Killer High Heels

Today’s topic is high heeled shoes.  Why do women wear the damned things, I sometimes wonder.  Those women wobble around, they take longer to get from here to there, they often trip on small sidewalk imperfections, and they regularly fall and get hurt.

I will confess: my gut reaction is that a woman’s IQ relates inversely to whether that woman tends to wear accident-inducing high heeled shoes.  I think of women who flock to such shoes as women who aspire to become Barbies or Princesses.  Before you write a comment to protest, I realize that my gut feeling is a gross over-simplification.  I also have an analogous gut feeling with regard to men who aspire to higher forms of masculinity by rushing to engage in dangerous activities such as motocross or hang-gliding . . .

I never understood high heels.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think that women who wear high heels are “hotter” than those who don’t.  To the contrary, I’m annoyed by high heels.  Most woman who wear them look uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that they become objects of my pity, not lust.  But many other men (and women) disagree with me.  For proof, take a look at almost any advertising (and see here and here and here (for 8” heels!)).

Because I appear to be obtuse regarding this particular slice of human sexual responsiveness (and a tad bit concerned about my lack of responsiveness!), I have chosen this subject of high heels as yet another port of …

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Prayer: a great cure for impotence

A friend called me recently.  The doctor just found a “suspicious” lump and scheduled a biopsy. As you can imagine, she is anxious that she might have cancer.

What can a good agnostic say to such a person? Consider these options:

  • I’m worried about you.
  • Rest assured that I’m hoping for the best.
  • I’ll be thinking about you every hour . . .
  • Well, maybe you don’t have cancer, so you might be OK.
  • I’m glad you have a good doctor who will give you excellent medical care.

Now compare the above impotent responses to the following (add reverb for effect when you read these out loud):

  • I will pray long and often to almighty God to ask Him to intervene to protect you from anything harmful.
  • I will ask God to see that you are healed promptly.
  • [or even this!] Keep in mind that this life on Earth is temporary for all of us.  But we will be together in heaven forever and I will keep praying for you.

Promising to pray makes it appear that one is really doing something.  It would certainly be much more satisfying to both me and to my friend I I could honestly tell her that I was doing something rather than settling for the agnostic version of prayer (i.e., “I hope it isn’t cancer” or “Would you like to talk about your upcoming biopsy over dinner?”).

The false efficacy of prayer plays into one of the great fallacies of our time, …

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So just who are we all talking to, anyway?

I wrote a paper for one of my Master’s classes a couple of weeks ago, integrating what I’d absorbed from two textbooks into pages of my actual life.   Shortly after I got it back from my professor, a friend and I were discussing this very blog, which led to a discussion of philosophizing in general.   He lamented how lately, he’s seen an awfully lot of writing overwrought with words at the expense of actual ideas.   This guy is an intellectual himself, a prolific writer and thinker, so his comment gave me pause. 

As I’ve read for this particular graduate Communication class, I’ve worried more than once that some in my degree program seem to overstate the obvious.  I love taking a fragment of seemingly mundane human interaction, analyzing its details and its place in our lives to parse from it a deeper understanding of our connectedness, yet I can’t shake the underlying fear that many would meet our research with a big, “So what?”

I thought I’d share some thoughts from this particular paper here, and ask for the feedback of the ‘blog’s readership.  Based on responses I’ve received to previous pieces and the responses I’ve read here to the writing of others, I believe this audience falls toward the thinking end of the spectrum.  There.  I’ve laid out a blanket compliment.  Be nice when you pick me apart, then, please??

Here goes:

Drama unfolds around us continually, though the mundane events of daily life often blur into methodical sameness …

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Einstein’s God

At Dangerous Intersection, we have often encountered definitional issues when we’ve cnsidered whether someone believes in “God.”  During a recent vigorous exchange several of us invoked the “Einstein” version of God.  Although I had read a few quotes of Einstein regarding his beliefs, I had not comprehensively read Einstein’s own words describing his “God.”

The April 16, 2007 edition of Time Magazine features a new biography about Albert Einstein (Einstein, by Walter Isaacson).  For that reason, I jumped at the chance to read this Time article, which focused on what Einstein actually meant when he said he believed in “God.”  The bottom line? 

[Einstein] settled into a deism based on what he called the’ spirit manifest in the laws of the universe’ and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.

Einstein was born to two parents who were Jewish “by cultural designation and kindred instinct, [though] they had little interest in the religion itself.”  Young Albert ended up attending a large Catholic school in his neighborhood.  While there, he “developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.” At the age of 12, however, he gave this up, concluding that “much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.  From that time on, he articulated (through many essays and interviews) a “deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.” 

At a dinner party in Berlin, one of the guests publicly expressed amazement that …

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Beautiful self-organized pattern: the huge hexagon at Saturn’s north pole

Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:

This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.

“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask.  No one built it.  It’s a self-organized pattern.  And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.

This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.

But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe.  In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:

Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped

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