Fifty people stared straight at the sun to see the Virgin Mary and caused themselves to go blind.  It happened in THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India.

At least 50 people in Kottayam district have reportedly lost their vision after gazing at the sun looking for an image of Virgin Mary.

Though alarmed health authorities have installed a signboard to counter the rumour that a solar image of Virgin Mary appeared to the believers, curious onlookers, including foreign travellers, have been thronging the venue of the ‘miracle’.

This is not the first time I’ve heard of people staring at the sun to see the “Virgin Mary.”  Thousands of people have flocked to Medjugorje (in the former Yugoslavia).

Accounts of miraculous healings began to occur with frequency. . .  A cross on a nearby hill was said to sometimes turn into “a pillar of light,” and as at Fatima, the sun was said to “dance” in the sky—although only some of those present on these occasions saw the transmutation of the cross or the dancing of the sun.

One of my pals from childhood became a Catholic priest (I, on the other hand, became an ordained minister over the Internet).  He made a pilgramage to Medjugorje about 15 years ago.  He told me (shortly after he returned) that he believed that he saw a magic movement of light that represented the Virgin Mary communicating with him.  He said that dozens of people gathered to stare at the sun every day in Medjugorje.    I told him that I didn’t believe that he was looking at the “Virgin,” which didn’t go over very well. 

The point of this post is that religion can (sometimes) be harmful to your health.   Perhaps this standardized warning should be stamped onto the back of every church bulletin.

David Hume made the argument that the various claims of miracles made by conflicting religions serve as evidence that no such claims are true.   The topic is thoughtfully discussed by Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism:

In other words, Hume says, the conflicting miracle claims of various religions cancel each other out. These religions cannot all be true, since they make incompatible theological claims. (I note for completeness’ sake that they can all be false.) We can safely assume that, if a religion is false, any miracle claims advanced in its name are exaggerations or frauds. It follows that when considering whether any particular miracle claim is true, we must consider all the miracle claims of all other religions to count as evidence to the contrary. And since there are so many of these, no matter which religion’s miracle claims you’re considering, the vast number of miracle claims from other religions which stand in opposition to it make the claim under consideration very probably false.

Check out the full post (and the vigorous discussion) here.

I am a wealthy person, but not in the way most people understand “wealthy.”  I don’t drive an expensive car (I drive a 9-year old Saturn).   I don’t own a vacation house.  I don’t expect to retire for many years. 

I am wealthy because I am a survivor.  I have repeatedly escaped adversity and I’ve repeatedly stumbled into enough lucky situations.   These unplanned events add up to an undeniable and compelling form of wealth.

When most people consider how “fortunate” they are, they engage in some form of ”accounting.”  For starters, they add up their savings and they subtract amounts they owe to others.   That gives them a financial base line.  There’s more to figuring wealth, of course.  

Some people consider their health when they assess their wealth.  If their bodies are in tolerable working order, that’s something well worth noting, especially for those over thirty.   Among people discussing age, I often assert that after thirty, “age” is mostly about health rather than chronological age.  Young adults snicker at this (I used to).  But imagine a room full of forty-year olds.  Everyone in the room is about forty, but just look how different they are!  Some of them look and act like they’re 25 and others are functional 75 year olds, often due to obesity, history of injury or illness, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, lack of sleep or various detrimental addictions.  The bottom line is that if you’re body is working even tolerably, that’s a big plus when figuring out your “wealth.”

Some people might want to stir misfortune and lost opportunities into their personal calculus.  They dwell on those big job promotions they didn’t quite get.  They remind themselves that they went to crappy schools and they weren’t able to make the right social connections.  I admit that there are lots of things that keep us from rising higher, socially and financially.   It’s tempting to obsess about those things, but it’s also important to remember that it’s unlikely that those sorts of missed opportunities and misadventures really pulled down one’s general level of happiness.   In short, there’s a poor correlation between money and happiness.

Here’s another source of real wealth you should consider when calculating your fortune:  the lack of bad things and the bucketfuls of near-misses.   For instance, most adult drivers have had dozens of close calls when driving.   Each time that an oncoming car veers over the center line, but then pulls back before striking your car, that made you very rich indeed!   How do I calculate that infusion of wealth?  It’s easy.  If that car actually hit your car, it would have sent you to the hospital, or at least, to the car repair shop.  You would have lost dozens or hundreds of hours and dollars recuperating or fixing the damage.   If you had been struck by that oncoming car and you were laid up in the hospital with a serious injury, what would you be willing to pay to have a magic little elf appear in your room and simply wish away all the pain and frustration, to make you healed and put your life back in order?  Presumably a lot of money. (more…)

Obama’s full speech is here.    What follows is a long excerpt from this October 2, 2002 speech:

Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the President today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let’s fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil. Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

Here’s a composite photo of the Earth at night, published by NASA:

The brightest lights correlate with the densest populations. No political boundary lines are visible, of course.  

I once had a framed poster of this sort of image in my office.  One of my co-workers asked: “Did they take that amazing photo in one shot?  “No,” I explained.  “The earth is round, so only one side could be taken at once (at most) and only half of the earth is dark at the same time. 

For higher resolution versions of this photo, visit the NASA site.

There are hundreds of other terrific satellite photos to view at the NASA site, including this false color composite of the Island of Hawaii, (explained here).

The NASA site includes many shots of many other places on Earth.  Lots of geography through photography, as well as evidence of human impact on this small planet.  It’s well worth a long visit.  Here’s the home page for NASA’s Visible Earth collection.

Larry David is convinced that it’s not Hillary Clinton:

Here’s an idea for an Obama ad: a montage of Clinton’s Sybillish personalities that have surfaced during the campaign with a solemn voiceover at the end saying, “Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?”

How is it that she became the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn’t panic when he’s losing or get too giddy when he’s winning, who’s as comfortable in his own skin as she’s uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she’d actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.

Will.i.am has done another impressive job of assembling a huge talented group of people to convey his message.

To learn more about this video, visit Soupy Trumpet.

I recently went to the doctor because I have had pain in my back and left side.  The doctor sent me down to a diagnostic office for X-rays.   When those x-rays came back, my doctor thought he saw evidence of a pinched nerve.   But that’s not what I saw when I saw the X-ray results.    What I saw was that

There’s a big skeleton inside of my body!

It’s one of those big creepy skeletons much like you’d see on Halloween or in a horror movie.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.   I’m talking about a real skeleton.  Apparently, this skeleton inside of me moves about when I move about.  It imitates me.  When I walk, it walks.   It has a hideous grin.  The doctor tells me that it is white in color, just like the skeleton bones you hear about in graveyards.  

I don’t think life will ever be the same for me.  I don’t quite know what to do about this.   Should I admit to my friends that I have this condition?  Would they be able to handle that I have a skeleton in my body?  Will they start seeing me as some sort of animal?  Should I seek out a support group?  What else is inside of my body?  Bats? Ghosts? Living things that don’t even share my DNA?  This is creeping me out to have this bony alter ego.

I’m beside myself.

Those guys who send out spam by the bucket-load are really busy these days.    In the past month alone they have tried to sneak more than 9,000 of their fake comments onto this site.  These “comments” are attached to links to various sites selling drugs, loans, pornography and you name it.  The spammers hope that those who run legitimate blogs will not notice that these comments are not sincere.   If they can succeed in getting even a few websites to approve their comments, the appearance of their links will enhance their own site’s credibility on search engines like Google.   Hence, a vigorous and healthy spam industry.

Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with the great majority of these fake comments.  We use sophisticated software to keep out most of this spam.   A few hundred per week slip through, however. 

I thought it might be fun to share, without the attached links, the types of comments you have been missing:

Good comment. It brought light to an old idea I had.

I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view

This article sounds well, but how everything is related together

amazing stuff

Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts !

Thanks for what you said. It seems I have thought the wrong way… until now. Hope this helps also.

Try the Strait Back Golf Shirt, It’s made to help with posture on & off the course. Good luck

Ångström also postulated that an incandescent gas emits luminous rays of the same refrangibility as those which it can absorb.

Since then, most research has focused on absorbing external crash energy with crushable panels and reducing the motion of human bodies

This article sounds well, but how everything is related together?

great website

Great work. I am going to pass this along.

Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin.

In today’s column, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com offers links to numerous credible resources that document:

1. That the U.S. Government has illegally spied on thousands of Americans and continues to illegally spy on Americans.

2. That the White House blatantly lies about this gross misuse of government power;

3. That Congress (with the notable exception of Russ Feingold) doesn’t care enough about this issue to do anything about it, and readily buys the lies of the White House, and

4. If unchecked power is vested in government officials, they’re going to abuse that power;

Greenwald’s suggestion is that the existing three branches of government need a big push because they are simply not getting the job done:

Maybe the only way to ensure that vast surveillance powers aren’t abused is to have something like an independent check on how those powers are exercised — a check from, say, one of the branches other than the one exercising those powers.  It’s understandable that our Congress hasn’t yet decided that this is necessary because the whole “checks-and-balances” concept is quite new, just a couple hundred years old.

 Greenwald’s windup spells a-p-a-t-h-y:

At some point — many, many years from now — there will be some report issued by an executive agency or a Congressional Committee finally describing the nature of the illegal spying programs implemented by the Bush administration and detailing all of the abuses. And the same members of Congress who looked the other way and then voted to legalize these programs will express all kinds of outrage and surprise.

For its entire existence as a sport bodybuilding has struggled to gain acceptance with a mainstream audience. Some say it never will. They say that the freakishly exaggerated physiques of bodybuilders will never be applauded by the general public. And so, bodybuilding remains a cult sport. Looked down upon by many as a freak show.

As hard as it is for male bodybuilders to gain acceptance as legitimate athletes, it’s even harder for female bodybuilders. The male bodybuilder creates an exaggeration of the male form. They have taken the shape and the characteristics of male-ness and pushed it to its limits. They give the impression of being a “super-male”. Though freakish to some, at least it’s consistent with their gender.

The problem for very muscular women is that as they become more muscular the general public sees them as becoming less feminine and more manly. This has been a growing problem for women’s bodybuilding since the early nineties as advances in training and chemistry have enabled female bodybuilders to far exceed their natural muscle building capacity. Debates about “feminity vs masculinity” in female bodybuilding are an eternally hot topic on bodybuilding forums around the world and discussed with the same fervor that “God vs no God” is debated here on Dangerous Intersection.

Into this fray jumps celebrated photographer Martin Schoeller. Martin’s latest project is a series on female bodybuilders that is being exhibited at the Ace Gallery starting in March. Known for his stark brand of portraiture, Martin’s work has a frankness that is often controversial. Presidents, royalty and celebrities have all sat in the glare of his harsh lighting. The result has been described as honest or raw; real or unflattering, depending upon your point of view.

Martin’s art intrigues me as a documentary filmmaker. Martin attempts to get a photograph of the “real” person by removing all artifice and getting them to let down their guard. He does this by stripping away every crutch that photographers, the photographed, and we as viewers have come to expect. There are no costumes, no props, no scenery, no backdrop, sometimes no makeup, no sense of place or time or fashion. What is left is deceptively simple and leads people to think that it is cheap or easy. It is not, because the hard part comes when he then attempts to disarm his subject, relax them and catch them off guard. A tactic that I endeavor to employ every time I shoot footage for my films.

True to form Martin photographs the bodybuilders when they are at their most vulnerable. Spirited away in the midst of their contests before they know their placings, some of them literally right off the stage, the women are exhausted, insecure and dehydrated. He then strips them of their last crutch…he does not allow them to pose. Asking a bodybuilder not to pose is like asking a singer not to sing, a dancer not to dance or a politician to be silent. There is nothing left to do but be yourself. (more…)

Here are some of my favorite quotes on this ultimate topic of the meaning of life.  I pulled many of these quotes from my favorite quote site:  The Quotations Page, where you can find hundreds more quotes on the meaning of life” and thousands of quotes on numerous other topics.

Is there life before death?
Graffito, in Belfast

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Life is a long lesson in humility.
James M. Barrie (1860 - 1937)

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
R. D. Laing

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.
Fran Lebowitz (1950 - )
- More quotations on: [Life] [Sleep]

Life is just one damned thing after another.
Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)

It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead (1903 - 1968)

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
Brendan Gill

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot (1826 - 1877)

A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873)

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
Barry Switzer (1937 - )

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988), “Job”, 1984

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) (more…)

A new Salon.com book review gives us the depressing and infuriating answers to how much the Iraq adventure is costing the citizens of the United States.   The book, written by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, is titled “The Three Trillion Dollar War:  The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”   In typical dyfunctional White House style, White House spokesman Tony Fratto has argued that the book is misguided because “One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11.”  As though the occupation of Iraq has anything to do with 9/11 . . .

The numbers presented by Stiglitz and Bilmes are truly staggering:

“The Three Trillion Dollar War” talks about two types of war-related expenses: budgetary and social. Budgetary costs include operational spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, which they estimate will total from $1.7 trillion to $2.7 trillion. (Throughout the book, the authors put forward two sets of figures: one based on a “best-case scenario” and one on a far more likely “realistic-moderate” scenario.) This figure includes the expense of keeping armies in the field, paying veteran-related costs, replacing equipment ($400 billion for this alone), and paying interest on the vast debt we have incurred to fight the war. So far, Congress has actually appropriated $645 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, plus the $200 billion Bush asked for in 2008. As the authors point out, this is more than the U.S. spends annually on Medicare and Medicaid combined. And the monthly “burn rate” to pay for the wars has gone steadily up, from $4.4 billion in 2003 to $16 billion today. This means that every American household is spending $138 a month on the current operating expenses of the wars.

The additional “social” costs that are not borne by the government are harder to calculate — and more controversial.

As an aside, I find the neocon sleight of hand interesting.  The usual neocon line when it comes to taxes is that money paid as taxes really belongs to the people.   Fair enough.   Why then, don’t neocons emphasize that these wild, irresponsible, inefficient and often corrupt expenditures on the Iraq occupation (I don’t call it a “war”) are being paid with my money and your money, not “government” money?  If any of you American families out there have a better use for $138 each month than blowing up buildings and people in Iraq, raise your hand!

In an interview published by McClatchy Newspapers Feb 27, 2008, Stiglitz warns that the worst is yet to come regarding our military expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan:

In an interview, Stiglitz said that too much of the public debate had been over the wars’ operational costs while the real budget strains would show up only years from now.

“The peak expenditures are way out,” he said, noting that the peak expenditures for World War II vets came in 1993.

The McClatchy article reminds us of the rosy 2003 predictions of the Bush Administration:

When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and that rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Being off by a few decimal points in grade school gets a student a well-deserved “F.”  

Slate’s Nancy Nall Derringer tells you how easy it can be to nail a plagiarist:

I spent much of last Friday being congratulated for “brilliant reporting” that consisted of a minute’s worth of typing on my laptop. That’s how long it took for me to notice what seemed to be merely a case of egregiously obscure name-dropping . . . , paste the name into Google, and discover the entire sentence . . . had been lifted from a previously published essay by Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review.

The plagiarism was in a column for a newspaper I used to work for, the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Ind. The piece was a guest op-ed about the importance of a good college education written by Timothy S. Goeglein, a top aide to President Bush.

This is how easy it is to catch a plagiarist. 

Happy hunting.  I’ll write a glowing review of anyone else who can catch a plagiarizing political hack.  

We do many inefficient things.  Why don’t we simply do those things differently, in a more efficient way?  Often, we don’t change things because we’ve done them a certain way for so long that it would take too much time and psychological effort to do them in new ways, even though the new ways would be easier and more inefficient in the long run.

The QWERTY keyboard is a great example. We could rearrange our keyboards, which would cause us to struggle with our new configurations for a few months or years, but then we’d all be better for the change.  We don’t do this, however.  It would take too much initial effort.

Scientific theories are quite often strained by the discovery of new evidence that doesn’t fit the theory, yet we cling to the old inadequate theories.   This is another tendency toward path dependence.   For example, until the 17th century, “epicycles” were used to explain the perceived retrograde motion of planets and stars.  Epicycles were finally discarded in response to Kepler’s work.   Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific progress does not occur smoothly, but rather in the form of periodic revolutions that that he termed paradigm shifts. The fact that scientists tend to hold onto old unworkable theories longer than they should can be seen as another manifestation of path dependence.

It would make a lot of sense to simplify the spellings of many words used in the English language.  We don’t do this, however.  It would take too much time and effort in the short run, even though it would be well worth our while in the long run.  And shouldn’t we all switch over to a universal language, so everyone could understand everyone else?  Esperanto, anyone?

We don’t have the determination to make many long-term improvements due to the time and energy it would take to make the short-term change.

I thought of path dependence yesterday when I drove past the campus of St. Louis University, a large Jesuit college in St. Louis, Missouri.  I attended the St. Louis University school of Law.  I know many people who have received fine educations from St. Louis University.  I know that many of the people associated with University are good-hearted people who do wonderful things for the community.  On the other hand, St. Louis University is a school based upon an unsubstantiated belief that a bloody crucifixion occurring 2000 years ago “saved” humankind.  What does my well-reputed school of law have to do with claims that a man/God visited Earth to save his wretchedly undeserving children?  Many people would say nothing at all. The Law School is attend by many students who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. It could be argued that the education provided by the St. Louis University School of Law could equally be provided by a university that didn’t make any claim that a man named Jesus rose from the dead.  After all, I attended law school for three years and never once heard Jesus discussed in any law school class.  So, why is it that a law school that teaches nothing about Jesus is considered to be a Jesuit law school?  Good question.  I consider it to be another manifestation of path dependence.  The buildings and administration of an existing Jesuit college simply made for a good foundation for the Law School.  The Jesuits would argue that the SLU School of Law is as good as it is because it is Catholic.  They would hear some good arguments that this is not the reason from some of the many fine law schools that are not Catholic, however.

Speaking of law, the legal principle of stare decisis holds that an ongoing legal dispute should be decided a particular way solely because a previous and similar case was handled that way.   (more…)

As some of you may know, I am a dedicated reader of Language Log, the blog where a bunch of linguists hold forth on a variety of topics, sometimes only tangentially related to linguistics. Their posts ridiculing ignorant peeve-rants about the degeneration of English are hugely enjoyable; but another frequent theme is bad science writing and modern forms of innumeracy.

However, in this post Mark Liberman singles out an article in the New York Times Magazine for praise for finding a way to explain how “small but statistically reliable differences in group distributions” should not be seen as “essential properties of the groups themselves.”

The article profiles a school that is changing its educational policies based on hack theories about male and female brains:

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Are there differences between male and female brains? Research findings suggest there are some. Does any brain research yet suggest that differential single-sex education is superior to co-ed classrooms? Hardly.

Scans of boys’ and girls’ brains over time also show they develop differently. Analyzing data from the largest pediatric neuro-imaging study to date — 829 scans from 387 subjects ages 3 to 27 — researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health found that total cerebral volume peaks at 10.5 years in girls, four years earlier than in boys. Cortical and subcortical gray-matter trajectories peak one to two years earlier in girls as well. This may sound very significant, but researchers claim it means nothing for educators, or at least nothing yet. “Differences in brain size between males and females should not be interpreted as implying any sort of functional advantage or disadvantage,” the N.I.M.H. paper concludes. Not one to be deterred, Sax invited Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch at N.I.M.H., to give the keynote address at his N.A.S.S.P.E. conference in 2007. Giedd spoke for 90 minutes, but made no comments on schooling at all.

One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place.

Of course, in elementary school the height/locker room assignment would be almost completely random, and in middle school, there might be more girls than boys in in boys locker room, and vice-versa. A better analogy would be an adult fitness club that made locker room assignments based on height. How many people reading this might find themselves in the “wrong” locker room on this basis? And remember that the correlation between gender and height is stronger than the correlation between gender and brain development rates, (and also remember that there’s no evidence that the differential development rate is related to learning in any way.)

While being assigned to the wrong locker room would no doubt be traumatic, think about the harm that is caused by teaching girls that it is unfeminine to to like reptiles, or depriving boys of opportunities to learn how to work together cooperatively.

It’s time to chuck the “evidence-free rubbish” out of our schools.

We were just getting warmed up with the photos in the previous post.   You really must also view these incredible photos that are winners of the 2008 World Press Photos contest.  Truly spectacular work.

For reference, here are the results from the World Press 2007 photo contest.

Visit this site to view this years winning photos in the 2008 PDN travel photography contest.   You’ll find superb work in the categories of:

• Human Condition
• Extreme Exploration
• Urban Landscapes
• Snapshots
• Wilderness, and
• Open Series

You won’t be disappointed.  The contest is co-sponsored by National Geographic Traveler.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.