In an article in today's New York Times Magazine, Eric Klinenberg ponders why people don't prepare themselves better for possible disasters. He comes up with two possible explanations that resonated with me:

One major concern I heard was that there are simply too many things to worry about. Participants complained about having to prepare for too many specific disaster possibilities and in turn feeling overwhelmed, if not helpless.

...

[M]any people simply don’t want to live in a culture of preparedness. The notion is off-putting, and downright scary for some, because it seems to place fear and defensiveness at the center of our public and private lives. Careful planning means dwelling on the uncomfortable topics of our own mortality, the vulnerability of our loved ones and the fragility of our planet, and there’s a psychological price to be paid for that.

I live in an area where serious natural disasters are unlikely (or unlikely to be serious), so the only real concerns I have are man-made disasters.

My thinking regarding disasters is as follows: I'm not too worried any disaster that leads to a temporary (let's say three days or shorter) breakdown of social infrastructure (electricity, municipal water, shipping of goods to stores, etc.). We can probably manage one way or another without any particular preparedness. And if there's a disaster that leads to a prolonged breakdown of social infrastructure, then we're all screwed, and no amount of preparedness short of stocking an entire room with food, water, guns and ammo, gasoline, etc., will help us through it.

I'm not saying that I am not preparing for a serious disaster because I don't think it'll happen. On the contrary, I think our social infrastructure is extremely fragile and the likelihood of such a breakdown of society is easier to cause than most people want to believe. It's just that I'm not willing to put the time, effort and money into preparing for it. I just assume that I, along with many people, probably would not survive such a disaster, and given the cost/benefit analysis, I'm okay with that.

This AP article is a mess. In particular, check out this sentence:

Fournier appeared disappointed as left [sic] the capsule and walked to the hanger [sic]. He was hugged by members of his entourage.

Oh, there's also this:

Fournier, 64, had planned to make the attempt Monday, but had to postpone his plans because of weather conditions.

And in case you missed it the first time, later in the article:

Spokeswoman Francine Lecompte-Gittens said Monday's postponement was due to unfavorable weather.

I've studied the German language and Germanic culture for years, but sometimes the intricacies of cultural understanding still allude me.

Last week, I visited my company's R&D office in Linz, Austria, for the first time. Please note that, as far as I know, I'm pretty much the only U.S. employee in the company who speaks fluent German--except the couple of Germans who work in the US offices, of course.

When speaking German, I assumed that all of my fellow software engineering colleagues would address me with the informal 'Du.' That was true with one exception.

Continue reading "Annals of cultural confusion"

The big story in the blog world today is about a Yale art student whose senior thesis involves repeatedly artificially inseminating herself and then aborting. The student's stated goal is to "inspire some sort of discourse."

What I find interesting, though, is that even at ultra-left MetaFilter, almost all of the commenters find this project distasteful, with frequent statements such as this one: "I'm pretty darn 'liberal' when it comes to abortion and all that, but this rubs me the wrong way, though I'm not entirely sure of the reason why."

The discussion went on for a good 80 comments before someone posted something similar to what I've been thinking, which provide a reason for the commenter quoted above:

This art is shocking and provocative but that is not to diminish it. It is not an empty shock to me. It is filled with real and legitimate questions on how abortion and pregnancy works in our society. The way I see it is it is sort of a completly unspoken truce where most Americans don't really like abortion but they get that women generally don't take the decision lightly, they wouldn't get an abortion unless they thought it was really important.

Now in this case a women is getting pregnant and ending the pregnancy for its own sake. The abortion is the point rather than a means to an end (which is vaguely agreed to be having a child later when you can take better care of it) She is asserting and questioning her own right to do this. She is pointing out that this right which is nearly absolute is in a way contingent on the reason behind it. At the same time though, where is the harm? The fetuses were not developed, the body sometimes rejects a fetus. This is a part of life. And what about her feelings, pregnancy is supposed to have a deep bond between the mother and child what is necessary for this to occur? Is this absolute? Is there something wrong when that isn't there? What does she feel about these children, is she a monster for not thinking what we expect?

We have taken a biological reality and built this mythology around it and it might be that the mythology is an important and necessary part of what it is to be human or it might not be, and this art, I think, actually helps us answer this question.

There's your hoped-for discourse right there.

UPDATE: Yale now says that this project never happened; it was a 'creative fiction.' If so, the artist still achieved her stated goal.

Over at Slacktivist, Fred Clark delivered a rant today about the sad state of journalism. As usual, it's a thought-provoking piece. However, what makes the post even better is one of the comments, which begins:

Wow. You have basically described my job.

I'm online editor at a smallish newspaper in the Midwest. Once a week, I am given a page to fill dedicated to exactly this sort of swill. And I am given a couple hours to come up with the copy and photos to fill that page. I literally am required to skim through the press releases, submitted poems, online comments sections, e-mailed photos and family-written profiles to come up with enough to fill that gaping hole in the paper. I consider it a good week when I can find something that is at least written in the first person. It is a relentless schedule. Every Thursday, I wade into the cesspool looking for shiny things, while a relentless clock ticks away in the background.

And that is really the rub. I don't have more time, nor would my bosses allocate more time, for me to factcheck every one of these pieces. Or any of these pieces, for that matter. And since I have that blank page staring back at me, I am genuinely relieved to be able to insert that terrible poem. Or that diary about your backpacking trip to Nepal. And if you send a photo? Ohmigod, you are my most favorite person in the world. Because that big, white page must be filled. And if you don't send your crap in, what in the world will I fill it with?

The rest of the comment is just as depressingly insightful.

I just listened to another interesting podcast from the Science in the City series: Callum Roberts' talk The Unnatural History of the Sea (I can't link directly to it; go to the podcast listing and page in reverse chronological order until you find it. This podcast was released on October 26, 2007).

In this talk, Professor Roberts outlines human exploitation of the oceans thorughout history. It's an interesting mix of biology and anthropology. However, it's a depressing talk as well. Over and over in his talk, Professor Roberts picks a time and place and then outlines the stages of sea exploitation that took place.

I recently found a new set of podcasts that I enjoy listening to in the car: Science and the City, recordings of lectures presented by the New York Academy of Sciences.

The past two days, I listened to a lecture by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker titled The Stuff of Thought (there's no direct link to individual podcasts. Go to the podcast page and page backwards in the reverse chronological archive to November 2, 2007). This lecture offers some interesting case studies in sociolinguistics. The concepts that are employed in the studies are nothing new to me, but the examples themselves are enjoyable.

In his latest essay in The Christian Century, Gordon Atkinson explains why we need both science and mystery. As usual, Gordon expresses my sentiments more eloquently than I ever could:

Some people see the boundary between mystery and science as a battleground with barbed wire and trenches on either side. But I think that the place where our searching and empirical minds meet the mysteries of the world is the realm of worship and poetry. Before Adam and Eve, the world was chaos, like a vast unconscious mind with no boundaries and no definitions. The world itself hasn't changed, but our human perspective is continually solving mysteries and creating new ones as fast as we can.

Our love of answers has always been nicely balanced against our penchant for awe and worship. Reality is both a thing to be conquered and also something to be worshiped. This is the human way.

I wonder when it was that science and religion stopped seeing each other as ancient twins of the human mind and started seeing each other as competitors. While I and others like me slog it out in the worshiping world of mystery, brother scientist is observing, collating and solving mysteries as fast as he can. I don't want him to stop. I like the way he slays ancient gods. What I want is for us to embrace each other and walk though life together. He can solve old mysteries and I can celebrate the new ones.

In an article in the International Herald Tribune, psychology professor Richard A. Friedman questions conventional wisdom about the midlife crisis. In regard to one story that he shares, he comments:

It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to see that [this woman's] husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like "midlife crisis." It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.

In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.

But you have to admit that "I'm having a midlife crisis" sounds a lot better than "I'm a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown."

Midlife is a drag, but that's just the way it is. People sometimes look at my with mild disbelief when I say that my wants are secondary to those of my family and that my primary role at this point in my life is to provide for them (not just financially). But Dr. Friedman also cites a survey in which only a small percentage of middle aged people reported having or having had a midlife crisis.

(via Follow Me Here)

Former NBC news reporter John Hockenberry offers a long commentary on why network news has failed the American public. It's an interesting, though unsurprising, read. One of his main points:

Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty.

As soon as Amazon's DRM-free MP3 service was launched (see my earlier post), Yahoo! Music's VP for product development Ian Rogers handed the music industry their collective DRM-laden ass on a platter:

But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

That's the most heart-warming 'Kiss my ass' I've heard in a very long time.

I usually hang on pretty much everything Fred Clark says on his blog, but his recent post about suburban sprawl is the exception to this rule.His thesis is pretty simple: suburban living sucks. He throws out all the usual arguments: soulless cookie-cutter homes, long commutes, poor home quality, etc.

I see where Fred is coming from. Until about age 30, I felt the exact same way. In my case, my over-simplified view of the 'burbs was born of ignorance. I grew up in the country, and then lived as a young adult in Europe and in older Austin neighborhoods around the UT campus.

Now that I've lived in the 'burbs for a decade, I see the situation differently. I'm not saying that Fred's accusations have no merit. Rather, I think he only sees one side of the story. Let's take the issue of poor quality suburban home construction. I hate to tell him, but that's been a fact of life in Austin since the first 'burb opened up over 100 years ago--the neighborhood next to UT that I lived in during college, incidentally, that's now an expensive, desirable urban neighborhood.

Another issue that isn't so black and white is community. The stereotype is that suburbanites don't know their neighbors. In our case, however, I know many more neighbors here in the 'burbs than I did in the in-town neighborhoods we lived in. To large extent, I think you get the level of community that you expect, wherever you live. We made a conscious decision to put down roots in Pflugerville. Except for work, we live our lives here: home, schools, church, etc. As a result, for instance, we can't ever go to the grocery store without running into someone we know. That certainly doesn't feel like the soulless, anonymous suburbs that Fred and others imagine.

I agree 100% that suburban sprawl is not a viable long-term option, primarily due to the reliance on automobiles. And yes, I'm contributing to it. But the factors that led to our living where we do are many and complex. You just can't reduce it to a few paragraphs of screed, as Fred has done.

My aunt used to distribute a lot of urban legend emails, mostly conservative political and religious crap. And every time, I would look up the myth on snopes.com, and send out a reply-to-all email explaining that this particular email is an urban legend, and pleading with people to do some minimal amount of research before forwarding on such emails to everyone you know.

Now, some researchers believe such counter-efforts may not help as much as I thought:

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

How depressing.

Oh, and I no longer receive such emails from my aunt. I hope, though don't really believe, that my efforts caused her to stop sending them. Most likely, she just removed me from the recipient list. I'm surprised I stayed on her list so long.

Journalist A. J. Jacobs recently published an article in Esquire about Radical Honesty. According to the web site, Radical Honesty is "a kind of communication that is direct, complete, open and expressive. Radical Honesty means you tell the people in your life what you've done or plan to do, what you think, and what you feel. It's the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy."

Or from the article:

[Radical Honesty's founder Brad Blanton] says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation.

When Mr. Jacobs tried to practice radical honesty, here are some of the incidents he describes in his article. First the stepmother:

The next day, we get a visit from my wife's dad and stepmom.

"Did you get the birthday gift I sent you?" asks her stepmom.

"Uh-huh," I say.

She sent me a gift certificate to Saks Fifth Avenue.

"And? Did you like it?"

"Not really. I don't like gift certificates. It's like you're giving me an errand to run."

"Well, uh . . ."

And then the female business associate:

I have a business breakfast with an editor from Rachael Ray's magazine. As we're sitting together, I tell her that I remember what she wore the first time we met -- a black shirt that revealed her shoulders in a provocative way. I say that I'd try to sleep with her if I were single. I confess to her that I just attempted (unsuccessfully) to look down her shirt during breakfast.

I regard my honesty as one of my most valued traits. In fact, some would say I already practice radical honesty! But 'Radical Honesty' is a step too far even for me. The incident with the business associate is the easiest to get out of the way. Even if Radical Honesty consists of "toss[ing] out the filters between our brains and our mouths," there's always the option of just keeping your damn mouth closed.

The interaction with Mr. Jacobs mother-in-law is a little trickier, since she directly asked him for his opinion. But her question and his response are only one small part in a larger cultural ritual that involves deciding what to give, giving it, receiving it--each step of which has ritualized responses. Mr. Jacobs abides by the conventions of the ritual until some arbitrary point, when he decides to throw convention out the window and practice Radical Honesty. I notice he didn't mention that he offered to give the gift certificate back to his mother-in-law. It seems to me that if he really wanted to practice radical honesty, he would need to opt out of the entire cultural ritual. You can't have it both ways.

This article tops digg.com today. It is the same idea as the one I expressed in my previous post, just with more detail.

There's an interesting commentary in the Washington Post that's making the blog rounds today: "Stop Trying to 'Save' Africa." The author's aversion to a certain type of attitude in regard to Africa reminds me of my dislike of the slogan "Save the Earth."

I'm pretty sure life on earth will continue on in some form for millions, if not billions, more years, even if we humans manage to make the environment inhospitable for our own species.

So, I think 'Save the Earth' really means: help to keep the environment in a state that will continue to support human life similar to the way it currently is." That in itself is a worthy cause, but the hubris implied in 'Save the Earth' really rubs me the wrong way.

I'm a little late on posting this, but security expert Bruce Schneier tells it like it is:

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong.

Remember, folks, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. Don't be scared of something that, statistically speiaking, barely even makes the list of things likely to hurt or kill you.

Today, Fred Clark blogs about a growing movement in the Southern Baptist Convention to urge parents to pull their children out of public schools. One of the motivations for this movement is to remove children from the "'metastasizing spiritual, moral and intellectual pathologies of the government school system.'"

As usual, Fred does a very good job of covering the political, cultural and religious aspects of the issue. But his post reminded me of something from my own past. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country just north of San Antonio. We lived just beyond the fringes of suburban San Antonio at the time; you could live more or less in the country and still commute into San Antonio, though it was a long commute.

I can think of quite a few families who moved out of San Antonio to remove their kids from the perceived negative influences of the city's schools. But by and large, these families continued to deal with the same types of problems with their kids even in the idyllic Hill Country. In my opinion, those families chose to blame the city for their kids' problems, when in fact the problems lay with the kids and families themselves; moving to the country didn't change things. Sounds to me like some Southern Baptists might be suffering the same delusion.

This comment on MetaFilter sums up my feelings about many of my grad school professors quite well:

Respect for academic achievements is slowly eroding into extinction. Good riddance, I say. I have been working several years at a university known as one of the top in the country for its particular field, and here's what I found out: it's meaningless. It is an institutionalized popularity and writing contest. It's as if these folks who probably suffered from social ineptitude at some point in their lives (or continue to suffer from it) are using their intelligence as a substitution for charisma and basic, decent human behavior. Which is fine for them inside their own circles I suppose. However, I personally have little respect for titles, authority, position and supposed academic credibility. The result of your work may be astounding and important, but that doesn't make you a good person or a decent human being, and it damn well doesn't mean that I have to show you any respect until you earn it. If I don't understand how great your work is, then you get to earn your respect from me by being a good person on a general level.

A while back, I winced when I saw the word 'congradulations' on the sign in front of our local middle school. But that ain't nothin'. Check out this letter from a Staten Island middle school administrator.

Rafe Colburn links to an article in the Washingon Post about the self-help phenomenon The Secret. I was not previously aware of this hit book, but as soon as I read it, I thought: this sounds like it appeals to the same type of people who are attracted to the Gospel of prosperity. Two sides of the same coin. Interesting.

(NOTE: I'm only linking to pages that are critical of the respective movements. I don't want to give google karma to the proponents.)

This week, writer John Scalzi is blogging his answers to questions submitted by readers of his blog. Yesterday's question was, in essence: What is the meaning of life?

Mr. Scalzi suggests that he devised his answer to this question via humanist (non-religious) means:

What I'm leaving out here, for the space of relative brevity, is a detailed examination of processes by which I came to this intellectual methodology, generated through years of self-examination and self-realization via intentional and unintentional experiential phenomena, to produce the robust heuristic structure through which I filter data.

Here's the heart of his reply:

Finally, in the larger sense -- the one in which I am a citizen of the world, that I like no man am an island, blah blah blah blah blah, it becomes a matter of asking one's self first whether one wants to be engaged in the world, and then if so, how best to be of utility. I do enough things that I feel engaged in my world and I feel like I'm trying to do beneficial things (or at least I'm doing as little harm as possible). I think it's my responsibility to try to make the world a better place than it was before I got here; I don't feel obliged to be heart-rent at every thing that's wrong with the planet. One person can make a difference in the world, so long as that one person realizes that one person can not do every thing or be actively concerned with every damn thing. I pick and choose; everyone does. I focus on what I think I do well, and where I think I can do good. (emphasis added)

I find his answer to the BIG QUESTION quite similar to my own, which I formed in the context of being a Christian. I guess it all comes down to the source of the responsibility, and his answer shows what I believe: that there are many ways to realize your obligation to 'love your neighbor'.

I've noted for a while a lot of misunderstanding about hydrogen fuel cells as a possible solution to our dependence on fossil fuels. This article correctly points out that since we have to manufacture hydrogen, it is really an energy storage mechanism, not a fuel.

The manufacturing process uses electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The resulting hydrogen is collected, and distributed. Then fuel cells combine the hydrogen with oxygen again, producing water and electricity. It takes more energy to create, collect, store and distribute the hydrogen than is regained when it is used to create electricity--which makes hydrogen a very inefficient energy storage mechanism.

There's an interesting article at New Scientist that imagines what would happen to the earth if all humans disappeared today. The most basic conclusion is that pretty much all traces of human existence would be gone in 100,000 years.

Equally interesting is the discussion of this topic on MetaFilter. As usual, the MeFi discussion goes in many different directions, but I sense in some of the posts an unease that traces of the human race could be erased so quickly.

Microsoft's yet-to-be-released iPod challenger, Zune, is already drawing a lot of attention. So, one of Zune's innovative features is the ability to share musically via a wireless connection with other nearby Zunes. Cool. For copyrighted music, however, the receiver can only play the received content three times or within three days, whichever comes first. Okay, a big nod to the music labels. That in itself is generating a lot of controversy.

But here's the part that astounds me, directly from the Zune blog:

I was going to leave a comment in my last post answering questions, but I decided to make a new one...

"I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?" Good question. There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she'll come see you three days later. . .

Just like the music industry attacked file sharing applications because it's possible to use them to share copyrighted material, Microsoft is defaulting to DRM since it can't know for sure whether a shared file is copyrighted. Better safe than sorry--safe for them, anyway. Well, that sounds pretty sorry to me. It's a 'guilty with no chance of proving your innocence' strategy. Great way to treat your customers. Of course, a lot of people are observing, justifiably to me, that Microsoft's primary customer is, in fact, the music labels. The consumer runs a distant second. In which case, the Zune will not catch on.

OK, so what about Apple's DRM? First off, if I import a non-DRMed song into iTunes, iTunes doesn't mess with it. Second, Apple doesn't promise to let me legally share files with someone else. I don't like DRM any more than Cory Doctorow, but Apple's 'five computers plus attached devices' DRM for iTunes seems a reasonable limitation for personal use. Millions of other iPod owners seem willing to accept it, too.

As the video below demonstrates, getting computers to work with human language is hard--even after decades of research and development.

Over at Slacktivist and Making Light there are lively discussions about 'Could you live on X amount of money?' Lots of commenters are chiming in with their mimimum requirements. For me, though, all those participants are missing the point of the discussion. This comment at Slacktivist expresses my sentiments exactly (though more eloquently than I could have done so):

For me, my happiness for their good fortune turns to scorn for their blind privilege when they go from, 'I wouldn't know how to live on only 100k a year' or 'I wouldn't want to try to live on only 100k a year' to 'I couldn't live on 100k a year'. I understand that you don't want to downgrade your lifestyle; who would? I understand that you've never had to live on 100k, let alone 50k, let alone 30k, and it's very understandable that you regard the prospect of trying with some trepidation.

But you could do it. Lots of people do it, because they must, because they have no choice. And if you had no choice, you'd do it, too. So be grateful. Be humble. Help those who don't have your staggering luck, to be amongst the richest people living in the richest country. You don't deserve it, nobody could, so at least be thoughtful about it.

One of my biggest fears in life is that I'll feel entitled to something. For me, being part of an intentional faith community is one of the biggest antidotes to feelings of entitlement. It helps me to keep in mind just how miniscule I am in the grand scheme of things.

Today, I ran across Bob Sutton's blog, Work Matters. Just up my alley: he shares lots of practical applications of some fairly esoteric ideas. I found Bob's blog via this post: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held. In it, Bob shares this insight:

A couple years ago, I was talking the Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future's Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” They've been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director Paul Saffo. Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions.

That's an eloquent description that I find ever so sensible. I do indeed have strong opinions, and like my friend Rafe Colburn, I like to think my opinions are based on well considered evidence, and that I'm willing to change my opinions in light of new evidence.

This web page about English usage 'non-errors' has been making the rounds in the bloggin world this week. It contains a list of English usage that people frequently correct, but the author of this page calls them 'non-errors' since they are in common usage. I poked around and discovered that the author of the page is an English professor who has published a book on English usage errors.

Given the author's knowledge of English usage, I'm a little disappointed that he calls the items on this page 'non-errors.' In fact, his primary argument that the issues in question are not errors is the fact that they are commonly used. I don't see how he can publish a prescriptivist book on usage and then not disclose that his view of these issues is based on a descriptivist argument.

Ben Stein's State of the Union.

Eric Sink has a recent blog post about negotiating. He makes the common sense observation:

In negotiation, the one thing that really strengthens your position is the ability to walk away from the deal.

My salary history over the last ten years bears out Eric's observation. With every job change except one, I received a decent salary increase. The one exception was the job I accepted after having been laid off. I was not in a strong position to negotiate salary, and I took a big hit for it. It took me several years to get back to the salary I had before.

The New York Times lists ten lesser-known significant dates in American history. For instance:

FEB. 15, 1933: The Wobbly Chair

It should have been an easy shot: five rounds at 25 feet. But the gunman, Giuseppe Zangara, an anarchist, lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was shaking hands with F.D.R.

Had Roosevelt been assassinated, his conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would most likely have come to power. "The New Deal, the move toward internationalism — these would never have happened," says Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. "It would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century. I don't think the Kennedy assassination changed things as much as Roosevelt's would have."

Apparently, this list of reasons why America actually sucks is making the rounds on the internet. I'm the first to question unbridled 'America is Number One!' jingoism, but I'm highly suspicious of this list for several reasons:

1. It was created to prove a point, so the data is necessarily selective
2. The sort of short bullet points that the list employs is subject to gross oversimplification
3. Many of the points in the list are not given comparative to other countries (e.g., "Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training" So, how does that compare globally?)
4. I frankly question the veracity or quality of some of the data (e.g., "Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time." I recall seeing a chart of average work hours, and South Korea led every other country by several hundred hours. Apparently, the South Koreans have some really bizarre ideas about the average work week)

I would really like to see someone pick apart the list. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or inclination.

This morning, I happened to catch Alex Chadwick's Radio Expeditions report from the Ecuadorean rain forest with entomologist Rex Cocroft. Dr. Cocroft's musings at the end of the piece struck me, so I transcribed them:

It can seem very strange to people, I think, and very ludicrous, to see some grown person who's spending his time chasing around tiny, strange bugs in the woods, but I think of it like somebody who's a musician. You're not just a pure musician in the abstract. You play something, and once you pick up an instrument, all the principles of music are there. And if you're studying biology, then any individual living thing that you can study has all the principles of biology wrapped up in it, and it has a long evolutionary history that has solved a very impressive set of problems and challenges and has a beautiful set of adaptations.

[The tree hoppers] are just very different from us, but they have just as many challenges in their lives, and fabulous, very finely tuned adaptations for dealing with them. So they're not at all primitive or simple. They're actually very complex and advanced, if you will.

I don't know whether Dr. Cocroft bellieves in any dieties, but I am much more impressed with a God who can devise evolution and let it run its course than one who just spits out creation fully formed. The more I learn about the complexities of creation via science, the greater my reverence for it.

I've considered writing something about The Da Vinci Code (read the book, may eventually see the movie on DVD, but based on my dismal movie watching history, probably won't), but I really couldn't think of anything to add to the billions of words already being written about the book and movie. As usual, Gordon Atkinson sums up my feelings perfectly and much more eloquently than I could have done:

I’ve read the Da Vinci Code. I plan on seeing the movie, which I hear is better than the book. I liked the book. It was a fun read.

I have no interest in discussing Dan Brown’s scholarship or lack thereof. Anyone who paid attention in seminary has heard of these extra-biblical sources and knows that Mr. Brown’s book is an adventure story and not a biblical or historical treatise. The Da Vinci Code has roughly the same relationship to biblical and church history that James Bond has to the world of secret agents. And hey, what’s wrong with that? It’s a good read. Like a Clancy novel.

(Note: I only attended seminary vicariously via Katie)

Recently, there was an interesting essay in the St. Petersburg Times about serendipity. The author is concerned that it is in danger in today's world:

Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find - with an irritating hit or miss here and there - exactly what you're looking for. It's efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn't know was there.

I've become a big public library patron the last couple of years. During one of the interviews for my new job, the interviewer asked me some personal questions, among them, "What are you reading right now?" One of the books was a novel that I'd picked up while browsing through the new books display at the library. It was by an author I'd never heard of and I couldn't recall the author's name for the interviewer. I remember feeling slightly embarrassed that I wasn't reading something intentional or directed, that I didn't have any sort of goal in reading this novel.. After reading this essay, I realize that there's absolutely no shame in browsing.

As I've expressed before, I'm skeptical of the current craze for hybrid cars. As I understand it, they were initially developed for their low emissions; better gas mileage was a bonus. But now, a lot of people are buying them for their general 'green' fuzzy feelgood value.

This New York Times editorial confirms my suspicions regarding some people's relatively unconsidered reasons for buying hybrids:

Lately, people have been calling me and telling me they're thinking about buying the Lexus 400H, a new hybrid SUV. When I tell them that they'd get better mileage in some conventional SUVs, and even better mileage with a passenger car, they protest, "But it's a hybrid!" I remind them that the 21 miles per gallon I saw while driving the Lexus 400H is not particularly brilliant, efficiency-wise - hybrid or not. Because the Lexus is a relatively heavy car and because its electric motor is deployed to provide speed more than efficiency, it will never be a mileage champ.

The article also offers some useful advice on when a hybrid is and isn't a good choice. For example:

Indeed, [with highway driving] the [Prius'] gasoline engine worked so hard that we calculated we might have used less fuel on our journey if we had been driving Toyota's conventionally powered, similarly sized Corolla - which costs thousands less.

The article concludes with a warning about the government's current penchant for supporting hybrid purchases:

So the ideal hybrid car is one that is used in town and carefully disposed of at the end of its days. Hybrid taxis and buses make enormous sense. But the market knows no such distinctions. People think they want hybrids and they'll buy them, even if a conventional car would make more sense. The danger is that the automakers will co- opt the hybrids' green mantle and, with the help of a government looking to bail out its troubled friends in Detroit, misguidedly encourage the sale of hybrids without reference to their actual effect on oil consumption.

Pro-hybrid laws and incentives sound nice, but they might just end up subsidizing companies that have failed to develop truly fuel-efficient vehicles at the expense of those that have had the foresight to design their cars right in the first place. And they may actually punish citizens who save fuel the old- fashioned way - by using less of it, with smaller, lighter and more efficient cars. All the while, they'll make a mockery of a potentially useful technology.

So, I'm definitely going to hold onto my eight-year-old Corolla. She's homely but she gets the job done quite efficiently.

Over at kottke.org, guest blogger Greg Knauss proposes that bloggers fall into two categories:

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth -- extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes -- but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.

The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

I'm definitely primarily a referential blogger. The primary reason for this is that I'm introverted and am therefore reluctant to share my personal life with people whom I don't know well.

But Greg's observations are timely for me, as I wrote an experiential blog post just last night. Writing that post felt kind of strange to me. Now I see why. But, I do think I'll try to write more experiential posts.

Researchers examined whether bilingual individuals showed different personality traits when communicating in each language. The short answer: yes. Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the entire paper.

As a bilingual person, that result doesn't surprise me. I know I behave differently when speaking German than I do when speaking my native language, English. But upon reflection, I'd say the reasons for that are complex: relative insecurity with my mastery of German, different cultural conversational conventions and expectations, etc. I'd like to know how the researchers controlled for various influencing factors.

Ivia Follow Me Here)

These study results are really interesting:

In the 1960s Jack Block . . . began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality . . . A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

. . .

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

(via Follow Me Here)

According to this article, a high school art teacher is facing sanctions from his school district for "recommending that some of his advanced students consider taking figure drawing courses that included nude figure drawings." The article lists some other circumstances that may have played a role in the district's decision to pursue this course of action against the teacher.

This reminds me of an incident that happened when I was in high school. One of the women's coaches, Coach Mac, was my health teacher. I thought she was an awesome teacher. About halfway through the year, she was charged with having used inappropriate language in class. Turns out, the charges were based on a lesson she taught my class. I don't remember the point of the lesson, but it was some lesson in development that involved Little Johnny 'learning the word Firetruck without the middle,' meaning the word 'Fuck'. She never actually said the F word in class.

But Coach Mac was brought before the school board for this alleged infraction. I attended the board meeting as a show of support for her. Soon afterwards, she left the district, and I frankly no longer recall whether she was fired or just gave up and left of her own accord. The result was the same for me: the loss of a teacher from whom I learned a lot.

Only later did I discover that Coach Mac's supposed language in class was just a front for the real issue: she was a lesbian and a girls' coach. But this issue was never uttered at the school board meeting. To this day, I have no idea if sexual impropriety was suspected or accused, or whether it just rubbed some parents the wrong way to think that a lesbian had access to the the girls' dressing room. Either way, the whole process was a sham undertaken by a community that must have known enough that its bigotry was inappropriate to pick a cover issue for their witch hunt.

In reading this story, you have to take the time and place into consideration. This was a mostly rural school in the 1980s. Personally, I did not know any homosexuals (that I knew of), I thought the Village People were just a gimmicky group, and non-heterosexual lifestyles were not an issue that I'd even given much thought to. The only reason I know that the lesbian charges were real was that sometime after she left, Coach Mac dropped back by the school with her girlfriend. That visit must have been her parting 'fuck you' to the community, so to speak.

Reading the linked article, however, it looks like things haven't changed a whole lot.

I read yesterday that Bart D. Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is selling briskly. In the book, Dr. Ehrman presents some reasons why we can't just take the Bible at face value: a plethora of conflicting source documents, errors in translation, the politics of canonization, etc. Or, as the Washington Post article says, his book "casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel."

I haven't read the book yet, but it sounds like New Testament 101 type stuff to me. I'm really happy that Ehrman's book is presenting these ideas to people who are not familiar with the complex processes which have resulted in the book we call the Bible. Maybe I should keep a copy or two on hand to give out.

A new study finds that people significantly overestimate the ability of themselves and others to accurately understand the intended tone of online text communications:

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.

"People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they 'hear' the tone they intend in their head as they write," Epley explains.

At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren't that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person's perspective.

This is a good case for the value of adding emoticons to your online communications, though such usage is often frowned upon for more formal communication. Maybe our younger Internet-savvy cohorts figured this out already.

I've been thinking more about the New Yorker article about banning aggressive dog breeds that I blogged about yesterday. Gladwell concludes the article by listing the series of steps that government officials could have taken--or arguably should have--to prevent the one dog attack that he profiles.

But even if authorities were prepared to take such measures, it would not prevent many dog attacks. The main problem, I believe (and Gladwell says this to some extent), is people who think of themselves as bad-ass and who have dogs whom they view as extensions of this projected personality. Identifying such people and somehow preventing their dogs from hurting others would be a thorny, and probably impossible, sociological task.

To generalize, it seems to me that flagrant disregard for the well-being of others is an integral part of this tough-guy persona, and, as Gladwell mentions, such people often have a history of violence. Since we, as a society, don't have a problem with limiting the rights and behaviors of convicted criminals (e.g., convicted felons can't vote), then maybe it would be effective just to not allow people who have been covicted of violent crimes from dog ownership. But even that doesn't seem like a very targeted means of avoiding dog attacks, which are actually a relatively uncommon problem. Just thinking out loud here.

This article makes me ill. Some excerpts:

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn't engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.

He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.

"We're going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles," Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham's ministry, Answers in Genesis.

In two 90-minute workshops for children, Ham adopted a much lighter tone, mocking scientists who think birds evolved from dinosaurs ("if that were true, I'd be worried about my Thanksgiving turkey!").

In a bit that brought the house down, Ham flashed a picture of a chimpanzee. "Did your grandfather look like this?" he demanded.

"Noooooo!" the children called.

"And did your grandmother look like that?" Ham displayed a photo of the same chimp wearing lipstick. The children erupted in giggles. "Noooooo!"

"We are not just an animal," Ham said. He had the children repeat that, their small voices rising in unison: "We are not just an animal. We are made in the image of God."

Can't we be animals and made in the image of God?

In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell examines the recent trend of local governments out lawing pit bull-like dogs (see here, for instance). Gladwell makes a case that the fundamental problem isn't with specific dog breeds, but with the type of people who want to own bad-ass dogs; pit bulls are just the current popular breed for such people.

The problem for governments, Gladwell points out, is that it's easier to make laws based on generalizations about dog breeds than it is based on generalizations about people. In regard to a recent pit bull attack, Gladwell concludes:

It was a textbook dog-biting case: unneutered, ill-trained, charged-up dogs, with a history of aggression and an irresponsible owner, somehow get loose, and set upon a small child. The dogs had already passed through the animal bureaucracy of Ottawa, and the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization—a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners. But that would have required someone to track down Shridev Café, and check to see whether he had bought muzzles, and someone to send the dogs to be neutered after the first attack, and an animal-control law that insured that those whose dogs attack small children forfeit their right to have a dog. It would have required, that is, a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed.

I did my graudate education in literary/cultural theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which means I was thoroughly immersed in deconstruction and post-structuralism: truth is relative, our thinking and reality are limited by language, human relations are all about power, etc. I was hit with Derrida in my first semester of grad school and the theories of Michel Foucault figured prominently in my dissertation.

Some would find it odd, then, that I became a Christian in the midst of this education, what with faith's appeal to universal truth and the institutional nature of Christianity. I find deconstruction and post-structural theories interesting, useful and basically sound, but in retrospect, I think my embrace of faith represented an ultimate rejection of those theories. If you completely embrace those theories, the end result is hopelessness: we are each stuck in our own little reality--which itself might be an illusion--unable to genuinely communicate with others.

I guess I refused to go that far. I wanted and want to believe that there is some meaning to life. I'm not even sure that it's God, but in a community of faith, I found a group of people who also want to believe that it's possible to connect with others in a meaningful way (whatever that means).

Oh, I feel great ambivalence about the institutional nature of the church. And it's damn hard to cut through all the crap that constitutes our daily lives to get to know others intimately, but at least the members of a faith community profess to believe it's possible to do so. It's that belief--that faith--that counts. And occasionally, I actually glimpse that connection.

In his article, Early Retirement: Where to Live?, Philip Greenspun offers the following advice:

If you can rent anything decent, try to avoid buying property. Think about the most interesting people you know. Chances are, most of them are renters. People who rent talk about the books that they've read, the trips that they've taken, the skills that they are learning, the friends whose company they are enjoying. Property owners complain about the local politicians, the high rate of property tax, the difficulty of finding competent tradespeople, the high value of their own (very likely crummy) house or condo, and what kinds of furniture and kitchen appliances they are contemplating buying. Property owners are boring. The most boring parts of a property owner's personality is that which relates to his or her ownership of real estate.

His article doesn't apply to me, but his insight about home owners hits close to home nonetheless. For us middle-aged suburban homeowners with school-aged kids, the concerns include: property values, the quality of the schools, how new development (especially new rental property!) will lower the quality of the schools and our property values, traffic, planned maintenance and upgrades to our homes, etc. Boy, he's right. That is boring stuff.

(via Rafe Colburn)

Here's an interesting comparison of Germany and the USA from a guy who grew up in Germany but has lived in the US for a long time. I have only skimmed a couple of sections so far, but it seems right on based on my experience with the two countries. For instance:

The Rich

Success in the US is almost exclusively defined as economic success; those who have such success try everything to show it. It is cool to be rich and people look up to the rich, to the extent that someone whose only credential consists of being a billionaire can almost become president.

By contrast, the rich are not particularly well-liked in Germany. In politics, being extremely rich would certainly be an obstacle. In the back of the German's mind there's still the assumption that someone who owns that much must have exploited others to get it.

The obvious fact that the rich in the US have much better access to health care and legal representation than the poor is generally not seen as an injustice. To Germans, this notion is deeply offensive. When I discussed the O.J. Simpson case with Americans, I would usually point out that he got away with murder because he was rich enough to hire the very best lawyers; many people I spoke to didn't even notice the implied criticism: they replied "Sure, the rich can buy better lawyers. They can also buy better cars. That's what wealth is."

Generally speaking, the average living standard in the US is considerably higher than in Germany. More people own their home, houses are bigger, people own more luxury items and have more disposable income. Two caveats are in order: first, the variation in the US is a lot larger, and the poor in the US are poorer than the poor in Germany. Second, Germans may not have as much money, but they certainly have much more free time, if the daily working hours and the yearly vacation time is taken into account.

I'll be reading the rest of it at my earliest opportunity.

From the New York Times:

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

I don't buy into this deterministic, hard-wired business, no, not me. :-)

(via Follow Me Here)

Mindless sports team loyalty meets mindless consumerism:

Academy Sports gears up for Longhorn sales

Academy Sports & Outdoors Ltd. is so sure that the undefeated University of Texas Longhorns will win the Rose Bowl that the retail chain already has purchased official Longhorns Rose Bowl Championship merchandise.

Academy stores will open at 6 a.m. Thursday to cater to Longhorn fans scrambling to be the first to buy Texas Rose Bowl Championship gear, including the official locker-room cap.

The Rose Bowl, pitting UT against the University of Southern California, is being played tonight in Pasadena, Calif.

Katy-based Academy is hoping to see the same long lines that formed -- at one time reaching 102,000 people in one night -- when the retailer was peddling Houston Astros apparel and products during the team's World Series run.

This article states what seems obvious to me: readers really do judge a book by its cover:

“BOOK LOVERS MAY NOT BE the most heroic members of the romantic world, but at least, we tell ourselves, we are deep, we are discerning. Well, I have news for you from publishing’s bottom line: we bespectacled creatures of the late-night night light are, frankly, a bit slutty.

All the research shows that consumers are very, very influenced by the covers, not necessarily to buy a book, but to pick it up,” Joanna Prior, publicity and marketing director at Penguin, says.

Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye. If it is picked up, it is on average glanced at for only three to four seconds.

Matt Haughey writes that he bought a house this year without the help of a realtor and feels confident that he could also sell a house without a realtor:

We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like "fabulous" and "wonderful" and replaced them with descriptive terms like "open" and "large". We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy -- whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we'll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.

If Matt feels comfortable handling a real estate transaction himself, good for him, but I think that finding a buyer for your home-for-sale and/or finding a home for you to buy are the least important tasks that a realtor does (or should do). Monitoring the legal aspects of the transactions is the most important role. I would feel very uncomfortable not having an experienced expert monitoring the process and advising me in the legal transactions.

When we sold and bought houses three years ago, we ended up finding the new house ourselves--which is pretty easy these days with everything online. But we needed to close on both houses on the same day, so we were super sensitive to a delay in either deal. Our realtor was in constant contact with the seller's and buyer's realtors for each deal, both title companies, and our mortgage lender to make sure everything went smoothly. He knew exactly what should be happening with each transaction at every point and he was hard-assed when necessary with the other parties to make sure they did their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. His diligence and expertise were well worth the fees we paid him (since we used him for both transactions, he waived one of our fees to him, which reduced our total realtor costs a bit).

Over at BoingBoing, Dale Dougherty traces the genesis of a news story, in this case, retail sales numbers for 'Black Friday'. He shows how this story, which is communicated on every news media every year after Thanksgiving, starts with a press release based on very questionable market research methods from an industry trade group, and then gets repeated as fact by news media.

I'm a self-identifying English language usage curmudgeon. But I tell you, misuse of apostrophes has become so rampant, it hardly even gets a rise out of me any longer. In just a few minutes of news scanning this morning, I ran across two incidents:

Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user's access that content.

Web store fails to monitor it's own reviews board.

I just can't get outraged any longer. It just makes me sad and tired.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen posted titled "How to walk through a museum". In addition to a number of specific suggestions to enhance your art viewing trip, he writes:

A key general principle is to stop self-deceiving and admit to yourself that you don't just love "art for art's sake." You also like art for the role it plays in your life, for its signaling value, and for how it complements other things you value, such as relationships and your self-image. It then becomes possible for you to turn this fact to your advantage, rather than having it work against you. Keeping up the full pretense means that you must impose a high implicit tax on your museum-going. This leads you to restrict your number of visits and ultimately to resent the art and find it boring.

I used to go with Katie to the opera occasionally, but several years ago I put my foot down and refused to go with her. Reading the quote above makes me realize that I thought I was supposed to like it 'for art's sake' and I finally admitted that I didn't like it, and that I didn't care whether anyone else thought whether I should like it.

But it also makes me realize that maybe others enjoy something else about opera bedies the 'art for art's sake' angle. I'll have to re-think whether there's some other reason why I might find opera interesting.

As soon as the levees were breached and New Orleans started flooding after hurricane Katrina, I tried to impress on people that this tragedy affected all types of New Orleanians, not just the ones we saw on TV who were did not get out ahead of time: white and black; poor, middle-class, and wealthy (though some were obviously more seriously affected than others. That's a discussion for another post).

As I've thought about this, I've concluded that standing water flooding is its own type of hell because it leaves your house and it contents in place for the most part, but also pretty much completely ruined. If your house is blown away by hurricane winds or washed away by torrents of water, it's certainly tragic, but you pretty much know that you start over from scratch. But with standing water flooding, you eventually have to return to figure out what to do with everything--what stays, what goes, do you repair the house or rebuild, etc. This Flickr photo set shows what one New Orleans family returned to.

Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald wrote an interesting post about the history of telling time.

Seen in a comment here:

We bought a new lawnmower a while back. After describing our needs to the Home Depot salesman, Katie and I asked him what it would cost us. He replied, "Well, it depends on how much you want to invest." Katie and I were both taken aback by that answer. One of us stammered something like, "Well, I don't want to think of it as an investment at all. We just need the cheapest lawnmower that meets the needs we described."

Today, I read this Ask Metafilter comment. Now I realize that the salesman was probably just misusing 'invest' to mean 'spend.' I had never heard that before.

This show's thesis:

In the programme, which looks at the causes and treatment of poor reading, at least three academics call into question the value of separating those with difficulty in reading into dyslexics and "ordinary poor readers", when the treatment is the same for both groups.

Experts say many children are being diagnosed with the condition to save embarrassment over their reading skills and in order to get extra help at school.

This show interests me, not because I believe that dyslexia is a myth--I have no opinion in the matter--but because I have little doubt that the diagnosis is sometimes used for exactly the reason given above.

Too bad this show is airing in Great Britian, not in the US.

Wow. Just go read it.

Slate's Meghan O'Rourke has an interesting article on men who are sexually traumatized by watching women give birth.

O'Rourke writes:

Today's women . . . see having the father in the delivery room as a necessary component of a healthy marriage, one in which both partners contribute equally to collective partnership. This is an absolutely reasonable request: Childbirth is scary and painful, and it makes sense to have reassurance and help from the person you're closest to (and your child's father). But the belief that men should be on duty no matter what assumes on some level that sex is just like all the other functions that the body performs. What the experience of the men in the therapist's article suggests is that, for at least some, this isn't true; for some, the erotic depends on maintaining a distinction between the sexual and the reproductive.

To the traumatized men, but also to some of these women, I say: it's not all about you!

Continue reading "The pain of (watching) childbirth"

Despite my disappointment with the first installment of Guns, Germs and Steel, I went ahead and watched the second installment this week. Same impression.

I've concluded that I'm just not anywhere near the target audience for this show. The target audience must be people who've never really been introduced to the idea of history as interpretation and who, therefore, have never really questioned the more conventional presentations of history.

At the conclusion of the second installment, Professor Diamond states:

I came to Spain to answer a question � why did Pizarro and his men conquer the Incas instead of the other way around? There�s a whole mythology that that conquest and the European expansion in general resulted from Europeans themselves being especially brave or bold or inventive or smart, but the answers turn out to have nothing to do with any personal qualities of Europeans. Yeah, Pizarro and his men were brave, but there were plenty of brave Incas. Instead, Europeans were accidental conquerors. By virtue of their geographic location and history, they were the first people to acquire guns, germs and steel.

My response to that statement is 'No duh!' but the producers of this show must believe that this is a revelation to their target audience. I guess I shouldn't be so hard on the show and understand that it was just not made for me.

I've come across the name Jared Diamond a few times in the last year or two, and he sounds intriguing, but I hadn't gotten around to reading any of his books. So, I was excited to hear that a three-part PBS documentary based on his book Guns, Germs and Steel would be broadcast starting this week.

So, I watched (most of) the first part this week, and the show disappointed me in several ways. First off, as noted elsewhere, it was slow (which is the primary reason I didn't quite make it through the entire broadcast). But mostly, I found the presentation of the ideas insulting. The first episode explains how the availability of different resources (plants and animals to domesticate) led to different levels of cultural change in different parts of the planet in early human history. Good thesis, but it's presented in two insulting ways: 1.) as if it is some revolutionary theory, and more importantly, 2.) as if Jared Diamond devised this theory all on his own. In fact, this is a long-established, uncontroversial academic theory, and Jared did not discover it; he is merely the popularizer.

In honor of U.S. Independence Day, Matt Haughey posted the entire Declaration of Independence to his blog. I hadn't read it in years, and when I did so this morning, I was struck by two points: first, what a prime example of Enlightenment thinking the document is, and second, in a related matter, how it refers directly to "Nature's God"--the god of the Enlightenment--not the Judeo-Christian god.

Re-reading the document makes me proud to live in a country that was founded on such high ideals, even if we so frequently don't live up to them.

Xeni Jardin posted an entry on Boing Boing about a bakery in Brooklyn that stopped making cakes with images from customers due to litigation fears for copyright infringement. The entry also includees some feedback from BoingBoing readers about the legal situation.

I am not a lawyer, so I cannot comment on the legal issues. What I find sad is the scorched earth aspect: that the legal fears led to the bakery's ceasing this service altogether.

Couldn't the bakery apply some common sense: if a customer brings in an image that they know is copyrighted, decline to do it and explain why to the customer. And if a customer brings in an unfamiliar image, ask the customer what it is. If the cusotmer replies, "Oh, this is my daughter's favorite TV character", then decline and explain. But if the customer says it's an original image and the bakery thinks the customer's explanation is reasonable, go ahead and make the damn cake.

It's a shame that a by-product of the current legal situation is the abandonment of good faith and informed judgment.

This smacks of 'zero tolerance' policies we often hear about.

I'm afraid I'm still living in the last century. Yesterday, we were showing our family quilts to some friends, and I explained that one of them had survived a flood with my grandmother "in '97." Without stopping to calculate the probable timeline of my family, our friend responded, "1897?" Of course, I'd meant 1997.

Then, this morning, I was composing in my head a blog post about a book I'm reading. It takes place in 'turn-of-the-century Buffalo, NY,' I thought. To me, I realized, 'turn of the century' refers to the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. I'm not sure that's true with everyone. Maybe I'm just getting old...

The Theory of Evolution: Just a Theory?, by William D. Rubinstein, has been making the blog rounds the last few days. PZ Myers has already posted a thorough critcism of how Dr. Rubenstein misrepresents the scientific method and the science behind evolution.

At the beginning of the essay, Dr. Rubinstein claims that his questions are not motivated by religious belief, but then he goes on to employ several common creationist attacks on evolution. After I read his essay, I immediately concluded that his claim about motivations must surely be disingenuous.

While I totally disagree with Dr. Rubinstein's arguments and conclusions, I have a certain appreciation for his rhetorical methodology. He has been effective at getting people to take his essay sersiously.

Let's take a look at his rhetorical framing, starting from the beginning of the essay:

Historian Prof. William D. Rubinstein shares his doubts about the theory of evolution. He raises questions about evolution to which he seeks answers.

Like most people with enquiring minds, I have at least a desultory interest in many fields beyond my own narrow specialty, including the mysteries of science. I am not a scientist, needles to say, although I think I have as much common sense as the next man and probably more in the way of an independent viewpoint than most.

Dr. Rubinstein starts off by establishing his intellectual credibility and by distancing himself from 'scientists.' By mentioning his 'independent viewpoint,' he plants the idea that scientists who support evolution may not be motivated purely by academic objectivity.

Furthermore, he appeals to common sense, implying that anyone who sees the scientific data without an agenda should find the same questions as he himself.

I have thus long been fascinated by the great dogma of the Theory of Evolution, which of course was formulated by Charles Darwin in his seminal work On the Origin of Species in 1859, probably the most important book published during the nineteenth century. The Theory of Evolution in its commonly-voiced form has long struck me as having so many dubious features that it is genuinely surprising that it has not attracted many more challenges than it actually has - although (I gather) a growing number of scientifically-trained commentators are also having their doubts.

In the next paragraph, Dr. Rubinstein continues his themes from the introduction. His 'genuinely surprising' statement again appeals to common sense and implies that anyone who does not question the 'dubious features' is working on some other, presumably prejudiced, basis. Furthermore, his use of the word 'dogma' in relation to evolutionary theory supports his implication that evolution's supporters are prejudiced.

One reason for the failure of scientists to challenge Evolution is that the whole subject is tainted and pervaded by the religion vs. science question, such that anyone who questions Evolution is automatically dismissed as a "Creationist" who believes in the literal truth of the Bible and who is seen as having an agenda of religious fundamentalism behind his doubts. Let me make clear, then, that I am not a religious fundamentalist...

The next statement is Dr. Rubinstein's pi�ce de r�sistance. The most common criticism of creationists is that they are motivated by religious dogma. Dr. Rubinstein draws together threads of the previous paragraphs and turns this argument against the scientists themselves, claiming that they are the ones who stick to dogma in the face of (presumably valid) criticism. Having established that, he claims that his questions are indeed not subject to any prejudice.

After having masterfully framed his argument, Dr. Rubinstein devotes most of the rest of the essay to the time-worn arguments of most creationists. The fact that so many people seem to be taking him seriously attests to the success of his rhetorical framing.

Breast cancer is a big issue in Katie's life: her maternal grandmother died of it; her mother has had two types of it and is currently living with metastasized bone cancer. I just ran across two interesting contrasting commentaries by breast cancer victims: noted feminist Barbara Ehrenreich, and a recent Newsweek "My Turn" commentary.

This morning, I heard a radio advertisement for a furniture store. The ad claimed that their current sale "is the most looked forward to event of the year."

Why not just "most anticipated"? Poor copyediting?

The LA Times is running a series of articles titled, "If America is richer, why are its families so much less secure?" From the first article:

Starting in the late 1970s, the nation's leaders sought to break a corrosive cycle of rising inflation and stagnating output by remaking the U.S. economy in the image of its frontier predecessor � deregulating industries, shrinking social programs and promoting a free-market ideal in which everyone must forge his or her own path, free to rise or fall on merit or luck. On the whole, their effort to transform the economy has succeeded.

But the economy's makeover has come at a large and largely unnoticed price: a measurable increase in the risks that Americans must bear as they provide for their families, pay for their houses, save for their retirements and grab for the good life.

A broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil � stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions, short unemployment spells, long-lasting unemployment benefits and well-funded job training programs � have been scaled back or have vanished altogether.

It looks like an interesting series of articles.

James Naughton has an article in the Guardian about how portable music and mobile telephones have contributed to the decline of public social space. Not an earth-shattering observation. But he makes one claim that bothers me:

It's not clear when [public social space started to decline] started, but my guess is that technology - in the shape of the Sony Walkman - had a lot to do with it. As the Walkman de nos jours, the iPod is simply continuing what Sony started. But not even Sony could have single-handedly destroyed the notion of social space. The coup de grce was administered by another piece of technology: the mobile phone.

In the U.S. at least, the decline of public social space has been quite well documented. And portable music devices and cell phones are really rather small, recent developments in the bigger trend. The rise of the suburbs, fear of strangers, dependence on automobiles for transportation are major factors in this decline.

This is so cool! This painting was created by Esref Armagan, a Turkish painter who has been blind since birth. Researchers are scanning Mr. Armagan's brain, in an attempt to understand how he can realistically paint things that he has never seen:

Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually do?

I've been thinking a lot lately about socio-economic class. It started when we took my wife's van in for repairs two weeks ago. The mechanic reported that it needed $600 in brake repairs, $1800 in A/C repairs and, in his opinion, the transmission might go out soon. He advised us to just get rid of it because it would cost us more trouble and money than it's worth in the coming years.

Continue reading "What does money buy?"

This is not a political post! I'm bugged by people using the word 'inaugural' interchangeably with 'inauguration' as a noun. Dictionary.com lists this as a valid usage of 'inaugural', but it really bugs me. And I strongly suspect that most people using it do so simply out of laziness: 'inaugural address', 'inaugural celebration', inaugural ball' all get truncated to just "inaugural". I may not be right, but that doesn't stop me from being irritated by this.

Slate offers a nice peek behind the curtains at how the Linguistic Society of America chooses its Words of the Year. Some excerpts:

In the Most Euphemistic category, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction seemed like a lock until Bill Frawley, the dean of the Columbia College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, suggested badly sourced, which was used by Colin Powell and others to mean "false."

This year the strongest contender [in the Most Outrageous category] was santorum, defined (and heavily promoted) by sex writer Dan Savage�in a campaign to besmirch the name of right-wing Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum�as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." We dismissed one potential problem�that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won�on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon's voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom.

In my recent post, Conformity and consumption, I linked to and quoted from The Rebel Sell. The article's authors argue that our attempts to reject mass culture just lead to different types of consumerism. The authors believe that there is no real way to avoid this trap:

It is tempting to think that we could just drop out of the race, become what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls �downshifters.� That way we could avoid competitive consumption entirely. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. We can walk away from some competitions, take steps to mitigate the effects of others, but many more simply cannot be avoided.

Maybe we cannot avoid all forms of competitive consumption, but I want to believe that we can consciously avoid many of them.

Today I received an email from someone who had read my earlier blog entry. This correspondent lives on a kibbutz in Israel, and writes:

We are 20 families, living in smalltown Israel. Each of us has his/her professional life. All salaries go to one bank account and split equally.

No member owns a private car. Not owning a car makes you indifferent to what make and model and year it is, as long as it goes from here to there with minimal comfort. It makes you indifferent to cars as objects.

What counts in this kind of life is what kind of a person you are to
your friends and kibbutz members, and not what you own.

Living in such a communal intentional community certainly seems to be one way to avoid many forms of competitive consumption, but it's a pretty radical step for most people. From my research a few years ago into intentional communities, it takes a pretty strong commitment to withdraw together from the mainstream (it helps that so many intentional communities have a spritual basis, I think).

Many intentional communities just don't make the break successfully. Or at the least, instead of competing with everyone in the culture, the members end up reproducing the same types of issues within their much smaller community.

The question is still open if and how I can 'downshift' in meaningful, though less radical, ways.

I've long thought of myself as an independent thinker and a skeptic of conformity and consumerism. In the last few years, however, it's occurred to me that much of what I thought of as my rebellion against conformity was, in fact, just a different type of conformity.

Go back to high school. For reasons that I do not fully understand, in the U.S. we tend to think of teenagers socially as falling into two groups: the 'socials' and everyone else. As a non-social, I thought of myself back then as a rebel against the conformity of that group. In actuality, I now realize, I conformed quite well and willingly to the norms of other groups: band member, speech nerd, etc.

Continue reading "Conformity and consumption"

Last week, Hannah had to do a report on an extinct animal of her choosing. Since she's such a horse nut, we decided she would write about one of the ancestors of the modern horse. As I was helping her find sources via Google, I was amazed by the number of hits that were creationist challenges to the scientifically accepted theory of horse evolution.

I'm not going to dignify any of those pages with a link, but this page summarizes and debunks the creationist arguments.

But the biggest puzzle to me was why the creationists have targeted equine evolution. As near as I can tell, it's not because the theory of horse evolution is particularly shaky. Rather, it's simply because horse evolution is apparently covered in some public school science textbooks.

Side note: asking kids to write a report about extinct animals seems to be a good indication that Hannah's school isn't caving in to the religious wackos.

Malcolm Gladwell, one of my f