January 2011
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up...”
– — Bill Vaughn
“Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve....”
– — Bill Vaughan
“New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to...”
– — Mark Twain
“The year is going, let him go; ring out the false, ring in the true.”
– — English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, about New Year’s Eve
“When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime,...”
– Joachim Prinz
“The first thing we need to recover is the knowledge that peace is a result and...”
– — Scot McKnight on Peace
(via azspot)
December 2010
Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not--But You Can Have... →
The Singularity is more than just hypothetic milestone in history. It’s also a peculiar movement today. Along with spaceflight tycoon Peter Diamandis, Kurzweil has launched Singularity University, which brought in its first batch of students in the summer of 2009. Kurzweil is also director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which held its first annual summit in 2006. The...
America in Decline: Why Germans Think Americans... →
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in...”
– — U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower on the Opportunity Cost of Defense Spending
(via wilwheaton)
Religion's Influence Declining? →
“Worldwide, America is identified as a religious country but a new Gallup poll suggests that Americans in near record numbers say that religion’s influence on their society is declining.” Its a happy thought for 2011…
(via posnonrel)
For Those of You A Year or Two Behind Everyone... →
“[The famous comedian, Richard Pryor] was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas...”
– — Richard Zoglin, in his 2008 book Comedy at the Edge, published by Bloomsbury, pp. 19-20, 44
Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies, Too: All-Meat Diet... →
Neanderthals went extinct approximately 28,000 years ago, and were previously believed to be carnivores. Now, researchers have found remnants of date palms, grains, seeds and legumes (including peas and beans), some of which were cooked, stuck in the teeth of three Neanderthals unearthed in caves in Iraq and Belgium. [Click-through above to read the rest of this intro, and note that at the bottom...
Ain't Misbehavin': Democratic Parenting →
Alyson Schafer’s latest parenting book, Ain’t Misbehavin’, is an excellent companion to her Honey, I Wrecked the Kids, the latter being a humane, sensible book on the theory and practice of raising kids with their cooperation (rather than in spite of them). Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a series of short articles arranged by subject, a kind of shorter, wittier reference about...
Trading in our sparkle and our freak →
Conservative columnist and National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg has an article in which he notes that the gay community has become increasingly bourgeois. We’ve traded in our outsider status — our anti-establishment, turn over the tables, radical revolutionary rhetoric and behavior — for an agenda that is conventional and middle-class. [And I agree with him.]
Censored: The World's Banned Video Games →
This is an annotated list of countries and institutions that ban video games, naming the games and detailing the (sometimes surprising) reasons for the censorship.
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in...”
– Buddha
(via ageofreason)
“Brace yourself for five piping-hot minutes of inertia,” said William Barrett....”
– Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Understimulation (very funny and interesting)
(via newshour)
Porn: Good for us? →
Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down.
Hatewatch: 4th Annual Smackdown Awards →
The Truth Wears Off →
If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.”...
The Original Birth of Freedom →
So to write the history of the idea of freedom is to navigate between two shores, one tragic and critical, the other epic and euphoric. Each epoch cultivates its own relation to freedom. Each, moreover, imagines its own Greece, for it was ancient Athens that first enacted — in the public square, the agora — our relation to freedom, or rather our conflicting relations with freedom. Epic ages (the...
Saccharin's Mostly Sweet Following →
Think saccharin is unsafe? You may want to think again. Elena Conis explains, in her L.A. Times article about food safety and the history of saccharine, how the artificial sweetener has been suspected of toxicity for decades, despite a huge number of research studies showing that it’s safe in low doses. Her explanation of saccarine’s problems are illustrative of many other additives...
