Granted I don't spend a lot of time perusing the salvos from the various sides of the religious culture wars, but regardless I've never seen a book receive almost entirely "best possible" or "worst possible" ratings from readers. It's not particularly surprising, given the almost total polarization among those who would want to read a book like this, but it's still amusing.
Also amusing is this book apparently uses the "banana is proof of God" argument I've seen pop up recently in various media. The general argument as put forth in its original source is that the banana has a number of characteristics that show it was designed for human consumption (it fits the human hand perfectly, it has a tab for easy opening, it's naturally color-coded to indicate when it can be consumed, it's nutritious, etc.). The easy retort to this is that the bananas we know are the result of a few thousand years of human-directed selective breeding (not unlike how our species took the timber wolf and selectively bred it into the poodle) and uncultivated bananas show no more "human-specific design" than any other edible seed pod. (It also begs the question of how the pineapple and the coconut fit in, given how difficult those fruits are to eat without tools of some sort.)
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Monday, April 27
Enhancements
This is interesting and refreshing. Even when it comes from a site whose search engine returns more than 2,000 articles on how to wear makeup (hypocrisy much?).
Cosmetics have been in use for at least 6,000 years (and likely much longer), and were used in ancient cultures like Egypt for the same reasons they're used today, so it's unlikely we'll see a rapid cultural rejection anytime soon. But some level of temperance would be nice; the revelation that even the models in Dove's "real women" ad campaign may have been modified to fit societal tolerances is more than a little disheartening.
This movie came up in my Netflix queue this week and, despite the dour subject matter, it's one of the best films I've seen this year.
As a related, but obscure, note, the number one method of suicide in the United States, by a fantastic margin, is the use of a firearm; self-inflicted gunshot wounds account for 52% of deaths. The next highest (hanging) accounts for a much smaller 22%, while wrist-cutting (despite its cinematic prevalence) is a paltry 1.5%. In Europe, interestingly, firearms and hanging switch places but otherwise keep roughly the same percentages.
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Wednesday, April 22
I Can' t Drive 55 . . . er, Wait, Yes I Can
For your edification, a brief Yahoo article on the scientific principles behind the observed evidence that my fuel economy goes from 32 mpg to 47 mpg (in a 10-year-old non-hybrid) when I hypermile at 55 mph on the Interstate. So slow down already.
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Happy Earth Day
I celebrated it a little early by watching the first episode of Life After People, a History Channel show about what would the world would look like at various lengths of time after every human is gone (the reasons behind said absence are neither explored nor regarded as important to the show; the show only concerns itself with what happens to the works we leave behind). It advances in increments, showing what happens one day, then six months, then a year, then 10 years, then 100 years, etc., up to 100 million years in the future. While watching the Statue of Liberty collapse into the ocean or the Houston Astrodome become a vine-encrusted swamp or the City of Boston vanish entirely over a million years might be somber, it's also somewhat beautiful in its own way.
I made my first Kiva loan over the weekend. Kiva is a Web-based facilitator of microloans, a system where multiple people loan small amounts of money to loan applicants in impoverished or developing nations as a "startup boost" to economic independence. This allows, as an example, 50 people in the first world to loan $25 each to an African village or a Cambodian fisherman, which allows the recipients to buy a generator or a shop that in turn leads to an increase in financial standing that would otherwise be impossible. The recipients then use the increase in income to pay back the loan on a scheduled term (just like a standard car or mortgage payment), which allows the lenders to then re-loan the money to other recipients.
The concept is similar to other "distributed" systems (such as distributed computing projects like Folding@home or BitTorrent); rather than a single source making one large expenditure (whether a financial loan or a large computer file), distributed networks allow many participants to contribute small pieces of the whole. While I may not be able to loan someone $2,000, I can be one of many people to loan $25, and while $25 is fairly insignificant to me, it can make a world of difference to someone whose yearly income is equal to a few thousand dollars. The concept of microcredit earned its originators the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
I saw an article today that melded my separate interests in photography and election procedures and brought up some interesting questions. A county election supervisor is attempting to bring misdemeanor charges against an anonymous voter who photographed his completed ballot and posted the photo online. The laws governing elections are very complex and vary from state to state, but most include some sort of prohibition against documenting your ballot (which was news to me). A little research reveals that the intent behind those laws is to increase the difficulty of using money or intimidation to coerce a voter into voting a certain way (since the shady party will want proof that the ballot was indeed cast the way the greedy and/or scared voter says it was). Okay, fine. That seems to be an antiquated method of voter fraud, but it's not unreasonable to try to curtail it. But to now apply that law to voters who voluntarily reveal their ballots with no voter fraud in mind seems to be going against the original intent: that a voter's actual vote belongs only to the voter. In the absence of evidence of fraud or intimidation, prosecuting something like this seems to be a case of following the letter of the law at the expense of its spirit.
To Meghan, who joins the happy homeowners club. Welcome to equity, a giant tax break, more space, more privacy . . . and the joys of being responsible for all of your own repairs and improvements. :) Moving will suck, but after that I'm sure you'll enjoy it immensely. :)
I found this interesting. I'll admit I'm not a big advocate for epilepsy education. Mine doesn't really affect me that much, and I have this aversion to drawing attention to something that happened *to* me rather than something I voluntarily chose to investigate; it seems reactionary rather than the result of a conscious plan to me. I can understand it would be different had it happened to someone close to me rather than to me directly, and I'm aware I'm somewhat odd, so I have no animosity toward those who want to support education and research into something that affects them personally. It's just not for me. I give my money to breast cancer research instead.
That aside, I really like Greg Grunberg, and this somewhat rambling clip on CNN covered a number of topics I found intriguing.
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Wednesday, April 8
Sliding Scale, Redux
While I'd expected the thesis of this post to be valid in the near future, I was hoping it wouldn't be quite this soon. Two more shootings in two days.
Well, shucks, Iowa. While your recent accomplishment is most certainly momentous and deserving of pride, I think Vermont actually tops you this month. Not only did they approve gay marriage, but they did it legislatively rather than judicially, and by a support margin strong enough to override an executive veto. Wow.
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Whoops
I'm not sure what this guy thought would happen when he illegally downloaded a copy of an unfinished, unreleased movie whose leak is being investigated by the FBI and then not only reviewed said movie in his official job as a news columnist but also joked about how easy it was to download, but I don't think the actual result was that unexpected.
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Monday, April 6
Go Nebraska
I still think Iowa takes the "best state" award for its latest supreme court ruling, but apparently Nebraska beats it out for "happiest state" in the most recent polls (although a pessimist might cynically propose the nomenclature "least unhappy" state, since it's not like the animals from Sleeping Beauty are fluttering about the prairies in song). One of the prevailing factors in the midwest bliss, according to the article, is the economic buffer created by the culture of fiscal frugality that makes the concept of living outside your means anathema to the residents of the heartland, as compared to the "extravagant" lifestyles of the coasts, leading to lower unemployment rates, fewer house foreclosures and a stabler local economy. I imagine this is even more apparent in non-metropolitan areas (which is the entire state except Omaha and, arguably, Lincoln); I don't know what the unemployment rate is in my hometown, but I'd wager it's lower than Omaha's. Closer-knit communities and "midwest values" likely play into that heavily, but another factor is the lack of "expendable" industries in non-metropolitan areas; it's hard to lay off staff from a chain retail store, a sit-down restaurant or an entertainment venue when those facilities don't exist in the town.
Mostly neutral, but annoying: Jackhammering on my street at 8 a.m. on my day to sleep in. Snow storm tomorrow.
Negative: A national and perhaps global weariness from and pessimism over a host of issues of debatable levels of influence but most definitely including the economic downturn and its effects leading to a rash of mass shootings in the U.S.
- April 4: Three police officers in a Pittsburgh, PA standoff - April 3: Fourteen people (including the suicide of the shooter) at an immigration center in New York - March 29: Eight people at a nursing home in Carthage, NC - March 29: Six people (including the suicide of the shooter) in Santa Clara, CA - March 21: Four police officers in an Oakland, CA traffic stop - March 10: Eleven people (including the suicide of the shooter) in a rural Alabama county
For my nervous family members, I'm not even addressing the gun control argument that will erupt between the polarized camps that feel strongly about this issue. A more salient point in my opinion is that at least two of those incidents were catalyzed by shooters who had recently lost their jobs and were emotionally distraught in the same way that millions of Americans are being distraught. While certainly not a one-to-one ratio, it's no secret that more extreme options have always become more prevalent in social groups facing greater amounts of stress and lesser amounts of optimism about the future. Even more disturbing is the inurement and apathy that the weight of woes seems to have deposited; while the December shooting here in Omaha received national, multi-day coverage, I'm aware of three of the shootings in the above list only because I put the word "shooting" into Yahoo News to find the exact dates of the other three. I wouldn't be surprised to see these sorts of incidents continue to occur, especially among those hit hardest by the economy, and to continue to receive less coverage than they would in more affluent years. People, both those at the edge of their coping ability and those keeping up with events outside of their immediate sphere, can only handle so much bad news at a time.
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Friday, April 3
Over the River
Go Iowa. I'm normally not a big "Nebraska vs. Iowa rivalry" sort, but, given that Nebraska chiseled its discrimination directly into its Constitution, I'm going to have to go with "Iowa is a better state" today.
I have no doubt the next step in Iowa will be a voter referendum on a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (the standard response to a state supreme court striking down a legislative statute to the same effect). That's the people's right, so I don't begrudge the process. But I'm not looking forward to the emotional appeals like the following:
The Rev. Keith Ratliff Sr., pastor at the Maple Street Baptist Church in Des Moines, went to the Supreme Court building to hear of the decision.
"It's a perversion and it opens the door to more perversions," Ratliff said. "What's next?"
What's next should be allowing people in committed relationships the same basic rights and freedoms promised everyone in the state's constitution. Suggestions that this is unlocking the door to the legalization of licentiousness and depravity are little more than slippery slope fear-mongering.
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Thursday, April 2
Defining "Predation"
"Unfortunately, youth don't have the same judgment as adults," she said, "and often, adults don't have the same technical savvy as the youth."
That seems to be a fairly decent summary of one of the issues in this case and the larger issue of the underage voluntarily producing media that falls under the umbrella of child pornography. I think everyone (except of course the teenagers involved and actual sexual predators) would agree that this is not a good thing, a self-destructive whim much in the same vein as binge drinking or drug use, likely saddled with the concomitant themes of peer pressure and a search for acceptance. As well, I'm sure there are adults on the receiving end of these exchanges who are fully accountable to both ethical standards and legal statutes who *should* be appropriately culpable.
I can't, however, help but find the idea of charging the minors with possession and distribution of child pornography, with its associated penal consequences and its basically forever stigma of "registered sex offender," to be out of line with the intentions of the statutes that make those charges possible: catching "predators" and preventing them from harming other children. Just as we don't charge the suicidal with attempted murder or the self-harming with assault (but rather provide counseling and psychiatric care), it seems unwarranted to impose a harsh punishment on a child for "preying" on herself when counseling and education seem a much more productive course. The acid test is the question of whether she poses a threat to other children, now or in the future. I would hope the legal authorities take the time to ask that question.
Linde, wracked with guilt and anguish as she was, redeemed herself with a surprise candy basket. She also mentioned, when she checked to make sure it arrived, that her school is switching her teaching focus yet again this year, this time to Art, but that one more year grants her tenure so she's putting up with it.
And something about burning her house down. After buying a new one, of course.
I gave my notice today. Things just weren't working out at work, between the random drug testing and them actually wanting me to do work. I know the economy is slow, but I'm sure it's not nearly as bad as the media makes it out to be. I expect I'll find a higher-paying job within a couple of weeks. Maybe in banking or real estate. Until then I can live off my 401(k) and my credit cards. If anyone knows of any jobs available that pay more than 70k (preferably with a company car), let me know.
And if that wasn't transparent enough, happy April Fools' Day. :)