking people to go naked in the winter or hunt and kill their own food and eat it raw.
3. Philosopher Victor Reppert on hypocrites:
What's very interesting about hypocrisy is that it is an inevitable by-product of having a high moral standard and rewarding socially behavior that lives up to that moral standard. If the bar is high, then you are always going to have some people who want the social benefits of appearing moral without actually being moral, and if that is the case then you'll get hypocrites. Thus it is an argument for being a member of a Christian church, and not an argument against it, that there are hypocrites in the church. If you dumb down your moral standard to the level that everyone can fairly easily satisfy, you'll get rid of the hypocrites, along with the high standard.
4. Mark Olson on solving the health care crisis
The essential problem in health care is that it is labor intensive. Drug production aside (which has it's own unfortunately high regulatory burden), the medical profession is saddled with very, very little mechanization. There is no machine that lets the doctor of today provide his services, through the advent of gadgetry two or three orders of magnitude moreclients, err, patients. That is what will solve the "health care" crisis. Nothing else. There is no other magic potion available. Costs can only be brought down through the introduction of labor multipliers, spreading the costs. Only by allowing one doctor or office or hospital to charge orders of magnitude less per patient because with the same staff it can assist orders of magnitude more patients. Those two magnitudes are directly related. If a doctor can process twice the patients he can charge half as much and still end the day with the same income at the end of the day. Ten times the patients -> one tenth the cost. One hundred -> one hundred. Imagine that. OK, now figure out how to make it real!
5. StrategyPage: Why Are U.S. Troops So Hard To Kill?
While every combat death is a tragedy, the war in Afghanistan has been notable for how few of them there have been. We'll use a standard measure of combat losses, the number of troops in a combat division (12-20,000 troops) who are killed each day the division is in combat. Since late 2001, there have been .12 American combat deaths per division day in Afghanistan. During the Vietnam war, the average division lost 3.2 troops a day, which was similar to the losses suffered in Korea (1950-53). In Iraq, the losses have been .44 deaths per division per day. By comparison, during World War II the daily losses per American averaged (over 400-500 combat days) about twenty soldiers per day. On the Russian front, German and Russian divisions lost several times that, and often over a hundred a day for weeks on end.
(HT: No Left Turns)
6. Quote of the Week: "Obama has repented of one good thing he did in the Senate: voting to save Terri Schaivo's life....Is this the kind of 'change' we want: the killing of the innocent at both extremes of life: the unborn and the disabled?" -- Philosopher Doug Groothius (HT: Between Two Worlds)
7. On NASA's website, ISS Science Officer Don Pettit describes the "smell of space":
Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn't quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as "tastes like chicken." The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.
(HT: BoingBoing)
8. Novelist Nicholson Baker on The Charms of Wikipedia:
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies--and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.
9. Anthony Esolen on Biola University and Patrick Henry College :
I am absolutely persuaded -- and to our shame let it be spoken -- that the typical undergraduate at [Biola University's Torrey Honors Institue] has read more Aquinas and has studied his thought more carefully than has the typical bishop in the American church, as the typical undergraduate at Patrick Henry College knows more about Constitutional history than does many a judge warming a federal bench.
I don't doubt that's true. The Torrey students I've met are not only wickedly smart and well-read but winsome and warm. They are by far some of the best and brightest young people in America.
10. The Economics of Assassination
In "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War," Olken and Jones looked at the effects of political assassination, using a strict empirical methodology that takes into account economic conditions at the time of the killing and what Olken calls a "novel data set" of assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, between 1875 and 2004.
Olken and Jones discovered that a country was "more likely to see democratization following the assassination of an autocratic leader," but found no substantial "effect following assassinations-or assassination attempts-on democratic leaders." They concluded that "on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy." The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that "suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed."
11. The Economist: In Praise of the Potato
Unlikely though it seems, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the industrial revolution in England in the 19th century. It provided a cheap source of calories and was easy to cultivate, so it liberated workers from the land. Potatoes became popular in the north of England, as people there specialized in livestock farming and domestic industry, while farmers in the south (where the soil was more suitable) concentrated on wheat production. By a happy accident, this concentrated industrial activity in the regions where coal was readily available, and a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its "historically revolutionary role".
12. Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos
13. Megan McArdle on poverty and start-up costs:
...the fact that poor people without savings are often forced into higher-cost alternatives than middle-class people. If you don't have the deposit and first and last month's rent for an apartment, you end up in a residential hotel that costs more but will let you pay by the week. If you only have a small refrigerator, it's hard to be thrifty by buying in bulk. If you can only afford a battered used car, a lot of your paycheck may get eaten up in expensive car repairs. It seems to me that this is actually a fairly easy poverty intervention, one that I know is sometimes done by churches and other charity groups, but could probably stand a more systematic implementation...
This is one of the reasons that being a middle-class person with a low income is fundamentally different from being born poor. Middle-class people generally have relatives that they can draw on for help with those kinds of upfront expenses. People who are born poor generally have social networks that are rich with mechanisms for surviving poverty, but rarely flush with cash.
14. Woman Gives Birth To Child Nearly Her Own Size:
A northern Kentucky woman believes she is the smallest woman who ever gave birth to such a large baby.
Stacey Herald, 33, gave birth five weeks ago to an 18-inch daughter who is not much smaller than her mother."I'm 28 ½ inches, head to heel," said Herald, who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta.
(HT: Neatorama)
15. Drinking makes heart grow more sorrowful, study finds
The researchers, led by pharmacology professor Norio Matsuki, gave mild shocks to lab rats to condition them to fear. As a result, the rats would freeze in terror and curl up the moment they were put in their cages.
Researchers then immediately injected the rats with ethanol or saline. The researchers found that rats with alcohol in their veins froze up for longer, with the fear on average lasting two weeks, compared with rats that did not receive injections.
"If we apply this study to humans, the memories they are trying to get rid of will remain strongly, even if they drink alcohol to try to forget an event they dislike and be in a merry mood for the moment," the study said. "The following day, they won't remember the merriness that they felt," it said.
(HT: Neatorama)
16. The Hermeneutics Quiz (HT: ChristianThinker.net)
17. Tongue Piercing, Sponsored by Coke Zero
Shops in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Salvador are giving free piercings to people that agree to take a picture with a fresh new Coke Zero stud. Coke's calling the concept advertasting.
(HT: Neatorama)
18. When you hit the snooze alarm on a clock radio or alarm clock, why does the alarm goes off again in nine minutes?
By setting the snooze time to 9 minutes, modern digital alarm clocks only needs to watch the last digit of the time. So, if you hit snooze at 6:45, the alarm goes off again when the last digit hits 4 - at 7:54. They couldn't make the snooze period 10 minutes, or the alarm would go off right away - or the clock would take more circuitry.
19. Gene Edward Veith on making policy choices:
On serious issues, my policy positions are based on my deeply-held convictions. On less important issues, I go by whatever position is funniest.
20. Timewaster of the Week: Bug Battle Combat
21. Why does the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa appear to be both smiling and not smiling at the same time?
The smile part of the Mona Lisa's face was painted by Leonardo in low spatial frequencies. This means that when you look right at her mouth, there's no smile. But if you look at her eyes or elsewhere in the portrait, your peripheral vision picks up the smile.
22. The Science of Fairy Tales
23. 20 Movies that Make Men Cry
24. 100 Weird Facts About the Human Body (HT: The Presurfer)
25. LOLCat of the Week
26. Aaron Earls on being Jesus' "hype men":
To put it in today's terms, we're Jesus' hype man. For those not familiar with the term, you'll know the guy. In a rap song the main artist doesn't come on until several seconds after the beginning of the song. During the build-up to his entrance on the track, the hype man yells over the beat. He's always saying things like, "Yeah!" "Alright!" "Uh-huh!" and other generic phrases that prepare the audience for the main event.
The hype man are usually friends of the rapper that lack the skills and experience of the featured artist. Hype men are successful as long as they are just another instrument there to make the main artist look good. They can and should have no ego, because it's not about them. Just about anyone can do what they are doing, they have that role because of who they know and nothing more.As hype men for God, we don't have any special skills that He needs to accomplish His work - He's God. Any abilities that we have, He gave to us so that we can be fulfilled by promoting or hyping Him.
27. How to Draw an Impossible Triangle (HT: The Presurfer)
28. 10 DIY Car Hacks
29. Researchers have discovered a gene that can block the spread of HIV -- A team of researchers at the University of Alberta, including a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, have discovered a gene that is able to block HIV, and thought to in turn prevent the onset of AIDS. Dr. Stephen Barr, a researcher in the Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology at the U of A, says his team identified a human gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus.
30. PC beats doctor in scan tests
Experts taught a standard computer how to diagnose Alzheimer's from brain scans, and got a 96% success rate.
The accuracy of diagnosis from standard scans, blood tests and interviews carried out by a clinician is 85%.
(HT: Hit & Run)
31. Like Owner, Like Dog: One Third Of US Dogs Are Obese, Cats Also Suffer -- Obesity in pets mirrors that of humans, as do the reasons -- decreased physical activity, age, and an increased caloric intake, even genetic predisposition. Like humans, there are also many health problems associated with being obese, such as diabetes mellitus.
32. Reaching 100 Is Easier Than Suspected
Living to 100 is easier than you might think. Surprising new research suggests that even people who develop heart disease or diabetes late in life have a decent shot at reaching the century mark.
It has been generally assumed that living to 100 years of age was limited to those who had not developed chronic illness," said Dr. William Hall of the University of Rochester.
Hall has a theory for how these people could live to that age. In an editorial in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine, where the study was published, he writes that it might be thanks to doctors who aggressively treat these older folks' health problems, rather than taking an "ageist" approach that assumes they wouldn't benefit.
33. The Duke and His Daughter
John Wayne answers a question about what he wants for his daughter. (HT: Mick Huckabee for President blog)
1. The Case of the Typing Monkeys
The “Monkey Theorem,” in its popular form, holds that if you have an infinite number of monkeys banging away at an infinite number of keyboards, eventually you will get from one of them Shakespeare’s Sonnet Eighteen, the first four lines of which read:
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? /Thou art more lovely and more temperate./ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/ And summer's lease hath all too short a date.Well, in the 1990’s the British National Council of the Arts, in an inventive use of taxpayers’ money, placed six monkeys in a cage with a computer. After banging away at the keyboard for a whole month – and using the computer as a bathroom at the same time – the monkeys had typed 50 pages but failed to produce a single word in the English language, not even the letter “a” by itself. [Gerry] Schroeder applied probability theory to the “Monkey Theorem” and calculated that the chance of getting Sonnet Eighteen by chance was 26 multiplied by itself 488 times (488 is the number of letters in the sonnet) or, in base 10, 10 to the 690th. If that number is written out, it is 1 with 690 zeroes following it. But, as Schroeder showed, the number of particles in the entire universe – protons, electrons and neutrons – is only ten to the 80th. Thus, even if every particle in the universe were a computer chip that had been spinning out random letters a million times a second since the beginning of time, there would still be no Shakespeare’s Sonnet Eighteen by chance. As [philosopher Anthony Flew] concluded, “if the theorem [the Monkey Theorem] won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.
(HT: Cranach)
2. Carol Platt Liebau, who recently wrote a book about sex in America, on the term "prude":
[A]s I point out in the book, the word "prude" derives from the old French "prude femme," meaning "a good or virtuous woman." It's revealing that, these days, the term "slut" has become a widely accepted, affection term of familiarity among girlfriends, but being labeled a "prude" is nothing short of a social disaster.
3. Mike Huckabee on SNL
(HT: Reformed Chicks Blabbing)
4. Annie Murphy Paul, writing in The New York Times, has an eye-opening feature on fetal pain:
If the notion that newborns are incapable of feeling pain was once widespread among doctors, a comparable assumption about fetuses was even more entrenched. Nicholas Fisk is a fetal-medicine specialist and director of the University of Queensland Center for Clinical Research in Australia. For years, he says, "I would be doing a procedure to a fetus, and the mother would ask me, 'Does my baby feel pain?' The traditional, knee-jerk reaction was, 'No, of course not.' " But research in Fisk's laboratory (then at Imperial College in London) was making him uneasy about that answer. It showed that fetuses as young as 18 weeks react to an invasive procedure with a spike in stress hormones and a shunting of blood flow toward the brain - a strategy, also seen in infants and adults, to protect a vital organ from threat. Then Fisk carried out a study that closely resembled Anand's pioneering research, using fetuses rather than newborns as his subjects. He selected 45 fetuses that required a potentially painful blood transfusion, giving one-third of them an injection of the potent painkiller fentanyl. As with Anand's experiments, the results were striking: in fetuses that received the analgesic, the production of stress hormones was halved, and the pattern of blood flow remained normal.
5. Millennials need to get real about work world
Advertising executive Owen Hannay, for one, has placed a moratorium on hiring people fresh out of college unless they’ve done a work-related internship or have an advanced degree. That’s quite a shift for the 45-year-old principal of Slingshot LLC, whose Dallas agency is known for its leading-edge marketing.
It’s not that millennials lack the creative genius or technological know-how that he’s looking for. Far from it, he says. It’s more that they lack the real-world grounding it takes to deal with responsibility, accountability and setbacks…
“[The Millennials have] been overparented, overindulged and overprotected…They haven’t experienced that much failure, frustration, pain. We were so obsessed with protecting and promoting their self-esteem that they crumble like cookies when they discover the world doesn’t revolve around them. They get into the real world and they’re shocked. “You have to be very careful in how you talk to them because they take everything as criticism.”
(HT: Joanne Jacobs)
6. Quote of the Week: "“Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.” --Hadley Freeman in The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable via The Smart Set
7. Adolescents and preteens are swearing more publicly than ever:
It's conversational swearing – in the hallways and in the classroom – that is on the rise, says Timothy Jay, one of the leading scholars on cursing in the United States.
Teens are more likely to drop casual expletives, or "fillers," than the generation before them and have more trouble adjusting their conversation to fit their audience. That means adults – especially strangers who cannot sanction the teens – hear more of the same language that the teens' friends hear, says Jay, author of "Why We Curse."
He estimates that the average adolescent uses roughly 80 to 90 swear words a day.
(HT: Ypulse)
8. Conservatives Just Aren't Into Academe, Study Finds
9. NYT: Under the Influence of…Music?
Teenagers listen to an average of nearly 2.5 hours of music per day. Guess what they’re hearing about?
One in three popular songs contains explicit references to drug or alcohol use, according to a new report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. That means kids are receiving about 35 references to substance abuse for every hour of music they listen to, the authors determined.
10. Heather Mac Donald on The Campus Rape Myth
If the one-in-four statistic is correct—it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”—campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.
None of this crisis response occurs, of course—because the crisis doesn’t exist.
11. Why Eating a Big Mac is Cheaper than Eating a Salad (HT: The Presurfer)
12. Jonah Lehrer, in the Boston Globe, on "Grape Expectations
SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.
The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.
13. Obsolete Skills
14. NYT: Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter
The stereotype of the 16-year-old boy is that he has sex on the brain. But a fascinating new report suggests that boys are motivated more by love and a desire to form real relationships with the girls they date.
The report, published in this month’s Journal of Adolescence, paints a far different picture of teen boys than the stereotype of testosterone-fueled youth. Psychology researchers from the State University of New York at Oswego surveyed 105 10th-grade boys whose average age was about 16. The boys, most of whom said they were heterosexual, were given surveys asking them to select various reasons why they asked girls out, dated and pursued physical relationships. Most of the boys had dating experience, and about 40 percent were sexually active.
15. Timewaster of the Week: Untangle
16. Ending Tradition, NBC Dismisses Fall Debuts
It soon may be time to retire the phrase “fall television season.”
NBC Universal took a big step toward undoing one of the television industry’s oldest traditions by announcing Tuesday that it would move to a year-round schedule of staggered program introductions. The move is intended to appeal to advertisers, who crave fresh content to keep viewers tuned in.
The question that should be asked is why didn't they do this sooner. I've always thought it odd that a technological medium like television would follow what is essentially an agrarian calendar schedule.
17. Scary Global Warming Story Headlines (Part I) -- Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
18. Scary Global Warming Story Headlines (Part II) -- Pythons could squeeze lower third of USA
19. Booktrust, “an independent charity set up in 1921 to encourage people of all ages to read,” has recently polled British readers and come up with a list of the fifty best children’s books. (HT: The American Scene)
20. How to turn a Calculator and an AM Radio into a Metal Detector (HT: Lifehacker)
21. On the Duke Rape Case (Part I) -- Duke lacrosse players sue city and school :
More than three dozen current and former Duke lacrosse players filed a lawsuit Thursday claiming they suffered emotional distress during the furor over the now-discredited rape case against three of their teammates.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Durham, accuses Duke University, the City of Durham and several school and police officials of fraud, abuse and breach of duty for supporting the prosecution of the case.
22. On the Duke Rape Case (Part II) -- Julie Ponzi is less than sympathetic
Team sponsored (whether "official" or not) drunken parties with strippers? I’m not so naïve as to be shocked by the occurrence of these things . . . but I am offended by a call for my sympathy to be attached to the idiots who get caught with their pants down--so to speak. Boys, if you don’t want to end up in this situation here’s an idea . . . don’t go to these kind of things. Don’t hang out with drunk sluts you don’t know and can’t trust. Exercise some judgment if you can’t exercise your virtue. If you don’t, it may go badly for you. And, when it does, perhaps you’ll have a legal case if you don’t end up in jail. But so what? You’re still an idiot.
I completely agree.
23. The Economist notes some interesting tidbits on currency:
A MAN'S angry wife once ran $30,000 of his life savings though a paper shredder. Fortunately the nest-egg was in dollars and help was at hand in a little-known corner of America's federal bureaucracy. Since 1862 the Mutilated Currency Division of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has pieced together partially destroyed American currency. So long as 51% of a bill remains and can be proved genuine, Uncle Sam will refund its full value.
With magnifying glasses, tweezers, scalpels and many gallons of disinfectant, the mutilated-currency specialists can spend up to two years analyzing a single bill. “We don't care if it was in a fire, buried underground or water-damaged,” says one. “Maybe your dog ate it. Came out the other end. Clean it up a bit. We'll take care of it.” In 2006 the currency forensics handled about 20,000 cases and sent out cheques worth $66m.
24. Good Ideas Distract Groups From Generating Great Ideas -- Good ideas can have drawbacks. When information is freely shared, good ideas can stunt innovation by distracting others from pursuing even better ideas, according to Indiana University cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone.
25. LOLCat of the Week
26. Working Alone May Be The Key To Better Productivity, New Research Suggests -- Solitary workers may be faster workers, according to research by neuroscientists. Individuals given a specific task are slowed when witnessing someone perform a different task nearby, suggesting that workers may perform better if they are in isolation.
27. Film critic Kyle Smith eviserates one of the most overrated Oscar-winning films of all time: Raging Bull.
In the climactic moment, when La Motta is jailed on a morals charge, he attacks the stone walls of his cell with his fists and his head, crying, “Why? Why? Why? . . . They said I was an animal. I’m not an animal.”
But that is exactly what he is; De Niro himself, Scorsese says in a documentary included with the DVD, compared the Bronx Bull to a crab, and animal noises such as an elephant’s roar frequently appear in the sound mix when La Motta is in tantrum mode. For all of its technical mastery–the sound effects by Frank Warner and Michael Chapman’s black-and-white photography are monuments to their craft–Raging Bull is not what Roger Ebert called it: “an Othello for our times.” Tragedy presupposes downfall, but a roach can’t fall. Nor is the film an investigation into evil; this guy is just a jerk. At the beginning he is a fit jerk, at the end he is a fat jerk, and he is a jerk at every point in between.
28. Reihan Salem wonders, "Is Charlie Bartlett the Best Teen Movie Ever?"
You come away from Charlie Bartlett wanting to be more in control of your life, and also wanting to be kinder, not least to your parents. The wish-fulfillment of most teen movies, and tween television, involves a world without adults, or in which adults are hilariously incompetent. Here we see imperfect adolescents and adults, bobbing and weaving around each other, all terrified of having their defensive barriers breached, and all fundamentally scared in the same ways.
29. Why Perfect Dates Make Lousy Partners
The best "catches" in dating land may be the worst choices in the long-run, new research shows.
Popular people who monitor themselves carefully in social situations and thereby appear to be the most socially appropriate are often highly sought after as romantic partners, a study finds, but these people show less satisfaction and commitment in relationships than socially-awkward people.
By self-monitoring, people assess how their actions affect others and adjust to fit the appropriateness of the situation. They screen their words and behavior to suit the people around them.
30. A new study suggests cat owners are less likely to die of a heart attack:
The study, by researchers at the University of Minnesota, found that feline-less people were 30 to 40 percent likelier to die of cardiovascular disease than those with cats.
Yet dog owners had the same rate as non-owners. "No protective effect of dogs as domestic pets was observed," said the study, which was presented Thursday at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans.
(HT: Fraters Libertas)
31. Oral Contraceptives Could Work For Dogs, Cats, Pigs, Maybe Even Deer And Coyotes -- If you're a land owner and animals such as coyotes or wild pigs are driving you hog wild, help may soon be on the way to control their numbers in a humane way -- in the form of a birth control pill for animals being developed at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences. The concept would be to get it to wild animals through baited food, researchers say.
32. Sun Will Vaporize Earth Unless We Can Change Our Orbit -- New calculations by University of Sussex astronomers predict that the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun in about 7.6 billion years unless the Earth’s orbit can be altered.
33. Editing: Oscar's Obscure Category
Hollywood editor Mark Helfrich walks us through well-edited scenes from this year's five Oscar-nominated films. (This year's winner was "The Bourne Ultimatum", edited by Christopher Rouse)
1. Should intelligent design (the theory that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause and are not the result of an undirected, chance-based process) be classified as science or pseudoscience? Advocates almost always assume that it should be regarded as a legitimate scientific research program while its critics often scoff at the idea of this "stealth creationism" being given serious consideration.
I myself am an interested agnostic on this particular aspect of creation. (While I know the "who" (God) and the "what" (God did it), I am unclear on the "how" (what processes were involved)). I believe the problem for the advocates of ID is that there is currently not enough empirical evidence to fully support their claims. And I also believe that the problem for the critics of ID is that they tend to rule out the possibility based more on prejudice than sound philosophical objections.
While I'm not qualified to determine whether Intelligent Design is an accurate scientific theory, I do think it is at least as philosophically plausible as other approaches (e.g., naturalism). As the atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett says, "There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination." Because I am interested in ID and evolution, I often note articles and arguments that I find noteworthy. Here are 32 such items which, if we set aside our philosophical baggage, are worth examining.
2. Mike Gene on "Maintaining an Open Mind"
The key question a person should ask him/herself about ID is this – does the result of the investigation have profound metaphysical implications for you? If you are a theist, would the disproving of ID cause you to abandon your faith? If you are an atheist, would the proof of ID mean you now have to deal with the reality of God?
If the answer if yes to these questions, then you will have great difficulty approaching this issue as an investigator, as the investigation carries deep metaphysical risk and significance for you. In other words, you are deeply invested in the answer and this will color your perceptions and thinking. The key to avoid all of this is to rid oneself of the notion that the designer in ID must be God.
3. Sound familiar? From Simon Singh's Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
The British physicist William Bonner, for example, suggested that the Big Bang theory was part of a conspiracy aimed at shoring up Christianity: 'The underlying motive is, of course, to bring in God as creator. It seems like the opportunity Christian theology has been waiting for ever since science began to depose religion from the minds of rational men in the seventeenth century'
Fred Hoyle was equally scathing when it came to the Big Bang's association with religion, condemning it as a model built on Judeo-Christian foundations. His views were shared by his Steady State collaborator, Thomas Gold. When Gold heard that Pius XII had backed the Big Bang, his response was short and to the point: 'Well, the Pope also endorsed the stationary Earth.' Scientists had been wary of the Vatican'
However, this wariness sometimes bordered on paranoia, as noted by the English Nobel Laureate George Thomson: 'Probably every physicist would believe in a creation if the Bible had not unfortunately said something about it many years ago and made it seem old-fashioned.' (pp. 361-62)
(HT: Uncommon Descent)
4. Evolution is deterministic, not random, biologists conclude from multi-species study -- A multi-national team of biologists has concluded that developmental evolution is deterministic and orderly, rather than random, based on a study of different species of roundworms. The findings are reported in the the journal Current Biology.
5. From Michael Lynch, a Distinguished Professor of evolutionary biology a Indiana University, in a letter to the journal Nature
Two factors have facilitated the promotion of ID. First, IDers like to portray evolution as being built entirely on an edifice of Darwinian natural selection. This caricature of evolutionary biology is not too surprising. Most molecular, cell and developmental biologists subscribe to the same creed, as do many popular science writers. However, it has long been known that purely selective arguments are inadequate to explain many aspects of biological diversity . . .
6. Philosopher David Stove's So You Think You Are a Darwinian?
7. One species' entire genome discovered inside another's -- Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the entire genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The finding, reported in today's Science, suggests that lateral gene transfer -- the movement of genes between unrelated species -- may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.
8. Beyond a 'speed limit' on mutations, species risk extinction -- Harvard University scientists have identified a virtual "speed limit" on the rate of molecular evolution in organisms, and the magic number appears to be six mutations per genome per generation -- a level beyond which species run the strong risk of extinction as their genomes lose stability.
9. A scientist unclear on the concept: There Is 'Design' In Nature, Biologist Argues
Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller has to hand one victory to the "intelligent design" crowd. They know how to frame an issue. "The idea that there is 'design' in nature is very appealing," Miller said. "People want to believe that life isn't purposeless and random. That's why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support.
"To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the language of 'design' and the sense of purpose and value inherent in a scientific understanding of nature," he said.
In a Feb. 17, 2008 symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston,* Miller will argue that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of "design" -- the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life.
10. Gene regulation, not just genes, is what sets humans apart -- The striking differences between humans and chimps aren't so much in the genes we have, which are 99 percent the same, but in the way those genes are used, according to new research from a Duke University team.
11. Granville Sewell asks What if we DID find irreducibly complex biological features?
My question is: what if we found another example, even more spectacular, so spectacular that every reasonable person would be forced to admit it could not have evolved through small improvements. Then would you consider the design inference justified? If you say yes, then you are admitting that design is a possible, even if currently unjustified, scientific hypothesis. If you say no, then everyone will finally understand that, as W.E.Loennig has stated, today’s evolutionary theory is completely unfalsifiable.
12. From the conclusion of the paper, The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life
The plausibility of different models for the origin of life on earth directly depends on the adopted cosmological scenario. In an infinite universe (multiverse), emergence of highly complex systems by chance is inevitable. Therefore, under this cosmology, an entity as complex as a coupled translation-replication system should be considered a viable breakthrough stage for the onset of biological evolution.
(HT: Uncommon Descent)
13. Complexity and the Sea Anemone (Part I) -- Sea Anemone Provides a New View of Animal Evolution
The newly decoded DNA of a few-centimeter-tall sea anemone looks surprisingly similar to our own, a team led by Nicholas Putnam and Daniel Rokhsar from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, reports on page 86. This implies that even very ancient genomes were quite complex and contained most of the genes necessary to build today's most sophisticated multicellular creatures.
The work is truly stunning for its deep evolutionary implications," says Billie Swalla, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle….This implies that even very ancient genomes were quite complex and contained most of the genes necessary to build today’s most sophisticated multicellular creatures.
14. Complexity and the Sea Anemone (Part II) -- D.A. Cook asks, "Just how the heck is the Darwinian paradigm going to explain this? Advanced genetic programs installed before there was any chance of natural selection acting on them. Yikes! Another finding in the real world not predicted by, or even possible within, the Darwiniam paradigm."
15. New Research Proves Single Origin Of Humans In Africa
New research published in the journal Nature (19 July) has proved the single origin of humans theory by combining studies of global genetic variations in humans with skull measurements across the world. The research, at the University of Cambridge and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), represents a final blow for supporters of a multiple origins of humans theory.
16. From the New Scientist article, Evolution: hacking back the tree of life
If you want to know how all living things are related, don't bother looking in any textbook that's more than a few years old. Chances are that the tree of life you find there will be wrong. Since they began delving into DNA, biologists have been finding that organisms with features that look alike are often not as closely related as they had thought. These are turbulent times in the world of phylogeny, yet there has been one rule that evolutionary biologists felt they could cling to: the amount of complexity in the living world has always been on the increase. Now even that is in doubt.
While nobody disagrees that there has been a general trend towards complexity - humans are indisputably more complicated than amoebas - recent findings suggest that some of our very early ancestors were far more sophisticated than we have given them credit for. If so, then much of that precocious complexity has been lost by subsequent generations as they evolved into new species. "The whole concept of a gradualist tree, with one thing branching off after another and the last to branch off, the vertebrates, being the most complex, is wrong," says Detlev Arendt, an evolutionary and developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.
The idea of loss in evolution is not new. We know that snakes lost their legs, as did whales, and that our own ancestors lost body hair. However, the latest evidence suggests that the extent of loss might have been seriously underestimated. Some evolutionary biologists now suggest that loss - at every level, from genes and types of cells to whole anatomical features and life stages - is the key to understanding evolution and the relatedness of living things. Proponents of this idea argue that classical phylogeny has been built on rotten foundations, and tinkering with it will not put it right. Instead, they say, we need to rethink the process of evolution itself.
It is not hard to see how the mistake might have happened
(HT: Uncommon Descent)
17. WaPo article (June 2007): Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle
The first concerted effort to understand all the inner workings of the DNA molecule is overturning a host of long-held assumptions about the nature of genes and their role in human health and evolution, scientists reported yesterday.
The new perspective reveals DNA to be not just a string of biological code but a dauntingly complex operating system that processes many more kinds of information than previously appreciated.
18. EJ Klone on An Atheist in support of ID
In the scientific debate over the origins and patterns of life over the years, it is often claimed that evolution is propped up by atheists, and ID is propped up by theists alone. There are theists in support of evolution, but what about atheists who support ID? I'm one.
19. David Tyler: "Truth be told" about Chimp-Human DNA comparisons
For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This 'fact' of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. "Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same." However, this "given" is about to be discarded.
Apparently, it is now OK to openly acknowledge that those who are involved in this research have never been comfortable that the 1% figure was an accurate summary of the scientific information. But more recent studies have made it impossible to sustain the old orthodoxy. They have raised "the question of whether the 1% truism should be retired." One zoologist is quoted as saying: "Now it's totally clear that it's more a hindrance for understanding than a help."
20. Casey Luskin on The Facts about Intelligent Design: A Response to the National Academy of Sciences’ Science, Evolution, and Creationism
21. Human Ancestors Walked Upright, Study Claims -- The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as "upright apes." Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule.
22. From the abstract of Chris Cosans' paper "Was Darwin a Creationist?
Throughout the Origin of Species, Darwin contrasts his theory of natural selection with the theory that God independently created each species. This makes it seem as though the Origin offers a scientific alternative to a theological worldview. A few months after the Origin appeared, however, the eminent anatomist Richard Owen published a review that pointed out the theological assumptions of Darwin's theory. Owen worked in the tradition of rational morphology, within which one might suggest that evolution occurs by processes that are continuous with those by which life arises from matter; in contrast, Darwin rested his account of life's origins on the notion that God created one or a few life forms upon which natural selection could act. Owen argued that Darwin's reliance on God to explain the origins of life makes his version of evolution no less supernatural than the special creationist that Darwin criticizes: although Darwin limits God to one or a few acts of creation, he still relies upon God to explain life's existence.
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - Volume 48, Number 3, Summer 2005, pp. 362-371.
23. From the LiveScience article, "Greatest Mysteries: What Drives Evolution?"
Natural selection is accepted by scientists as the main engine driving the array of organisms and their complex features. But is evolution via natural selection the only explanation for complex organisms?
"I think one of the greatest mysteries in biology at the moment is whether natural selection is the only process capable of generating organismal complexity," said Massimo Pigliucci of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, "or whether there are other properties of matter that also come into play. I suspect the latter will turn out to be true."
(HT: Telic Thoughts)
24. Comet probes reveal evidence of origin of life, scientists claim -- Recent probes inside comets show it is overwhelmingly likely that life began in space, according to a new paper by Cardiff University scientists. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues at the University's Centre for Astrobiology have long argued the case for panspermia - the theory that life began inside comets and then spread to habitable planets across the galaxy. A recent BBC Horizon documentary traced the development of the theory. Now the team claims that findings from space probes sent to investigate passing comets reveal how the first organisms could have formed.
25. DNA Is Blueprint, Contractor And Construction Worker For New Structures
DNA is the blueprint of all life, giving instruction and function to organisms ranging from simple one-celled bacteria to complex human beings. Now Northwestern University researchers report they have used DNA as the blueprint, contractor and construction worker to build a three-dimensional structure out of gold, a lifeless material.
(HT: New Covenant)
26. William Dembski answers the question, "What exactly is the “design” part of “intelligent design”?
27. Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of years -- The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes -- including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees -- several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted. The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago.
28. Frontloading (Part I) Uncommon Descent: "It Seems Frontloading is Everywhere"
It seems like every other day there’s an article where scientists are discovering the presence of genes thought to have arisen late in evolution to be already present in ancient forms, so-called “living fossils”. In this case what we see in this particular “living fossil”, the shark, is the presence of genetic activity that is associated with ‘digit formation’ in limbed animals. Previously, scientists thought that there was some late phase additional activity which, we may say, was ‘added onto’ fin development….
As I say, these types of articles seem commonplace, yet NDE keeps on chugging along as if all of this fits in nicely with Darwinism. Just think, ‘limb-like’ genetic activity before ever there was a limb. And, so, would it be rude if we asked our Darwinist brethren: “So how did it evolve when it was present before ever it was needed?”
29. Frontloading (Part II) New genetic data overturn long-held theory of limb development
Long before animals with limbs (tetrapods) came onto the scene about 365 million years ago, fish already possessed the genes associated with helping to grow hands and feet (autopods) report University of Chicago researchers in the May 24, 2007, issue of Nature.
This finding overturns a long-held, but much-debated, theory that limb acquisition was a novel evolutionary event, requiring the descendents of lobed-fin fish to dramatically alter their genes to adapt their bodies to their new environments of streams and swamps.
30. Frontloading (Part III) -- Conquest of land began in shark genome
The finding shows what was thought to be a relatively recent evolutionary innovation existed eons earlier than previously believed, shedding light on how life on Earth developed and potentially providing insight for scientists seeking ways to cure human birth defects, which affect about 150,000 infants annually in the United States.
"We've uncovered a surprising degree of genetic complexity in place at an early point in the evolution of appendages," said developmental biologist Martin Cohn, Ph.D., an associate professor with the UF departments of zoology and anatomy and cell biology and a member of the UF Genetics Institute. "Genetic processes were not simple in early aquatic vertebrates only to become more complex as the animals adapted to terrestrial living. They were complex from the outset. Some major evolutionary innovations, like digits at the end of limbs, may have been achieved by prolonging the activity of a genetic program that existed in a common ancestor of sharks and bony fishes."
31. Low Probability is Only Half of Specified Complexity
32. Frequently Asked Questions about Intelligent Design
33. The trailer of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
1. Vern S. Poythress, who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard, on A Biblical View Of Mathematics:
The neutrality postulate holds special attractiveness as applied to mathematics, because of the apparent widespread agreement about mathematical truths. “Everybody knows that 2 + 2 = 4.” If religious beliefs really have an influence, why is there such widespread agreement, cutting across religious lines? We intend to answer this question on several levels: (1) by showing that the agreement in mathematics is not so widespread, nor so uncorrelated with religious beliefs, as the textbooks would have you believe (§§2-7); (2) by showing that non-Christian philosophy of mathematics is involved in deep-set cleavages and antinomies, in its understanding of even so simple a truth as 2 + 2 = 4 (§§11-18); (3) by showing that only on a thoroughgoing Biblical basis can one genuinely understand and affirm the real agreement about mathematical truths (§25).
So, first of all, what differences have arisen in mathematics in connection with religious belief? Differences have arisen over arithmetical truth, over standards for proof, over number-theoretic truth, over geometric truth, over truths of analysis, over mathematical existence-not to mention the long-standing epistemological disputes over the source of mathematical truth.
(HT: City of God)
2. The latest New York magazine has a fascinating article by Po Bronson on how and why kids lie:
Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they'd started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens….
For two decades, parents have rated "honesty" as the trait they most wanted in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don't even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98 percent said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their ages, 96 to 98 percent said lying is morally wrong.
So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?
Bronson's article contains a number of revealing tidbits, including:
1. Lying is related to intelligence. The smarter the kid, the better they are at lying.
2. On average, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half.
3. Scholars have found that kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less often.
4. Children lie because they see their parents lie, and learn to imitate them. Adults inadvertently teach children that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict.
5. Permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their children’s lives.
6. Most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them since its too much work.
7. Parents view arguing with their teenager as destructive to their relationship, while teens see it as strengthening their bond.
3. Kevin Kelly says the internet is a copy machine:
At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
Kelly also answers the question, "how does one make money selling free copies?"
4. How to make better decisions
5. 50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily
6. Quote of the Week: "“Whoever is not satisfied with Christ alone, strives after something beyond absolute perfection.” - John Calvin, Commentary on John (HT: Of First Importance)
7. Greg Gilbert on the problem with church music:
I am really afraid that we’ve managed to create a generation of anemic Christians who are spiritually dependent on excellent music. Their sense of spiritual well-being is based on feeling “close to God,” their feeling close to God is based on their “ability to worship,” and being able to worship depends on big crowds singing great music.
‘Just as bad, think about how many church fights and divisions are rooted in disagreements about music. People leave churches because they don’t like the music. Christians who believe exactly the same things about Jesus worship in different buildings next door to each other because they can’t countenance one another’s musical style. Churches split because one faction wants “contemporary” music and another wants “traditional” music. It’s not the words that are at issue; it’s how the words are sung, and to what instrumentation. The thing even has its own name—the “Worship Wars,” which when translated with a little honesty is really “the Music Wars.”
(HT: CounterCulture)
8. The most organized shanty town on earth
Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon was founded by 8 homeless people. In 2001, city officials granted them rights to live on a selected plot without interference. Now with a population of about 60, the community has a village council, 24-hour security, and a website.
(HT: Neatorama)
9. The Public Library of Law, a new search engine launched in collaboration with legal research firm FastCase, gives you access to laws, statutes, and legal decisions from all 50 states, as well as a wealth of free legal forms. (HT: Lifehacker)
10. Steve Sailer says the best indicator of whether a state will swing Red or Blue is the cost of buying a home and raising a family:
The culture wars between Red and Blue States are driven in large part by these objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking. For example, according to ACCRA, a nonprofit organization that measures the cost of living so corporations can adjust the salaries of employees they relocate, the liberal San Francisco-Oakland area is twice as expensive as the conservative Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The BestPlaces.net calculator reports, “To maintain the same standard of living, your salary of $100,000 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California could decrease to $49,708 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas.”
Not surprisingly, the San Francisco area is popular with people who don’t need a big backyard for their kids, such as homosexuals and childless couples, while North Texas attracts families from across America. San Francisco is very Democratic, while the Metroplex is quite Republican.
Why? The simplest explanation is that GOP “family values” resound more in states where people can more afford to have families. In parts of the country where “Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life.” And where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you will generally find more conservatives. It’s a stereotype that marriage, mortgage, and kids make people more conservative, but, like most stereotypes, it’s reasonably true. You’ll find fewer Republicans in places where family formation is expensive. Where fewer people can form families, Republican candidates making speeches about family values just sound irrelevant or irritating.
(HT: Eunomia)
11. How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer (HT: Lifehacker)
12. How business can save the world
[N]ew research suggests that business can have an important -- and positive -- cultural impact as well. Companies that empower their employees to cut costs in the workplace not only improve their bottom lines, but also may foster civic engagement and contribute to peace in the societies where they operate, according to research published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Author Gretchen Spreitzer, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, examined survey data from 65 countries around the world, comparing detailed measures of employee workplace empowerment with broader measures about the quality of civic life. Her analysis, based on surveys taken between 1981 and 2001, shows that empowered, satisfied employees tend to live in open, peaceful societies -- and that improvements in workplace empowerment often precede social changes. Employees, it seems, can take lessons learned in the workplace and apply them to social and political life.
13. 10-Minute Tips to Help You Retire Rich
14. As Tyler Cowen notes, "It’s an Election, Not a Revolution":
Democracy is reasonably good at some things: pushing scoundrels out of office, checking their worst excesses by requiring openness, and simply giving large numbers of people the feeling of having a voice. Democracy is not nearly as good at others: holding politicians accountable for their economic promises or translating the preferences of intellectuals into public policy.
That might sound pessimistic, but it’s not. Many Americans will be living longer, finding new sources of learning and recreation, creating more rewarding jobs, striking up new loves and friendships, and, yes, earning more money. Just don’t expect most of these gains to come out of the voting booth or, for that matter, Washington.
15. James Antle proposes the Churchill Rule:
I'm proposing a new rule in conservative opinion journalism: Nobody gets to be compared to Churchill -- or Reagan, or Lincoln, or Jefferson, or whomever -- until they have actually led the country or otherwise had the opportunity to perform Churchill-like tasks.
16. NPR on Mike Huckabee's rhetoric and Biblical (il)literacy:
Like every person we stopped, Teutonico and Pettit were raised in Christian households and had attended Sunday school. But Boston University professor Stephen Prothero says they're not alone in being mystified by Huckabee's rhetoric.
"Half of Americans can't name any of the four Gospels, and that includes the Christians," Prothero says. "And half don't know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Those are much easier questions than things like, you know, 'What's the loaves and the fishes story?'"
Prothero, who wrote the book Religious Literacy, says Huckabee may think he's scoring points with his base.
"You could imagine that … this is his secret code way that he could speak to evangelicals without alienating more secular people," Prothero says. "But the faulty part of that strategy is the evangelicals don't even necessarily know these stories."
(HT: Stand to Reason)
17. Ten things that won't change (no matter who gets elected) (HT: Kottke.org)
18. Cal Thomas on Redefining Conservatism:
Conservatives also need to do a better job of storytelling. They should celebrate people who have overcome poverty and hopelessness as examples to others. It is not enough for conservatives to advocate for lower taxes and smaller government if the purpose is for Americans to acquire more money and material goods Americans already have so much they are renting storage units in which to place the overflow. Imagine the economic - even spiritual - revival that might occur if conservatives "adopted" one person or family and made it their goal to help them improve their lives. There are few thrills greater than seeing a life transformed in which you have played a part.
(HT: Crunchy Con)
19. On NPR, David M. Schwartz answers the question, How Much Is a Trillion?
The 2009 budget proposed this week by President Bush weighs in at $3.1 trillion. But just how large is a trillion, anyway?
One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 — 10 to the 12th power, or a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand. To put things in perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion.
$1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States. A trillion barrels of oil would — at current consumption levels — fuel the world for about 33 years.
20. New York City stores begin taking euros:
In the latest example that the U.S. dollar just ain't what it used to be, some shops in New York City have begun accepting euros and other foreign currency as payment for merchandise.
"We had decided that money is money and we'll take it and just do the exchange whenever we can with our bank," Robert Chu, owner of East Village Wines, told Reuters television.
(HT: Freakonomics blog)
21. Young voters influenced by negative political ads, says study
In the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, an important field study of registered voters aged 18-23 reveals that negative “attack” ads provoke more voter migration than positive ads. Researchers from Notre Dame and the University of Texas at Dallas used real advertisements from the 2004 presidential election to show that, although negative political ads are explicitly disliked, they have a powerful impact on voters’ mindsets that positive ads do not – and the potential to change preference and behavior in ways that benefit the advertiser.
About 77 percent of college-educated 18-24 year olds who were registered cast a vote in the 2004 presidential election, compared to 64 percent of registered voters as a whole. In this presidential election, young voters may have even more of an impact.
22. Leo Babauta's list of "20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life
23. When people feel powerful, they ignore new opinions, study finds
Don’t bother trying to persuade your boss of a new idea while he’s feeling the power of his position – new research suggests he’s not listening to you. “Powerful people have confidence in what they are thinking. Whether their thoughts are positive or negative toward an idea, that position is going to be hard to change,” said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
The best way to get leaders to consider new ideas is to put them in a situation where they don’t feel as powerful, the research suggests. “If you temporarily make a powerful person feel less powerful, you have a better chance of getting them to pay attention,” said Pablo Briñol, lead author of the study and a social psychologist at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. Briñol is a former postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State.
24. How to uncook an egg:
[French chemist Hervé This] explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to 'uncook' the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
(HT: Kottke.org)
25. LOLCat LOLBaboon of the Week
27. On "Christian Ramadan" (Part I) -- According to The Daily Telegraph, " Dutch Catholics have re-branded the Lent fast as the "Christian Ramadan" in an attempt to appeal to young people who are more likely to know about Islam than Christianity."
28. On "Christian Ramadan" (Part II) -- James M. Kushiner of Mere Comments writes, " In Holland, some have rebranded Lent as a "Christian Ramadan." Because Ramadan is more familiar to the youth, you see. And who's fault is that? While we're it, isn't canon law simply 'Christian sharia'? And a church building a 'Christiain mosque'? The Bible a 'Christian Koran'?"
29. Identical twins not as identical as believed -- Contrary to our previous beliefs, identical twins are not genetically identical. This surprising finding is presented by American, Swedish, and Dutch scientists in a study being published today in the prestigious journal American Journal of Human Genetics. The finding may be of great significance for research on hereditary diseases and for the development of new diagnostic methods.
30. Tyler Cowen on the postponement of sleep:
If you get up late in the morning on weekends, you must think sleep is very valuable. And if sleep is very valuable, that means we should go to bed early. Because if you go to bed early, you always have the option of sleeping later -- that is sleeping more -- and getting even more sleep than if you had gone to bed late. (You can't just shift your sleep into any hours block you want, given the coordination issues.) And if sleep is very valuable, the option to sleep more must be valuable as well. Therefore it's time to go to bed. Now. Early.
31. No Easy Answers In Evolution Of Human Language -- The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.
32. 'Hotties' Not So Hot When You're In Love, Online Dating Researchers Find -- In an experiment with college students in long-term relationships, researchers at UCLA and the online dating service eHarmony found that asking coeds to reflect on the love they felt for their boyfriends or girlfriends blunted the appeal of especially attractive members of the opposite sex.
33. Atonement in the ER
As Michelle McGinty says, "What an amazing scene! I can't believe this was on a TV show. It really demonstrates the emptiness of the rhetoric of liberal theology when you need to know if you can ever find forgiveness for your sins. What can a chaplain, who believes in a Christ who was never resurrected, really say about forgiveness and atonement?"
1. Ezra Klein on bookshelves:
Bookshelves are not for displaying books you've read -- those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I'm pretty sure that's what a bookshelf is there to prove. The reading of those books is entirely incidental.
(HT: Postmodern Conservative)
2. The Punctuation of Political Power
3. Rod Dreher says what child-men need is some tradition:
Today's child-men have been formed by a culture that has lost – or, rather, thrown away – a relatively fixed standard of manhood. It used to be that virtue was the measure of a man. Was a man just? Was he brave (and not necessarily in terms of physical courage)? Was he honorable in his dealings with those weaker than he? Did he respect women? Did he believe in something higher than himself? Did he submit to the concepts of duty and respect?
It's not that all men, or even most, lived by this general code. It's that they recognized that they would be judged by it, and judged themselves by it. That's mostly gone, replaced by a therapeutic model in which the autonomous self is its own judge, and personal satisfaction is the measure of a life well lived.
4. N.T. Wright says that many Christians are wrong about heaven being an eternal, ethereal existence:
There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.
Indeed, it is surprising that even many Biblically literate Christians seem not to be aware of this truth. (HT: The Christian Mind)
5. Twins Save Mom's Life, Kick Loose Deadly Tumor From Mom's Cervix While Still in Womb
Shortly after becoming pregnant, Stepney of Cheam in South-West London was taken to the hospital after suffering what was believed to be a miscarriage. Soon doctors realized she was still pregnant, but had developed life-threatening cervical cancer. Stepney declined to have an abortion and doctors at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London agreed to give her reduced chemotherapy in the hope of stopping the cancer spreading during the pregnancy.
But it wasn't the chemo that ultimately saved Stepney. "I couldn't believe it when the doctors told me that the babies had dislodged the tumor," she said. "I'd felt them kicking, but I didn't realize just how important their kicking would turn out to be. I owe my life to my girls, and that's why I could have never agreed with a termination."
(HT: Reformed Chicks Blabbing)
6. Quote of the Week: "Disparate peoples can coexist in three ways: in isolation, under hegemony, or at war. In the absence of hegemony, peaceful intercourse is an elusive ideal." -- Arnold Kling
7. Can you spot the difference between the work of the minimalist artist Donald Judd and mass-produced furniture? Take this quiz to find out. (HT: Very Short List)
8. 5 Reasons Why the Emerging Church is Now Receding
The Emerging Church is about contextualization and practice. How do we contextualize the gospel for a postmodern world?
Unfortunately, some Emerging Churches look like the continuation of the Seeker movement, even as they decry the Seeker-focused mindset. Incense, candles, icons. These aspects of worship might be helpful for ministry to postmodernists somewhere. They would look silly in rural Tennessee. Contextualization does not always look the same, something the Emerging Church conversation affirms in theory, but often ignores in practice.
9. Fred Sanders on the Top Twelve Theology Books of Christian History.
10. Eric Weiner of the Washington Post on why Republicans are happier than Democrats:
A 2006 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of Republicans describe themselves as "very happy," compared with only 30 percent of Democrats (and 29 percent of independents). This is a sizable gap and a remarkably consistent one, too. Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, began asking about happiness in 1972….
Basically, Republicans have in spades all the things that combine to make us happy. Church attendance is particularly crucial. People who attend religious services regularly are more likely to report being "very happy" than those who don't -- 43 percent vs. 26 percent (a happiness boost, by the way, that cuts across all the major religious denominations). In addition, Republicans are more likely to be married than Democrats, and married people are happier than singles….
If this isn't depressing enough for liberals, it turns out that some of their own pet policies are to blame for their unhappiness. Once in power, Democrats tend to focus on issues that, according to the science of happiness, have little effect on our contentment -- income equality, for instance, and racial diversity. Neither is linked to greater happiness. Countries with large disparities between rich and poor are no less happy than more egalitarian ones, studies have found. And the happiest countries in the world tend to be homogenous ones, such as Denmark and Iceland, not the ethnic melting pots that liberals celebrate.
11. On Exxon's record-setting tax bill:
[J]ust one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers, which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% is only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion), and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes).
(HT: Instapundit)
12. Why are textbooks so expensive?
Textbook prices have been rising rapidly in recent decades, increasing at more than 2.5 times the rate of inflation from 1986 to 2004, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Publishers can get away with these shenanigans because there’s a fundamental disconnect in the textbook marketplace: The people paying for the books (the students) are not the ones choosing them (the teachers).
(HT: Poliblog)
13. 10 Disasters that could end it all at any given second. (HT: The Presurfer)
14. James Joyner notes that being ex-president is more lucrative than it used to be:
Half a century ago, Congress instituted pensions for former presidents because Harry Truman was leaving office with no visible means of support aside from a small Army pension. Now, Clinton can make more for a single speech than he did any year he was president.
15. Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. Example: Yale -- Although Yale has a good law school, Yale itself can feel more like a retirement community for geniuses than a stimulating university: The great Yale faculty members get tenure there decades after doing their brilliant work elsewhere. (HT: The Presurfer)
16. Some economists are rethinking free trade:
[S]upport of free trade by the academic Establishment is a big reason why Presidents, be they Democrat or Republican, have for years pursued a free-trade agenda. The experts they consult have always told them that free trade was the best route to ever higher living standards.
But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We're not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can't explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more is done to help those who are losing out. "Previously, you just had extremists making extravagant claims against trade," says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Now there are broader questions being raised that would not have been asked 10 or 15 years ago."
17. Why Doing Sprints is Great for Your Health
18. Walter Reich on terrorism and the poverty myth:
The belief that poverty is a root cause of Islamist terrorism has been thoroughly discredited. Numerous studies of terrorism have debunked the notion. Islamist terrorists themselves, as well as those who live among them and know them well, have repeatedly attributed Islamist terrorism primarily to religious and ideological motivations and to the logic that—against America and the West—terrorism is used because it works. As Abdel Aziz Rantisi—a Hamas leader until he was assassinated by the Israelis—said of suicide bombing, “It is the most effective strategy for us. For us it is the same as their F-16.”…
It turns out that members of Islamist terrorist ¬groups—¬Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.—tend to be from relatively privileged back¬grounds. “As a group,” Krueger notes, “terrorists are better educated and from wealthier families than the typical person in the same age group of the societies from which they originate.” For example, one study compared 48 Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad with 18,803 fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and found that the bombers were less than half as likely as the general population to come from families below the poverty line, and that “almost 60 percent of the suicide bombers had more than a high school degree, compared to less than 15 percent of the general population."
19. Time Waster of the Week: dragTheDot (HT: Neatorama)
20. Fast Driving May Lead to More Stock Trading:
If you get speeding tickets, watch out: The chances are good that you will also engage in possibly dangerous investing behavior, too. That is the implication of a new study that found that individuals who receive more speeding tickets tend to churn their portfolios...
They found that, other things being equal, an investor’s portfolio turnover rate rose 11 percent after each additional speeding ticket he received.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
21. Why paper cuts hurt so much. (HT: Instapundit)
22. Quarter of Brits think Churchill was myth:
Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.
The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth. And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist. Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself. Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi and Battle of Waterloo victor the Duke of Wellington also appeared in the top 10 of people thought to be myths.
Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Holmes actually existed; 33 percent thought the same of W. E. Johns’ fictional pilot and adventurer Biggles.
(HT: Outside the Beltway)
23. Tim Stafford on This Samaritan Life:
The problem is not that my religion is strange. The problem is that my religion is familiar. Like Samaritans and Jews, Christians and non-Christians have a partly shared worldview (our Western traditions, which include the Bible), a shared point of origin (Christendom), and well-defined points of contention (the exclusivity of Christ). We are familiar with what each other believes. We're suspicious of one another. So we start off with a grudge.
24. Bad times makes feminine woman more attractive:
Current events, it now appears, shape sex appeal. According to a recent theory in psychology, individuals react defensively when the world around them (the "system") is threatened. This defensiveness generally prompts them to embrace the status quo, along with any of its associated stereotypes. In a new test of the theory, researchers found that men who read one article conveying pessimism about their country became significantly more interested in traditionally feminine women - women who were portrayed in profiles as "vulnerable, pure, and ideal for making men feel complete."
25. LOLCat LOL Owl of the Week
26. Philosopher Dennis Dutton on astrology:
Astrology, to cite but one example, is frequently cast in the role of an outmoded competitor to modern astronomy. This is a misunderstanding of the function that astrology plays in people’s lives. Astronomy is about planets, stars, and galaxies; astrology, however, is about me, and the special place I have in the grand cosmic scheme. It explains my unique personality, my special hopes and desires. From astronomy I learn that I am but an insignificant creature in some minor corner of the universe; astrology tells me I am someone unique and important. In this respect, astrology does not function as an alternative to scientific astronomy, but as a rival to the personal support provided by religion.
(HT: Siris)
27. Foreign languages easier to learn when they're sung rather than spoken -- Daniele Schon and colleagues have completed a study showing that hearing foreign words sung can help with this segmenting process - a finding that has obvious practical implications for learning new languages.
28. New Thoughts On Language Acquisition: Toddlers As Data Miners -- Researchers are studying a ground-breaking theory that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining. Their theory, which they have explored with 12- and 14-month-olds, takes a radically different approach to the accepted view that young children learn words one at a time -- something they do remarkably well by the age of 2 but not so well before that.
29. Sprinters should kick-off with their right foot -- All sprinters should start with their right foot in the rear kick-off position on the starting block. Doing so will give them an advantage of about 80ms compared with starting with their left foot in that position. That's according to Adam Eikenberry and colleagues who say the effect of foot position on starting time has to do with differences in the workings of the left and right brain hemispheres.
30. Big Mac: The Whole World On Your Plate -- A burger and fries may be the quintessential North American meal but it can also be viewed as the perfect example of humanity's increasingly varied diet, according to researchers who have conducted a unique study of the plants used around the world for food.
31. Tobacco Could Kill One Billion By 2100, WHO Report Warns -- In a new report which presents the first comprehensive analysis of global tobacco use and control efforts, WHO finds that only 5% of the world’s population live in countries that fully protect their population with any one of the key measures that reduce smoking rates. The report also reveals that governments around the world collect 500 times more money in tobacco taxes each year than they spend on anti-tobacco efforts.
32. North Korea Remains No. 1 Persecutor Of Christians:
This year's No. 1 spot on Open Doors' 2008 World Watch List is no stranger: North Korea has now topped the list for six years in a row.
There is no other country in the world where Christians are being persecuted in such a horrible and relentless way. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia holds a solid No. 2 place, followed closely by Iran. Maldives is No. 4.
33. A useful explanation of the Laffer Curve
(HT: RedState)