Character is forged by failure. There are thousands of examples, and here are a few of them: A worthy segue is the advice of psychologist Carol Dweck: Praise hard work, not intelligence, because doing the latter makes students unwilling to take chances that risk failure.
I have from time to time made the point that the entire debate over abortion and birth control and almost the whole edifice of what we call Fundamentalism in the world, in whatever religion, is all essentially over controlling women. Here is an article which has one of the most bizarre takes on the entire issue I've ever seen. The central premise is early on stated in 0ne sentence that defines all of this nonsense, in whatever creed you care to name. "Sexual relationships, while enacted privately, are public property." The twists in logic, never mind rationality, are among the most byzantine I've ever encountered. What is more, the writer doesn't seem to understand that this "philosophy" reduces children to little more than marks on a scorecard. The exhibition of marital health and fidelity is all that is important. The attempt to limit family size and indulge private acts privately for private purposes is reduced to an attempt to deceive the community, pure and simple. But ultimately, as in all other instances of this kind of obscene interference with the personal, it is the women who bear the costs, the burdens, and the responsibility. I suppose the next step would be to devise a kind of tracking bracelet for the penis and vagina so someone somewhere can determine when either is being used and where. I have no answer for this kind of inanity (or insanity). The fact that this makes sense to some people disturbs me no end, because it means that some people cannot see past the end of their own prurience. Yes, I said prurience, because to come up with this kind of thing, rather than demonstrating a balanced healthy appreciation for sex, shows an obsession with it that can only be described as prurient.
Conservative. Liberal. We act as if we know what these labels mean. Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct. Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged. Well. Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions. Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people. It was meant to be taken as humorous. But I’m not being entirely flip here. When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve. I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart. At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them. How does this apply here? Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate: Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened.
Here's a big page-full of well-presented optical illusions and paradoxes. Many of these are oldies-but-goodies, but there are more than a few that were new to me. Many of these are startling. The site offers succinct explanations for many of the illusions. Related post:http://dangerousintersection.org/2006/12/08/optical-illusion-extravaganza/ And don't forget that we are subject to mental illusions too.
According to new book by Nicolas Carr, the brain's plasticity is a double-edge sword--to the extent that we make ourselves into Internet skimmers, we allow other cognitive abilities atrophy. Carr's new book was reviewed at Salon.com by Laura Miller:
The more of your brain you allocate to browsing, skimming, surfing and the incessant, low-grade decision-making characteristic of using the Web, the more puny and flaccid become the sectors devoted to "deep" thought. Furthermore, as Carr recently explained in a talk at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, distractibility is part of our genetic inheritance, a survival trait in the wild: "It's hard for us to pay attention," he said. "It goes against the native orientation of our minds."
Concentrated, linear thought doesn't come naturally to us, and the Web, with its countless spinning, dancing, blinking, multicolored and goodie-filled margins, tempts us away from it. (E-mail, that constant influx of the social acknowledgment craved by our monkey brains, may pose an even more potent diversion.) "It's possible to think deeply while surfing the Net," Carr writes, "but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages or rewards." Instead, it tends to transform us into "lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment."
Rather than claim that the Internet makes us "stupid" (a term used in the title of an article on this topic that Carr published in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"), it would be more accurate to suggest that constant skimming and clicking develop those particular skills at the expense of the ability to focus deeply. Thus, we trade-off one ability for another, it seems, an idea captured by Howard Gardner's suggestion that it is misleading to speak of a unified version of intelligence--hence his concept of the multiple intelligences. There is no doubt that the ability to quickly navigate the Internet and to multitask can be quite useful in many situations. The question is whether a long-term development of these skimming and clicking skills, to the extent that it diminishes traditional skills associated with "intelligence," leads to the kinds of ideas and abilities that we need to solve modern day problems faced by society. This is an issue recently raised by Barack Obama:With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.
I notice that I am often not focusing well when I read on a screen, especially after long hours of looking at the screen. I find that my focus improves dramatically when I switch to printed material, especially when I also use a pen to ink up the article with my own highlights and notes. Perhaps this is another illustration of the same problem noted by Carr. Perhaps I will need to actually buy and read the print version of Carr's new book to fully appreciate his analysis! To complicate matters, I caught the above-linked potentially important ideas and articles while surfing the Internet.