According to the Associated press, Tobacco alone is predicted to kill a billion people this century, 10 times the toll it took in the 20th century, if current trends hold. This humongous number begs for a morbid illustration. If you lined up the dead bodies of one billion dead smokers end to…
Earlier, I wrote about the tendency of suburbanites to feel they have limited options, and how such a life can seem unfulfilling or failed. At the time, I inspected the personal shortcomings that have a hand in this, as well as the human predisposition to discontentment. But it appears that yet another factor contributes to the often portrayed suburban dread: the structure of the suburbs themselves.
Prior to the Second World War, most suburbs had what architects and city planners call a “traditional” or “mixed-use” structure. Towns of this type have closely arranged, small city blocks intermittent with other amenities such as shops, restaurants, churches, and public buildings such as schools and post offices. To get a better idea of a town of this type, picture the typical conception of a small New England village or city. This traditional structure made pedestrian activity both easy and inviting, claims Andres Duany, one of the authors of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.
In the 1950’s and beyond, building codes began to prevent such a seamless blend of commerce, public activity, and personal residence from organizing. Most American towns now have much more rigid building codes the divide all the realms of society into isolated sections: a housing district, a shopping center-like area, and government buildings shoved somewhere else. Duany describes the trend this way:
…“It’s an architectural version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Our neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless
In 2004, the same geneticist who had earlier discovered a gene linked to male homosexuality found a gene associated with religious belief. The geneticist, Dr. Dean Hammer of the National Cancer Institute, used a 226-question survey to determine a person’s feelings of spirituality, or willingness to believe in supernatural phenomena. He found that those with an inclination for religiosity tended to share a gene called VMAT2. Nicknamed the “god gene”, it purportedly dictates the flow of mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and determines one’s level of belief in religious experiences.
I first accepted this research with a sense of mild dread. I assumed, forgetting that the devoutly religious tend to eschew all scientific or logical prospects, that the religious would respond to this discovery as a palpable sign that God exists. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for classic religious circular logic, the same used to “prove” the significance of the Bible: We know God exists because we believe in him, and we believe in him because he wants us to.
Even Dr. Hammer used this train of thought. In an interview shortly after his discovery became public, he said, “Religious believers can point to the existence of god genes as one more sign of the creator’s ingenuity – a clever way to help humans acknowledge and embrace a divine presence.”
However, the religious community did not embrace Hammer’s findings. Christian reviewers of Hammer’s book on the subject labeled it as bad science, and claimed that he didn’t define …
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine there is a salad bowl sitting (upright) on your kitchen table. Imagine, also, there is a marble resting in the bottom of the salad bowl. If you slightly disturb the marble with your finger, the marble will roll around the bottom of the bowl. If you disturb the marble a bit more, the marble will roll up the side of the bowl and then roll back down to the bottom. In this situation, the marble is said to be in a “stable equilibrium,” because the marble remains inside the bowl (equilibrium) despite reasonable-sized disturbances.
Now, imagine removing the marble from the bowl, turning the bowl upside-down, and resting the marble on the flat base of the bowl. Although the marble will remain within the boundary of the flat base (equilibrium), even a relatively small disturbance will roll the marble off the base, down the side of the bowl, across the kitchen table and onto the floor. In this situation, the marble is said to be in “unstable equilibrium,” because of the tendency of the marble to roll (far) out of position with even a small disturbance. Once on the floor, the marble is again in equilibrium: it will stay on the floor unless some force lifts it back to the tabletop.
Now, let us consider global warming. For tens of thousands of years (and perhaps much longer), our planet has maintained roughly the same average temperature. Yes, there were a few ice ages, but …
Just look at our intense national confidence! Ergo, we are doing well as a nation! Not so fast, scientists have warned. There is actually an inverse relationship between one's own incompetence and one's awareness of one's incompetence. In a 2003 article entitled "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence," psychologists…