Links Dump
drorzel | August 9, 2011News: The Education/Religion Connection - Inside Higher Ed
"For years, a commonly held belief has been that more educated Americans are less likely to embrace religion. But an article forthcoming (abstract available here) in The Review of Religious Research suggests that the relationship between education and faith is more nuanced, and that more education has a negative impact only on certain religious questions, not on all of them.
Some religious beliefs and practices -- including belief in God and regular prayer -- increase with years of education, the research found."
Lev Grossman |…
drorzel | August 6, 2011Chuck Klosterman on Planet of the Apes and Project Nim - Grantland
I'm a pretty massive Planet of the Apes fan, even though I'm never able to watch an entire Planet of the Apes movie without reading a magazine. It's definitely my favorite film franchise that's 80 percent boring. I really, really love the first 20 minutes of the 1968 original film, and I've probably rewatched that opening sequence a dozen times: I relate to Charlton Heston's character2 and adore the idea of gorillas riding horses while playing instruments that remind me of Jonny Greenwood's solo album. There are numerous…
drorzel | August 5, 2011Chuck Klosterman on the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction - Grantland
"[T]hat's what's so weird about the whole Hall of Fame process: The public sees it as an argument, but -- within the mind of the elite athlete -- it must be one of the most confusing, painfully personal scenarios they'll ever experience. Being inducted into a Hall of Fame is both the greatest thing that can happen to an athlete and the effective end to his or her cultural import; being rejected by a Hall of Fame is a major blow to one's self-image and the single-best thing that can happen to a retired player's legacy. The…
drorzel | August 4, 2011The science and magic of beer | Andy Connelly | Science | guardian.co.uk
"Beer is the juice of grain skilfully treated: it is liquid bread. The first people to make beers as we know them today were the Sumerians, who cultivated cereal grains specifically for brewing and drank beer to honour their gods. Many cultures have seen beer as a gift from God (a medieval English term for yeast was godisgoode). It is an expression of place and tradition - one of the few truly regional foods to which we are regularly exposed.
Brewing is a combination of art and science and great brewers are blessed with…
drorzel | August 3, 2011The Worlds Weirdest Book
A truly unique work of fiction, ââ¬ËThe Codex Seraphinianusââ¬Ë is a book that appears to be a visual encyclopedia of some unknown world or dimension. Written down in one of that worlds beautiful curving languages, the book by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini, explains the odd inhabitants and their colorful behaviors. The book was created between 1976 and 1978 and for the low price of about $500.00 you can ponder over your own copyââ¬Â¦
Views: Myths About Fair Use - Inside Higher Ed
"Academics potentially enjoy some of the greatest…
drorzel | August 2, 2011The Virtuosi: Physics in Sports: The Fosbury Flop
"Physics has greatly influenced the progress of most sports. There have been continual improvements in equipment for safety or performance as well as improvements in technique. I'd like to talk about some physics in sports over a series of posts. Here I'll talk about a technique improvement in High Jumping, the Fosbury Flop.
The Fosbury Flop came into the High Jumping scene in the 1968 Olympics, where Dick Fosbury used the technique to win the gold medal. The biggest difference between the Flop and previous methods is that the jumper goes over…
drorzel | August 1, 2011(The semi-automatic method I've been using to post Links Dumps has broken, so here's a hand-edited version of what I've tagged for the last few days. Suggestions of alternative automated ways to post tagged links are welcome in comments.)
Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings -- Crooked Timber "vi: Moria
Like Fangorn, ancient and deep, with hints of the long labor of a great people. There is, supposedly, a monumental city of stone down here somewhere but it's so dark I can't see a damn thing. No, wait! A shaft of light illuminates some runes! They read as follows:
^…
drorzel | July 29, 2011
Design View / Andy Rutledge - News Redux
"Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days."
(tags: journalism internet technology design blogs culture society)
Richard Dansky » Six Things You Don't Want To Do At A Genre Writing Convention
"3-…
drorzel | July 28, 2011
How to turn the GOP into a party of liberals - War Room - Salon.com
"July 28, 2011: Barack Obama announces he's had second thoughts, now fully endorses Boehner debt ceiling plan, "Cut, Cap and Balance," and Reid plan. His new bottom line? He'll accept anything Congress can pass, as long as it isn't just a short-term clean debt limit extension.
July 28 (20 minutes later): House passes clean debt limit extension through 2013."
(tags: politics us economics silly blogs)
Ravings of a Feral Genius: The Feral Genius Applies For A Government Job
"Ridiculous as these examples sound, I still…
drorzel | July 27, 2011
Workers of the world unite | slacktivist
"So the NFL lockout has ended in some kind of deal that I would summarize here except that the details of professional sports contract negotiations make my eyes glaze over and, since I'm no longer getting paid to edit NFL labor stories for a daily paper, I've reverted back to ignoring all those details.
My frustration with this long saga isn't just with the tediousness of the dispute, it's based more on the perpetual missed opportunity that professional athletes' unions largely ignore to build connections with other workers in other unions."
(tags:…
drorzel | July 26, 2011
A Bedtime Story | Easily Distracted
"Now this is a new thing in my lifetime, I grant you: a Congressman who is going to run on the argument that it's time for America to take its place among the poor and struggling nations of the world. I don't have to study go to Zimbabwe any more to study Zimbabwe: my Congressman is doing his best to bring it to me. Thanks, Congressman!"
(tags: politics us society culture history economics stupid blogs easily-distracted)
drorzel | July 25, 2011
nanoscale views: Einstein, thermodynamics, and elegance
"Recently, in the course of other writing I've been doing, I again came to the topic of what are called Einstein A and B coefficients, and it struck me again that this has to be one of the most elegant, clever physics arguments ever made. It's also conceptually simple enough that I think it can be explained to nonexperts, so I'm going to give it a shot."
(tags: science physics blogs natelson atoms optics quantum)
Water Fountain Shows Cool Physics | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Here is a clever water fountain in Japan.
What did I notice…
drorzel | July 24, 2011
Katie Baker on the New York Times wedding section - Grantland
"This renewed series will attempt, through a rigorous quantitative method detailed below, to determine the following:
Which couple best exemplifies both the unique spirit and impossible standards of everything the New York Times "Weddings/Celebration" section stands for?
Back in the day I used a scoring-system metric originally devised by Alexis Swerdloff but I felt it needed a more modern update. This new and improved NUPTIALS (Names, Universities, Parents, Tropes, Identifiers, Avocations, Locales, and Special Situations)…
drorzel | July 23, 2011
Quantum Diaries
At the moment anyone who has even a passing interest in particle physics is thinking about the results being presented that European Physical Society High Energy Physics 2011 conference (referred to as simply "EPS".) It is at EPS that we hear news about the search the Higgs boson, and the news is tantalizing! The talks are all publicly available, and to understand them fully you need to know a little bit about how limits work.
(tags: science physics particles experiment blogs)
Bill Simmons on WWE music - Grantland
"In more than 30 years of following wrestling, the first…
drorzel | July 22, 2011
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault - Anil Dash
"As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we've developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that have been learned when we create our communities online. But, by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to…
drorzel | July 21, 2011
Towards an Opt-Out Button in Left-Liberal Debates | Easily Distracted
"Here's what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call "good enough". I don't want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my name in lights, have the penthouse apartment on the East Side. I don't want to write out a lengthy policy manifesto on what American foreign policy towards 21st Century African states should be and then spend the next ten years taking meetings and writing op-eds to push my plan. I just want to…
drorzel | July 20, 2011
The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts-and-sciences strategic plan in the past 15 years. No one can remember much about any of those plans, but another one is in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is,…
drorzel | July 19, 2011
Views: Perspective in Math and Art - Inside Higher Ed
"As a mathematician, I expect that people at parties will tell me that they're no good at math. I'm used to my fellow professors confessing their ignorance of my subject. I understand that many of my students think math is hard and scary. That's why I was so eager to do drawing -- something I figured would be easy and approachable -- in my math classes.
But to my great surprise, I found that it is the art, not the math, that makes people nervous. As my co-author Marc Frantz told me, most college graduates have a bit of math in college,…
drorzel | July 15, 2011
Guest Blog: Why Is Quantum Gravity So Hard? And Why Did Stalin Execute the Man Who Pioneered the Subject?
In fact, the field of quantum gravity was born in 1916, even before physicists had properly explained the other fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Twenty years later, a young Russian physicist by the name of Matvei Bronstein realized that gravity would be the hardest force of all to quantize. But before he could do something about that, he was swept up in Stalin's Great Terror and executed at the age of 30.
(tags: science physics magazines gravity theory history…
drorzel | July 14, 2011
Jamie Leigh Jones verdict: Jury trials aren't always satisfying, but they're better than angry mobs. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
As Alan Dershowitz explained last week: "A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty. That's because only one person is on trial in a criminal case, and if that one person is acquitted, then by definition there can be no justice for the victim in that trial." If all that sounds cold, lawyerly, and inhuman, that's because the justice system is designed to be all those things. Juries…