Recently in Thirty Three Things Category

1. Jennifer Roback Morse on Feminism: An attack on the human body

...[F]eminists don't view gender differentiation as a biological reality to which sensible people must adapt. Sex differences are a cosmic injustice. No demand for social change is too extreme in the service of wiping out these differences. This is great if you happen to be a radical, intent on justifying revolutionary social changes. But if you are a normal person, living in a normal body, this ideology is more than a nuisance. We have painted ourselves into a corner. Under feminist tutelage, we have insisted that women change their fertility in order to accommodate the labor market. We have insisted on the right to raise our children alone, and to spend larger and larger portions of our lives alone.

2. Harvard research reveals the prejudices of babies

One area into which Spelke's team would like to delve deeper is the origins of bigotry in human beings. In the case of skin colour, newborns respond to individuals of all races equally. By three months, however, a baby from a Caucasian household will prefer to gaze at a white face, and a black baby at an African American face. By the age of two or three, they are drawn to their own gender, too. 'There are some very intriguing parallels between the patterns of social preference we find in infants and what seems to go on in adults,' Spelke says.

(HT: kottke.org)

3. Ilkka Kokkarinen on obesity and the laws of physics

There are quite a few of fat people out there who claim, in all apparent seriousness, that food consumption has no causal relationship to their weight and that they maintain their bulk by eating maybe only 1,500 kcal/day. However, none of these people has ever been able to do this under controlled conditions where they can't sneak in snacks, such as this prison unfortunately seems to be compared to the outside world that is abundant with food. And of course doing so would be an instant Nobel prize in both physics and medicine (and Randi prize, and what else) for establishing that a human body is able to generate energy out of thin air, so I'm pretty confident to be that none of these guys will ever do it. Physics is not everything, but it does set absolute constraints and lower bounds to everything else.

(HT: The Buck Stops Here)

4. NYT: Appeasing the Gods, With Insurance

We buy insurance not just for peace of mind or to protect ourselves financially, but because we share the ancient Greeks' instinct for appeasing the gods.

We may not slaughter animals anymore to ward off a plague, but we think buying health insurance will keep us from getting sick. Our brains may understand meteorology, but in our guts we still think that not carrying an umbrella will make it rain, a belief that was demonstrated in experiments by Jane Risen of the University of Chicago and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell.

(HT: EconLog)

5. Reality TV's Most Memorable Christians (HT: Christ and Pop Culture)

6. Future Fireman

My new favorite commercial.

7. "I See Dead People's Books," a catalogue of the libraries of 33 deceased luminaries, including Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, and Tupac Shakur. (HT: VSL)

8. Pew Survey: Religion Ranks Above Wealth

Who says Americans worship at the feet of the almighty dollar? Not the American public. Only 13% of adults say it's "very important" for them to be wealthy, ranking this personal priority far behind six others measured in a new survey by the Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends project.

But don't get Americans wrong - a majority certainly wouldn't mind being rich. According to the survey, another 43% of adults say being wealthy is "somewhat important" to them, while about the same proportion say it's "not too important" (33%) or "not important at all" (10%).

9. Making Meaning in a Meaningless World: Five Ways that Won't Work

10. Religious Bias and Church/State Separation -- An extract from Roger Trigg's 'Religion in Public Life: Must Faith Be Privatized?'

1. David Kuo on God and suffering:

I was in Uganda last month. While there I saw, if not hell, some of its suburbs. The stories are familiar to us all -- dying children, slums beyond description, systemic brokenness that robs hope. So many of those questions popped into my head -- How could God allow this sort of thing? What kind of god could allow children to live like this.

It isn't a new question for me or for any of us. It is among the world's oldest questions I suspect. But as I thought about it something clicked. God isn't allowing this suffering. I am. You are. We are.

I will focus on Africa's suffering. Africa finds itself where it does today because of a billion or more decisions that people made-- individual decisions. A decision not to invest here. A decision to buy a slave there. A decision to drive an unfair trade deal here. A decision to pay diamond miners pennies. Billions and billions of decisions like this have been made over the centuries. The result? Africa today.

Is that God's fault?

I think not. Because at every moment those decisions were made God was whispering for people to do the right thing, the just thing, the merciful thing. But we chose not to listen.

God has done his job. We haven't done ours.

2. Clay Shirky on sitcoms and cognitive surplus:

So how big is that [cognitive] surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

3. Adam Sternbergh says that shoes are bad for your feet:

Well, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.

Look, it's not your fault. It's your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don't just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet--your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet--are getting trounced in a war that's been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet--.

Admittedly, there's something counterintuitive about the idea that less padding on your foot equals less shock on your body. But that's only if we continue to think of our feet as lifeless blocks of flesh that hold us upright. The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we're walking on.

But (you might say) if you walk or run with no padding, it's murder on your heels--which is precisely the point. Your heels hurt when you walk that way because you're not supposed to walk that way. Wrapping your heels in padding so they don't hurt is like stuffing a gag in someone's mouth so they'll stop screaming--you're basically telling your heels to shut up.

(HT: BoingBoing)

4. Philosopher Alexander Pruss has an argument against abortion. (HT: Fides Quaerens Intellectum)

5. William Murchison refutes the popular myth that American Christianity in the 1950s was an idyllic time for the faithful:

The church of the fifties had generally identified itself with civic purposes such as patriotism and moral respectability, along with national recuperation and prosperity. As those purposes began to wear thin, like a good-luck coin fingered too long in the pants pocket, could one doubt that a broad search for new purposes would commence?

6. Quote of the Week: "Gifted writers make each sentence propel readers to the next. Another strategy is to just finish before readers have time to quit." -- Abraham Piper

7. Dave Cassel made $900 writing 300 reviews for Helium's Reward-a-Thon:

I'd originally begun including biographical information about the actors' lives just to pad things out. But now I was really beginning to feel for them....Maybe I was beginning to wonder if it all meant something, when taken as a collection -- a secret history of the 20th century, as seen by me....They were all snapshots of someone's life, and every moment I'd spent watching it represented a moment in their life that they'd spent creating it.

(HT: Waxy)

8. How to Write Fascinating Content That Readers Will Remember

9. How to Leave the Perfect Voicemail

10. Dennis Prager: Internet Anonymity Is as Destructive as Internet Porn

1. n + 1 on Dating:

Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it's an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner. Keep Looking, says dating. You're Not Done Yet. What About That One? And That One? Dating, like the tyrant, seeks perfection (within a certain price range). Whereas the heart, like the eye, can only cling to imperfections: her funny stride, and the way her voice breaks, child-like, on the phone. And so the dater, self-baffling, seeks what the heart cannot understand.

We must stop dating. But we can't. Because the only way to stop dating would be to date more, and more efficiently, to become more adept at spotting, on the first date, those things that on the fifth or fifteenth date are going to become a problem. Of course that only makes it worse--by that standard, even Abelard and Heloise wouldn't have made it. The other option is to change yourself. But you'd have done that by now, if you could.

The only way to stop dating is to fall in love. But how, under conditions of dating, would this be possible?

(HT: The American Scene)

2. J.P. Moreland on the Argument from Consciousness:

If we limit our options to theism and naturalism, it is hard to see how finite consciousness could result from the rearrangement of brute matter; it is easier to see how a Conscious Being could produce finite consciousness since, according to theism, the First Being is Himself conscious. Thus, the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning.

To put the point differently, in the beginning there were either particles or Reason. If you start with particles and just rearrange them according to physical law, you won't get consciousness. If you start with Reason, you already have consciousness.

(HT: Fides Quaerens Intellectum)

3. The Wilson Quarterly on Joke Morality:

It's perfectly OK to tell lawyer jokes, musician jokes, or almost any joke about a rich guy. But jokes about race, gender, eth­nicity, religion, sexual orien­tation, or physical or cognitive ability are considered morally offensive. ­Why?

Philosophers have advanced two theories. "Cognitivists" say that jokes made at the expense of minority groups carry the suggestion that the jokester, deep down, believes them. "Consequentialists" argue that certain jests are morally suspect because they cause harm, or are likely to. But neither theory adequately explains what's offensive, argues Jeanette Bicknell, a philosopher at Carleton University, in Ottawa. It is quite possible, she suggests, to tell a joke without embracing it as a ­truth--­nobody believes that an elephant actually walked into a ­bar--­but we suspend disbelief for the sake of a laugh. And almost any joke might cause harm to someone, ­sometime.

4. The Federal Budget Crisis Explained

5. Jonathan Dodson offers six ways to redemptively engage culture:

1. Engage culture prayerfully. I'm not suggesting that we should actually bow our heads and recite a prayer before reading a newspaper or book, watching TV or a movie, or going shopping, though that certainly wouldn't hurt. Instead, we are to live life and engage culture in a spirit of dependence upon God; we are to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17). We should approach culture just as we should approach all things, prayerfully.

6. Quote of the Week: "Every macroeconomic pronouncement should be accompanied by a disclaimer that says, 'This is just my opinion. We don't really know.'" -- economist Arnold Kling

7. How to Turn Your iPod Touch into an iPhone

8. Metacritic.com compiled a list of the 200 lowest-scoring films in their database database with a minimum of seven reviews. Although I watch a lot of movies, I had to go down to #83 Staying Alive (1983) before I got to a film that I had watched (a) in a theater and (b) all the way to the end. (HT: Kyle Smith)

9. Justice Scalia Delivers a "Supreme Court Smackdown" to Justice Stevens

Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of JUSTICE STEVENS' experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress--who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment--is dismissed as "the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process." Ante, at 8. The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. Ante, at 10, n. 13. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a "thirst for vengeance." Ante, at 11. It is JUSTICE STEVENS' experience that reigns over all.

10. Carl Trueman on Zen Calvinism (via Gene Veith):

1. 110 best books: The perfect library

2. When Christians think about themselves, a different pattern of activity is observed in their brains compared with when non-religious people think about themselves. From the abstract of the paper Neural consequences of religious belief on self-referential processing:

Christianity strongly encourages its believers to surrender to God and to judge the self from God's perspective. We used functional MRI to assess whether this religious belief is associated with neural correlates of self-referential processing distinct from that of non-religious people. Non-religious and Christian participants were scanned while performing tasks of personal-trait judgments regarding the self or public persons....our findings suggest that Christian beliefs result in weakened neural coding of stimulus self-relatedness but enhanced neural activity underlying evaluative processes applied to self-referential stimuli.

(HT: BPS Research Digest)

3. Michael McManus, coauthor of Living Together: Myths, Risks & Answers, on cohabitation:

Couples who live together are gambling and losing in 85 percent of the cases. Many believe the myth that they are in a "trial marriage." Actually it is more like a "trial divorce," in which more than eight out of ten couples will break up either before the wedding or afterwards in divorce. First, about 45 percent of those who begin cohabiting do not marry. Those who undergo "premarital divorce" often discover it is as painful as the real thing. Another 5-10 percent continue living together and do not marry. These two trends are the major reason the marriage rate has plunged 50 percent since 1970. Couples who cohabit are likely to find that it is a paltry substitute for the real thing, marriage.

4. Jared Bridges wonders "Why is drive-thru technology still in beta?

As I made my way through the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru today, it dawned on me that even though the technological advancements of our country has given us such wonders as i-Phones, artificial hearts, and Tang, we still haven't developed a drive-thru intercom system that outputs ungarbled speech.

5. As fans of Star Trek will tell you, anyone wearing a red shirt and beaming down to a planet with Captain Kirk is probably going to die. But Matt Bailey has actually done some in-depth analysis of the "Red Shirt Phenomenon":

* Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
* Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
* Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
* Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.

(HT: Danger Room)

6. Quote of the Week: "As we think seriously about contextualizing the message of the Bible, let's remember that we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures they already have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important..." -- John Piper

7. Govit, a new social network for policy wonks, lets you read, compare, and vote on all of the important legislation facing Congress. (HT: GOOD magazine)

8. 14 Old Testament Ways to Get a Wife

9. Using TiVo fast forwards to predict American Idol winners:

TiVo Inc. announced today a prediction of the "American Idol" contestant most likely to be voted off the show in this week's eliminations. For past four weeks, TiVo has been using its second-by-second audience measurement to determine which performers had the highest and lowest viewership. It turns out, this information, especially among viewers who are watching on a timeshifted basis, is highly predictive of which contestant will be voted off. Viewers tend to rewind and watch their favorite performances multiple times, while fast-forwarding through the ones they don't like. These viewing preferences correlate with voting patterns (for each week TiVo has measured).

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

10. My friend Randy Thomas on Grace and Gay Men:

1. Is it permissible for God to kill people?

Many people have difficulty with God's acts in the Bible because God seems to be committing or commanding immoral acts (e.g., when God commands the Israelites to wipe out certain people-groups, including children). I think that many of these charges can be alleviated if some good justification can be given for the claim that it is morally permissible for God to kill people as he does in the Bible.

One step towards arguing for the claim that it is morally permissible for God to kill people is to argue that people do not have the right not to be killed by God. I may have the right that you not kill me, and vice versa, but perhaps there are different considerations with God. The difference is that while others don't own my body, God may own my body.

(HT: Fides Quaerens Intellectum)

2. Reihan Salam on Rickrolling and Racial Transcendence:

Rick Astley, known for his 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," has again become an object of amusement and fascination as Internet pranksters deceptively deploy links to his most celebrated song's groundbreaking music video.

Apparently there's something very, very funny about Rick Astley, judging by the endurance of "rickrolling."...

The profound illogic of this video defies description. Yet one suspects there's more to it. As an exemplar of "blue-eyed soul," Astley could be condemned for appropriating a primarily black form of musical expression. But not only was he not condemned - he was embraced by music-lovers of all colors, not least the acrobatic bartender featured in the music video itself. The earnestness and lack of self-consciousness contrasts with the paralyzing cynicism of our own time. What we're seeing is the promise of a post-racial future, in which color distinctions melt away in the white heat (so to speak) of Astley's soulful vocals.

Could it be that Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the soundtrack for the Age of Obama?

3. Omnibus Sanctis: Vampires Are People Too:

I recently read a review of Anne Rice's new book, "The Road to Cana." But more importantly I found out that she is not going to publish another vampire story which she initially said she was willing to write.

I have to admit that I am indeed saddened. Of course I respect the consecration of her work to Christ. And I commend her on striving to follow God's will. I just wish that it included a Catholic vampire story. (But not my will...)

She wants to use her writing as a tool for Evangelism. Well, there is no other genre of literature better equipped for Evangelism than the vampire story. It has only been recently that vampires have suffered from the modern preoccupation of calling what is evil, good and what is good, evil. And do not mistake something which is intrinsically evil as something intrinsically other. Vampires are us, what we become (monsters) when we turn our backs to God and give ourselves over to unbridled passions, our lusts and selfishness, our nihilism. In this way vampire stories are at their core Catholic. Built into the conventions of the genre is Catholic theology; light/darkness, blood/life, life/sacrifice, undeath/damnation, soul/immortality, instinct/vice, sin/slavery, the sacramentals (holy water, crucifixes, rosaries, etc...).

4. Kyle Smith on Errol Morris and the Smoking Gun of Abu Ghraib

Did you know the Iraqi prisoner standing on the box in the famous Abu Ghraib photo didn't really believe he was going to be electrocuted, that he laughed at his captors' silly threats, that he was only on the box 10 or 15 minutes, and that he later palled around with some of the soldiers who were later castigated for their "torture" of prisoners? Errol Morris's Abu Ghraib documentary "Standard Operating Procedure," which casts the enlisted soldiers convicted of abuse in a sympathetic light, searches for a higher power to blame for their acts-but doesn't find one.

5. Car patrol vs. foot patrol -- From Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District:

Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol - the cornerstone of urban policing - has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, "The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime."

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

6. Jim Manzi relates his experiences as a "theoretical math major at MIT and a card counter":

My experience was that it was very easy to stay under the radar of casinos if you didn't feel the need to do any of that. Just play solo at the quarter tables, never spike your bet above 5:1, and play no more than one hour at casino before you move on to the next one. There are about 100 casinos in Vegas, so you can play ten hours per day every other weekend and only visit a given casino once every two or three months (for an hour each time). No pit boss will know who you are or care what you're doing because you're so far down in the noise. You can make a lot of money this way. Of course, nobody will ever know that you are taking them, and the emotional satisfaction arises from walking into this multi-billion dollar enterprise and walking out with their money because you're smarter and more disciplined than they are. In a bizarre way, you succeed through classical bourgeois virtues: self-discipline, frugality, ego control and steady work.

Once you realize all this, of course, you figure out that you can make a lot more money in that giant casino called Wall Street.

7. John Mark Reynolds on moderation, chastity, and charity:

The man who can keep a secret and refuse to turn every personal event into a blog post and the woman who will not write all she knows on an easily forwarded email are going to be precious indeed to friends and to society. The man who is no Lancelot, so interesting until commonplace, will be as nothing next to his son, the Galahad. The Galahad has nothing to fear and nothing to hide due to the mystery of his chastity and charity.

Privacy, quietness of mind, will only be possible where a man is chaste, charitable, and humble. A chaste man has learned humility through countless failures. He knows that the libertine, especially the pathetic new media rake who declines by himself using a public medium, has no privacy. There is no secret to being base. Falling down is easy to do... and in an age without secrets we now know that all sin is alike.

8. My friends at The Young Adults team at Focus on the Family recently launched "The Boundless Show," the audio companion to the already popular Boundless webzine and Boundless Line blog for singles and young adults. The first ten episodes are now available online. You can listen to the show on either iTunes (just do a search for "Boundless Show" from within iTunes) or in the podcast section of their blog.

9. Exactly how much housework does a husband create?

Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women, according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families.

For men, the picture is very different: A wife saves men from about an hour of housework a week.

The findings are part of a detailed study of housework trends, based on 2005 time-diary data from the federally-funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics, conducted since 1968 at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

10. Grim's Hall on social harmony and violence:

1. Jerry Bower on how the "last week of [Jesus'] life was driven by clashes pertaining to wealth and poverty - freedom and tyranny."

Rome needed money to buy off the urban mob, and Herod needed Rome to keep down the Palestinian rabble. And so when the people, innocents at home, came to Jerusalem to make their offerings to God, they were met at each step in the process of religious devotion with another checkpoint at which tolls were extracted. The journey to Jerusalem often meant crossing a Roman checkpoint - ka-ching! Since the trip was long and hard on the animals, it was better to travel light and buy the sacrifices in Jerusalem - ka-ching! You can't use pagan Roman coins for that sort of thing, of course, so off to the money changers - ka-ching again. Tithes, offerings, sacrifices, festivals, Rome got her cut - ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. In fact, that's the only reason there even was a temple or a King Herod. Rome would have long ago plundered it and killed him, except you don't kill the goose who lays the golden eggs.

If the temple was the bridge between heaven and earth, Herod was the troll who lived under the bridge. Every pilgrim was forced to pay the toll. That's what kept Herod in power, no ka-ching, no king. Ordinary Jews hated the regime, and the anger was boiling over, but Herod didn't care what they thought; he had Rome on his side.

Into this world steps the young son of a Galilean entrepreneur.

2. Ty Burr, of the Boston Globe, on the cultural force of media bad girls:

Bringing up children in 21st-century America is difficult enough, given a pop culture that constantly promotes a vulgar, empty celebration of self. But do some of our starlets have to work so hard at it? The Spears sisters, Britney and Jamie Lynn, have mutated from wholesome pop tarts to whacked-out baby factories. Lindsay Lohan acts out her rebellion against the entire culture on the evening news. Paris Hilton - well, Paris Hilton. That's all you need to say.

As a parent of two girls, age 11 and 13 at this writing, I should probably be wringing my hands. I'm not, because when I listen to my daughters and their friends, I hear a moral code being forged upon the paparazzi traumas of the famous and unfortunate. There are levels of judgment going on here, moral siftings and weighings. Children are both more and less innocent than adults take them for, and they process the role models our culture hands them in complex ways.

The new bad girls, it's clear, are important figures in the culture. But they don't necessarily teach young girls how to behave - just as likely, they're teaching them how not to behave. They have become anti-role models.

3. Daniel Gross on the "dysfunctional class threatening American values":

For decades, social scientists, policy wonks, and politicians have studied and debated what's come to be known as the "culture of poverty." The consensus: A group of Americans is set apart from the mainstream by geography, class, and income. Its members adhere to norms that don't apply to the rest of society and engage in self-destructive behavior that imposes significant costs on the nation at large. The culture of poverty has made for potent politics (remember Ronald Reagan's fictitious welfare queen?) and spawned best-selling polemics from the right (Charles Murray) to the left (Jonathan Kozol).

We don't hear as much about the culture of poverty these days. Perhaps it's because the market turmoil is making us all feel a little poorer. Or perhaps it's because a highly visible group is now exhibiting all the outward appearances of the underclass: the overclass. Forget welfare queens and the culture of poverty. Think Wall Street kings and the culture of affluence.

4. Apple Logo Can Make You 'Think Different'

Whether you are a Mac person or a PC person, even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively, according to recent research from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the University of Waterloo, Canada....

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

5. The Museum of Online Museums

6. Quote of the Week: "Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our own behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense." -- Novelist Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead (HT: IMAGE blog)

7. Andrew Gelman on social class and views of corporations:

I was looking through the Pew surveys and they are just full of fascinating things... Republicans tend to like corporations, with little difference between the views of professional-class and working-class Republicans. For Democrats, though, there's a big gap, with professionals having a generally more negative view, compared to the working class...

- For some corporations (Halliburton, Walmart, Exxon, McDonald's, Pfizer, Coke), the working-class Democrats are much less supportive than the working-class Republicans. For these corporations, there is almost no difference between professional and working-class Republicans. The only exception is Coke, which was viewed much less favorably by professional-class than working-class Republicans.

- For the others (Citibank, GM, Coors, American Express, Target, Starbucks), working-class Democrats had views that were similar to or more favorable than their Republican counterparts. And for these, there was a consistent pattern of much stronger favorability by professional than working-class Republicans.

8. The Healthiest Places for You to Eat Out

9. Candyman meets Pusherman:

With candy sales banned on school campuses, sugar pushers are the latest trend at local schools. Backpacks are filled with Snickers and Twinkees for all sweet tooths willing to pay the price.

"It's created a little underground economy, with businessmen selling everything from a pack of skittles to an energy drink," said Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville.

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

10. From Why We're Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be by DeYoung and Kluck (via One Eternal Day)

1. "Wikihistory" is an intriguing, very brief science fiction short story by Desmond Warzel. As BoingBoing notes, the form is "a series of messages posted to a time-travelers' forum -- it's basically a Wikipedia edit war, where the old hands have to keep on slapping down the noobs for killing Hitler"

International Association of Time Travelers: Members' Forum Subforum: Europe - Twentieth Century - Second World War Page 263

11/15/2104

At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:

Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:

Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:

Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?

Read the rest here.

2. J. Budziszewski on what we lose when we forget what sex is for:

Suppose a young man is more interested in using his lungs to get high by sniffing glue. What would you think of me if I said, "That's interesting--I guess the purpose of my lungs is to oxygenate my blood, but the purpose of his lungs is to get high"? You'd think me a fool, and rightly so. The purpose of the lungs is built into the design of the lungs. He doesn't change that purpose by sniffing glue; he only violates it.

We can ascertain the purposes of the other features of our design in the same way. The purpose of the eyes is to see, the purpose of the heart is to pump blood, the purpose of the thumb is to oppose the fingers so as to grasp, the purpose of the capacity for anger is to protect endangered goods, and so on. If we can ascertain the purpose of all those other powers, there is no reason to think that we cannot ascertain the purpose or purposes of the sexual powers too.

3. In honor of the excellent miniseries on HBO, I give you this attack ad on John Adams:

4. Mark Dever on what evangelism isn't:

Imposition
Probably the most common objection to evangelism today is, "Isn't it wrong to impose our beliefs on others?"

Some people don't practice evangelism because they feel they are imposing on others. And the way evangelism is often done, I can understand the confusion! But when you understand what the Bible presents as evangelism, it's really not a matter of imposing your beliefs.

It's important to understand that the message you are sharing is not merely an opinion but a fact. That's why sharing the gospel can't be called an imposition, any more than a pilot can impose his belief on all his passengers that the runway is here and not there.

Additionally, the truths of the gospel are not yours, in the sense that they uniquely pertain to you or your perspective or experience, or in the sense that you came up with them. When you evangelize, you are not merely saying, "This is how I like to think of God," or "This is how I see it." You're presenting the Christian gospel. You didn't invent it, and you have no authority to alter it.

(HT: One Eternal Day)

5. Malcolm Gladwell's "Disclosure Statement." As Harrison Scott Key notes, "Topics in this lost essay include: how often he gives speeches (a lot), why he sometimes charges a speaking fee and sometimes doesn't (free for charities and academic institutions, usually), how many words The New Yorker expects him to write in a year (40,000 to 50,000), what he thinks about journalistic objectivity (mostly impossible, but still preferable), what party most journalists vote for (surprise!), and why his speechmaking and his financial success as a writer present him with a complicated ethical dilemma."

6. Quote of the Week: "Precautions are always blamed. When they are successful, they are declared to be unnecessary." -- Benjamin Jowett

7. Sports Illustrated has introduced the Vault, a free site within SI.com that contains all the words Sports Illustrated has ever published and many of the images, along with video and other material, in a searchable database. (HT: NYT)

8. WaPo: A list of 209 once-common things that are either obsolete or well on the way: Carbon paper, Wite-Out, Lickable stamps, Printer paper with holes on the sides, Walkmans, Tie tacks, Dial-up, Sound of the modem starting up, Diaper pins, Wall-mounted pencil sharpeners, ... (HT: Cranach)

9. Thomas Berg on why we care about the Founding Fathers:

...[N]ot only judges and lawyers but a lot of Americans seem to care about the Founders' views. Because our nation is built less than others on geographic and ethnic ties and more on a sense of a shared project, the people who started that project - who are seen as its source, or closer to its source, of inspiration - have an extra claim on attention. In contrast to Prof. Eberle, I see this attitude as having "Protestant" overtones, in that Americans look back to the original documents and the generation that produced them - much as evangelical Protestants look back to the scriptures and the first-century church - more than they emphasize an evolving tradition....Of course you can question the analogy between the Christian relevatory generation and the American founding, but for "a nation with the soul of a church" the analogical move isn't that surprising. Even if the analogy is bad, the sense that our national project starts from some founding principles, to which that generation was closest, is very understandable.

10. D.A. Carson on contextualization:

1. David Cameron, head of Britain's Conservative Party, recently gave a great speech on the need for family-friendly policies:

Today I want to talk to you about a simple ambition that I have for our country. It's at the heart of what I believe, and what I believe our country needs. My ambition is to make Britain more family-friendly. To make our country a better place to bring up children. Not just because it's the right thing to do, not just because my family is the most important thing in my life, but because families should be the most important thing in our country's life.

Why? We all know why. Because those kids at the end of the street, causing mayhem, smashing up the bus shelter...we know what the problem is. It goes back to the home, the way they were brought up, the lack of a strong family to teach them that you just don't behave like that. It's families. Those young people who leave school without qualifications, expecting nothing but a life on welfare. We know what the problem is. The problem is they never had that strong family saying: go on, try hard at school, do your homework, make something of your life. Those people in jail, time after time, addicted to drugs and unable to break free of their habit and a life of crime. We know what the problem is. It's families and be clear: there are single parents, divorced parents, widows - all working hard to keep their families together, to keep their children on track. The modern Conservative Party is the party of families, and we need to support them all.

(HT: ConservativeHome's ToryDiary)

2. John Mark Reynolds on longing for love:

Somehow the traditional Christian sexual ethic of Dante and Donne has become confused with repression or being undersexed. Nothing could be further from the truth. If my email box is any indication, libertine sexual rules have not made us happier or better lovers. It has made things worse. It certainly did for me.

Chastity is a positive thing, not the lack of something. It is, I think, the active nourishment of love to prepare it for the appropriate beloved. It is a great gift....

In old movies, making love was about intimacy and might culminate in marriage. Marriage was more, so much more, than the sex act, though it was not less than that. In modern terms, making love is merely a nice way to say the f-word.

3. England's Royal College of Psychiatrists warns abortions can lead to mental illness:

The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends updating abortion information leaflets to include details of the risks of depression. "Consent cannot be informed without the provision of adequate and appropriate information," it says.

Several studies, including research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2006, concluded that abortion in young women might be associated with risks of mental health problems.

4. Future Tech: A wireless neckband that intercepts nerve signals allows you to talk on the phone without emitting a sound.

(HT: Marc Andreessen)

5. Homes made out of airplanes

6. Quote of the Week: "We as Christians can very easily become more concerned about whether other people are loving us, than we are about whether we are loving other people. I know that being and feeling loved are important needs for any human being. That's how we're made. But it's worth noticing, especially in the context of the church, that the Bible's command is to 'love one another,' not "to be loved by one another." The language is active, not passive." -- Greg Gilbert (HT: One Eternal Day)

7. Jared Wilson has some numbers that put the Iraq war in perspective. For example:

Total [U.S. Active Duty Military] Deaths under Reagan 1981-1988 - 19,593
Total Deaths under Bush I 1989-1992 - 6,223
Total Deaths under Clinton 1993-2000 - 7,500
Total Deaths under Bush II 2001-2006 - 8,792

8. Study results released from Ellison Research show the vast majority of Americans (87%) believe in the concept of sin. "Sin" was defined in the research as "something that is almost always considered wrong, particularly from a religious or moral perspective."

The behaviors a majority of all Americans describe as sinful are:

* Adultery 81%
* Racism 74%
* Using "hard" drugs such as cocaine, heroine, meth, LSD, etc. 65%
* Not saying anything if a cashier gives you too much change back 63%
* Having an abortion 56%
* Homosexual activity or sex 52%
* Not reporting some income on your tax returns 52%

9. American Book Review's list of the 100 best last lines from novels. (HT: kottke.org)

10. Doug Smith on How to Complain to God:

1. Doug Groothuis on recovering from fetus fatigue

It appears that millions of evangelicals, especially younger ones, are experiencing fetus fatigue. They are tired of the abortion issue taking center stage; it is time to move on to newer, hipper things--the sort of issues that excite Bono: aid to Africa, the environment, and cool tattoos. Abortion has been legal since they were born; it is the old guard that gets exercised about millions of abortions over the years. So, let's not worry that Barak Obama and Hillary are pro-choice. That is a secondary issue. After all, neither could do that much damage regarding this issue.

Evangelicals (if that word has any meaning), for God's sake, please wake up and remember the acres of tiny corpses you cannot see. Yes, the Christian social vision is holistic. We should endeavor to restore shalom to this beleaguered planet. That includes helping Africa, preserving the environment, and much more. However, the leading domestic moral issue remains the value of helpless human life. Since Roe v. Wade, approximately 50 million unborn humans have been killed through abortion. Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy. A million dead is a statistic." Too many are now Stalinists on abortion. The numbers mean nothing, apparently. The vast majority of these abortions were not done to save the life of the mother, a provision I take to be justified. Things have reached the point where bumper stickers say, "Don't like abortion, don't have one." It is simply a matter of private, subjective taste. But how about this: "Don't like slavery, don't own slaves"? Two human beings are involved in this matter, inescapably. . . .

Evangelicals, for God's sake, please wake up. Remember the least, the last, and the lost: the millions of unborn human beings who hang in the balance (Matthew 25:31-46). No, this is not the only issue, but it is a titanic issue that cannot be ignored. Rouse yourself to recover from fetus fatigue. God is watching.

2. Steven Garber on making peace with proximate justice:

Proximate justice realizes that something is better than nothing. It allows us to make peace with some justice, some mercy, all the while realizing that it will only be in the new heaven and new earth that we find all our longings finally fulfilled, that we will see all of God's demands finally met. It is only then--there we will see all of the conditions for human flourishing finally in place, socially, economically, and politically.

(HT: Common Grounds Online)

3. Is Kyte is this year's Twitter?

...Kyte makes it as easy as possible to capture video with a mobile phone (any mobile phone with the capability) and post it to your own channel on the site. It's got one of the easiest interfaces and processes I've seen. One of the latest innovations by the company, though (launching today, according to VentureBeat), may eventually be what makes it a key player in the space -- the broadcasting of live video from a phone.

4. Ten Reasons I Don't Read Your Blog

5. According to scientists, Wim "The Ice Man" Hof should be dead for doing the following: running a half-marathon in the Arctic Circle in his bare feet, climbing the Everest in his shorts, and diving under the ice at the North Pole.

Normally, when a person is exposed to freezing temperatures for a prolonged period of time, the body goes into survival mode, as its liquids begin to freeze. Frostbite sets in, and in order to save the major organs, the body sacrifices blood flow to the extremities, cutting circulation from the fingers, toes, ears and nose to keep the blood flowing to the organs necessary for survival.

If not treated immediately, the damage to these extremities is irreversible. The other danger is hypothermia, an abnormally low body temperature. At about 90 degrees, body functions start shutting down, and once that starts, you could be dead within minutes.

But Hof stayed in his tomb of ice for one hour and 12 minutes. Then, the ice was poured out of the tank, and Hof emerged, his skin still pink.

"He's not moving, he's not generating heat, he's not dressed for it, and he's immersed in ice water. And water will transmit heat 30 times faster than air. It literally sucks the life right out of you. And yet, despite all those negative factors, Wim Hof was very calm, very comfortable the entire time that he was immersed in that water," Kamler said.

(HT: Neatorama)

6. Quote of the Week: "Christianity and Islam account for almost half the world's population. Amazingly, they remain relatively ignorant of each other's central beliefs." -- Mateen Elass, Understanding the Koran

7. RefTagger is a free web tool that automatically turns all of your Bible references into hyperlinks to the passages at BibleGateway.com. RefTagger can also add an icon that is hyperlinked to the passage in Libronix. So if your website says, "My favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28," RefTagger will turn it into this: "My favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28," or this: "My favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28 [Open in Libronix (if available)] ."

8. Top Ten Grammar Myths

2. You shouldn't split infinitives. Wrong! Nearly all grammarians want to boldly tell you it's OK to split infinitives. An infinitive is a two-word form of a verb. An example is "to tell." In a split infinitive, another word separates the two parts of the verb. "To boldly tell" is a split infinitive because boldly separates to from tell.

(HT: The Presurfer)

9. Giant 'chicken droppings catapult' set up by businessman to protect premises from arsonists:

Every night Joe Weston-Webb loads chicken droppings into a 30ft catapult and primes a cannon that used to fire his wife with a railway sleeper, all in the name of security....

Ex-showman Joe Weston-Webb primes his 30ft Roman catapult with chicken dropping to protect his business from criminals. Mr Weston-Webb, 70, has rigged up Britain's biggest anti-burglar device after being targeted by vandalism, break-ins and even an arson attack.

But police have told him he will be prosecuted if he unleashes the wrath of the 30ft-tall Roman catapult - filled with chicken poo collected from a nearby farm - on any yobs he catches on his property.

What is wrong with the police in Britain? Don't they realize that if poo-flinging catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have poo-flinging catapults? (HT: Neatorama)

10. The Economic and Security Implications of the Artic Meltdown :

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 more clients, 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

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

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.

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