Religion in the White House: a history

Richard Balmer is a historian of religion. On Jon Stewart's show, he surveyed the relationship between religion and the Presidency since John F. Kennedy:

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Penn and Teller explain sleight of hand in three minutes

Penn and Teller's explanation of sleight of hand is delightful. You get the whole lecture in about three minutes. As entertaining as this video is, it could also serve to remind us of a set of principles by which humans deceive each others through fallacious and misleading arguments. Because we are creatures of limited attention and growing fatigue, we are vulnerable to cognitive misdirection much as we are vulnerable to prestidigitation. For more on human attentional limitations, see here. Further, I have given considerable thought to the idea that much human decision-making could be explained in terms of attentional limitations. For more, see this paper I wrote in 1996.

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DI is still under construction, but now there’s artwork in our header

Although more work remains to be done, DI is making progress on its site reconstruction, as you can see. Many of our navigation features are now functional and the site mostly "works." Tonight, "Alistair" of Solostream (the company that created WP-Vybe, the WordPress template I'm using) helped me figure out what I had been doing wrong, thereby enabling the artwork to pop into the header. That artwork really helped to class the joint up, I'd say. I do want to mention that Solostream is a terrific company that provides first rate support. They offer several "magazine" style templates for WordPress websites, and their prices are incredibly reasonable. Check out Solostream's website for details and tutorials. I'll end with a bit of trivia: the "dangerous intersection" you can see in the header is a real-life intersection located at 8th and Cerre, downtown St. Louis, just south of the baseball stadium.

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High-resolution multi-stitched inauguration photo

At Barack Obama's inauguration, David Bergman kept busy with his robotic camera mount used in tandem with his Canon G10 camera. After the inauguration, he used his Macbook Pro to stitch together the resulting 220 images into one gigantic 2gb tiff file. The resulting 1,474 megapixel image is dramatic and fun to explore. Equally impressive is that the Gigapan camera mount and the G10 camera he used are not expensive--they can both be purchased for less than $1,000 (less than $500 each).

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A Rant in Rhyme Saves Time

Here is a beat poem that first appeared on YouTube as a concert bootleg with subtitles about a month ago. The artist quickly had the bootleg taken down. And then received a Storm of protests, requests to post it again. Finally, he put it up himself. Sans subtitles, or even video. So listen well to a rational rant that many of us would love to be capable of delivering. Storm, by Tim Minchin I've seen those warning eyes from both my wives, and held my piece for a while. But the temptation is great to emulate this artists storm of bile.

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