1/31 The theodicy problem in a hilarious three-minute video: Mr. Deity. (Thanks to Joe for the link.) And Robert Tracinski explains why Intelligent Design is a pseudo-theory.
1/30 Don’t date your optician: Eugene Volokh takes on Washington state’s ridiculous sexual harassment legislation.
1/29 Live Science has a good slide show entitled The Top 10 Ancient Capitals. And great photos of a contemporary financial capital: Hong Kong.
1/27 More good thinking from Tyler Cowen and Don Boudreaux on income inequality. And on happiness and creature comforts: here is Witold Rybczynski’s slide show on the evolution of the luxury bathroom. (Via Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist blog.)
1/26 About: Entrepreneurs interviews productivity expert David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. (Thanks to Virginia for the link.) And Presentation Zen comments on positive competition: Effective competitors operate from an “abundance mentality” rather than a “scarcity mentality”.
1/25 At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a dialogue of a sort on philosophy major career trajectories. (Thanks to Chris for the link.) More seriously, here’s a list of well-known philosophy majors. And here a summary of philosophy majors’ performance on the GRE, LSAT, and GMAT tests. Not that we’re bragging or anything.
1/24 Freedom House has released its Freedom in the World 2007 report. One significant point: “Although the past 30 years have seen significant gains for political freedom around the world, the number of Free countries has remained largely unchanged since the high point in 1998.”
1/23 Rossputin posts this insightful essay by George Friedman on Iran’s strategic thinking about Iraq. In connection with that, check out this map of Sunni and Shia Muslim population distribution. Update: Facing the Islamist Menace—Christopher Hitchens assesses Mark Steyn’s new book and offers his own bracing list of steps we should take. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
1/22 The pre-Enlightenment mind is still with us: “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man”. (Via
And here is a collection of frighteningly hilarious fundamentalist opinions.
1/20 John Stossel has a good example of an unintended consequences of ill-thought out regulation: shut down those who feed the hungry. And Wise Legislators in Michigan have made adultery punishable by life in prison.
1/19 Fayetteville State University has FIRE’s college speech code of the month
whatever the code likely means, it’s unconstitutional.
1/18 Finally, someone is serious about raising the minimum wage to a realistic level. Of course, that may not be high enough for those who obsess about wealth disparities.
1/17 Professor Mayer on liberty’s prospects in 2007. And Shawn Klein reviews Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl’s Norms of Liberty, a defense of neo-Aristotelian liberalism in ethics and politics.
1/16 Repulsive: slavery flourishing in the 21st century. And here is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report. 1/25 update: Italy arrests 2,000 for human trafficking. (Via ifeminists.)
1/15 Ayn Rand is sometimes charged with exaggerating to the point of absurdity the implications of the abstract philosophical principles she rejects. And then, as Protagoras reports, along comes a philosopher who advocates the principle and the absurdity. Compare that with this prescient example from Rand’s 1963 essay, “Collectivized Ethics”: “It is medically possible to take the corneas of a man’s eyes immediately after his death and transplant them to the eyes of a living man who is blind, thus restoring his sight (in certain types of blindness). Now, according to collectivized ethics, this poses a social problem: Should we wait until a man’s death to cut out his eyes, when other men need them? Should we regard everybody’s eyes as public property and devise a ‘fair method of distribution’?”
1/13 Testing obedience to authority: Is independence an especially difficult virtue for humans? (Via Cato@Liberty.) Yet has the Enlightenment made us more moral? I’m with Arnold Kling on this one.
1/12 Horace wrote, “Though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever return.” In that spirit, Bruce Boyd takes on the Theory-is-All followers of Derrida. (Thanks to Bob for the link.)
1/11 115 photos of New York City at night. And more striking science images via micro-photography.
1/10 A review of Alessandro Scafi’s Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth: Fascinating insight into the late mediaeval mind.
1/9 First the hot coffee. Now McDonald’s’ dangerous pickles are harming customers (and their spouses). (Thanks to Beverly for the link.) Bizarre, bizarre, bizarre: Mike Munger on the treatment of ice price-gougers after a storm in North Carolina. Meanwhile, George Reisman shows us how The New York Times is pushing poverty as an environmentally-friendly philosophy.
1/8 Christian Delacampagne reflects on the sorry Redeker affair as a symptom of the decline of France as a serious intellectual and moral power. A key quotation: “Today in France, research on the most contested issues of race and religion is taboo unless one exhibits the ‘right’ politics. To speak at conferences or to be considered for important posts, a scholar must be prepared to describe the colonial era in French history as nothing less than an exercise in genocide and to denounce American policy in the Middle East as barbaric cruelty. Those who refuse to comply find themselves shut out.” If true, French universities are not likely to improve their weak standing in studies such as this one.
1/7 On the philosopher of Islamism: What Seyyid Qutb saw in Colorado. Here is the pugnacious Christopher Hitchens on religion. Julian Baggini asks, What is sin? Robert White and Peter Cresswell have some insights into Mother Teresa’s saintliness. Via Philosopher Stone, here are several less-than-popular-but-nonetheless-fascinating Biblical verses.
And I was almost convinced by this decisive refutation of atheism. (Thanks to Joe for the link.)
1/6 A postmodern curator takes a critical hatchet to Ansel Adams’s photographs—or, as Kenneth Brower puts it in The Atlantic Monthy, “The aesthete from the East has come out west and cut Ansel Adams down to size.” (Thanks to Michael for the link.)
1/5 100 years after the launching of Casa dei Bambini, Montessori goes mainstream. And educator Lisa VanDamme discusses pattern recognition and conceptual education.
1/4 Johan Norberg’s nomination for the best book of 2006.
1/3 If a business kept its books the way the government does, its owners would go to jail. So why the chronic complacency over this? Ross Kaminsky has a sharply-worded reproof of those caught up in zero-sum government pork-barrel game.
1/2 Shawn Klein posted a funny list of playful questions and observations. For humor and higher education: a series of dispatches from lecturer Oronte Churm of Hinterland University. And in honor of the upcoming Year of the Pig, entrepreneurship-blogger Jeff Belmont has collected some wry observations on pigs and entrepreneurship.
1/1 Let’s start the new year with this Presentation Zen review of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. One of many insights: ‘Indian physician Madan Kataria points out in Pink’s book that many people think that serious people are the best suited for business, that serious people are more responsible. “[But] that’s not true,” says Kataria. “That’s yesterday’s news. Laughing people are more creative people. They are more productive people.” Somewhere along the line we were sold the idea that a real business presentation must necessarily be dull, devoid of humor and something to be endured not enjoyed. And if you use slides—and God help you if you don’t—the more complex, detailed, and ugly the better. After all this is serious business, not a day at the beach. This approach is still alive and well today, but I hope in future that this too will become “yesterday’s news.” It’s possible. Remember, for example, that twenty years ago or so business—especially big business—rejected the idea of a graphical user interface for “serious computing” because business should be “difficult” and “serious,” ideas that seemed incongruent with a mouse (how cute!) icons, pictures, and color, etc. Today, of course, almost every serious business person users a computer with a GUI.’