Thirty Three Things (v. 64)

1. Geerhardus Vos on the biblical concepts of “wisdom” and “folly”:

The [Old Testament] idea of “folly” can be best understood from the antithesis it forms to “wisdom.” Wisdom is not a theoretical or abstractly scientific apprehension of things, but such a practical immediate insight into their reality and manner of action as enables one to use them to advantage. Correspondingly, a fool is not one who is deficient in the power of logical thought, but one who lacks the natural discernment and tact required for success in life. Both wisdom and folly are teleological conceptions, and rest on the principle of adjustment to a higher law for some practical purpose.

(HT: Tribalogue)

2. Philosophy professor Edward Tingley on how agnostics and atheist are not true skeptics:

All of the people who say that they are “atheists through skepticism, because they see no evidence that God exists,” are patently unthinking people, since by virtue of turning skeptic, no one has ever done anything–employed any logic, gathered any evidence, found any way forward–to reach a conclusion about whether God exists. So these atheists have not reached a conclusion; they have made a commitment.

What the scientific skeptic ought to say is this: “Having examined the hard evidence, we declare that route to be exhausted. The only kind of evidence for God’s existence that counts will have to be of some other kind–if there is any other kind.”

That would be reasonable. And it would be a fine thing for a skeptic to doubt that there is any evidence besides the standard, demonstrable kind–and there are skeptics who do so. But all those who, just because they doubt it, run home with the question answered are frauds like their agnostic brethren if they still call themselves scientists.

3. Merlin Mann on priorties as indicators of character:

Where you put your time and attention says a lot about who you are. It says a lot about you as a human being. You have some idea in your head of all the stuff that is high priority to you. All the stuff that really matters. If I sat down and asked you what’s really important to you – you would say ‘oh my family and my church group and I’m a deacon.’ But then I go and I look in your email box, newsfeeds and web browser… If I went and got all CSI on that, what would the last two weeks of your electronic life say about how it maps to the stuff that you claim is really important?

(HT: swissmiss)

4. Elizabeth Marquardt on “The New Alone”:

Temple University’s Adam Davey found that aging stepparents were only half as likely as biological parents to receive care from grown children. “Society does not yet have a clear set of expectations for stepchildren’s responsibility,” he observed.

You can say that again. All stepchildren and stepparents forge a relationship in their own way. Some become deeply attached, some are virtually strangers, many fall somewhere in between. Even when stepchildren and stepparents are close, the deep ambiguity of the relationship can make losing a stepparent to death or divorce a profoundly lonely experience for the child. A friend told me about a colleague who had recently nursed her beloved stepmother, a woman she had grown up with, during a long illness. Even as she mourned her stepmother’s death, the woman was mystified and hurt by the lack of support she had received from many friends and co-workers, who’d wondered why she would go out of her way to provide long-term, hands-on care to someone who was “only” a stepmother.

(HT: Jennifer Roback Morse)

5. William L. Saunders, Jr. and Gerard V. Bradley explain why a Constitutional amendment is the only way to protect marriage in the United States:

Indeed, marriage is not simply a matter for the states, and has not been for more than a generation. The strongest statement that marriage is a matter of state law was made in an 1878 Supreme Court case called Pennoyer v. Neff. A state has an “absolute” right to decide the “conditions upon which the marriage relation shall be created.” (Even in this case, the Court did not say the state has the right to decide what marriage is.) By 1971, the Supreme Court found (in Boddie v. Connecticut) the state’s power to be much less “absolute”: States controlled marriage “absent some specific federal constitutional or statutory provision.“

6. Quote of the Week: “Apologies are like monsters: They’re only real if you believe in them.” – Justin Feinstein

7. Denzel Washington on his work as his ministry:

When I was about 20 years old, when I first started acting, I was sitting in my mother’s beauty shop. And a woman just kept looking at me. I was looking in the mirror, and I saw her across the room. And she said, “Someone give me a piece of paper.” And she wrote down a prophecy. She said that I would speak to millions of people, and I would travel the world and preach to millions of people. And I didn’t know what she was talking about. But this was March 27th, 1975, 32 years ago now, almost 33 years ago.

So my work has been my ministry. In fact, I asked my pastor, years ago, “Do you think I should become a minister or a preacher? And he says, “Well, that’s what you’re doing already.” And he felt, as I feel, that that’s what she was talking about back then.

I’ve always understood why I’ve been blessed to be put in this situation. And I’m more than happy to take advantage of it and to preach, if you will, about what God has done in my life.

8. Top 10 Political Brawls of All Time (HT: The Presurfer)

9. Most Americans Say Divorce is Morally Acceptable

A record 70 percent of Americans believe divorce is morally acceptable, according to Gallup’s 2008 Values and Beliefs survey. That’s an 11-point increase from seven years ago.

Mike McManus, co-founder of Marriage Savers, said two generations of high divorce rates have made divorce the norm in America.

“Since 1970, that’s 42 million divorces, shattering the lives of 40 million children,” he said. “We have the highest divorce rate in the world, and for 70 percent of Americans to say it’s morally acceptable is really quite stunning.”

10. Bjorn Lomborg on How to Think About the World’s Problems

Research for the Copenhagen Consensus, in which Nobel laureate economists analyze new research about the costs and benefits of different solutions to world problems, shows that just $60 million spent on providing Vitamin A capsules and therapeutic Zinc supplements for under-2-year-olds would reach 80% of the infants in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with annual economic benefits (from lower mortality and improved health) of more than $1 billion. That means doing $17 worth of good for each dollar spent. Spending $1 billion on tuberculosis would avert an astonishing one million deaths, with annual benefits adding up to $30 billion. This gives $30 back on the dollar.

11. Graph of the Week

more graph humor and song chart memes

12. How to improve your photography with classical art

13. Séances & Science — John Mark Reynolds uses the example of the Spiritualist movement of a century ago to warn those in the burgeoning Intelligent Design (ID) field of possible pitfalls:

The ID movement must not allow popular expressions of its positions to become divorced from more responsible ones. The Spiritualists left the public leadership of their movement to the cranks and charlatans. With the exception of the fairly responsible [Sir Arthur Conan] Doyle, none of the intellectual leaders of psychic research did much public speaking or writing. The job of “spreading the word” was more and more left to the cranks and charlatans who rushed to fill the void.

14. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (HT: Open Culture)

15. From E.B. White’s “Here is New York” (1948)

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. [...] Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

(HT: swissmiss)

16. By Christopher Orlet on teaching the humanities:

At one time the purpose of a university education was to give future leaders an opportunity – before they shouldered the dull burdens of civic responsibility – to explore the purpose and value of life. By instilling a strong sense of history, of reason, of logic, of the best of what has been thought and said, a background in the Humanities would prepare a young scholar for whatever may lie ahead.

This, at least, had been the belief going back to Plato’s Republic.

(HT: WORLD magazine)

17. The Best Baseball Pitch Ever

(HT: kottke.org)

18. Molecular gastronomist Herve This’s 10 Elements of Basic Kitchen Knowledge (HT: kottke.org)

19. Saudi Woman Divorcing Husband for Sneaking a Peek to Look at Her Face

After 30 years of marriage, cynics might say most husbands and wives would have seen quite enough of each other, thank you very much. But not in the case of one Saudi Arabian man who managed to live with his wife for three decades without setting eyes on her face.

Not that he had much choice about it. His 50-year-old wife followed the tradition of her native village near the south-western city of Khamis Mushayt and kept her features veiled at all times.

Until one night last month, that is, when the husband was finally overcome by curiosity and tried to lift his wife’s veil as she slept to take a look at her face. It was an error he is unlikely to be given a chance to repeat for his outraged wife woke up during his sneak peek and is now demanding a divorce.

(HT: Neatorama)

20. The Worst Cities in America

21. Virtual Bubblewrap

22. Help! We’re Running Out Of Internet!

If you thought the World Wide Web was a limitless receptacle to the world’s news, blogs and occasionally pointless musings, think again. The Internet could run out of web addresses by 2011, undermining the potential of businesses to use new services and applications, Karine Perset, the author of an alarming report on the future of the World Wide Web, warned Friday.

Perset, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, told Forbes.com that 85.0% of all remaining Internet addresses that could be used, were being used, and the rest could be taken within three years.

23.Timewaster of the Week: Budget Hero

24. Stephen H. Webb takes another look at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:

To many astute readers, the novel seems more like propaganda for the permissive society than a work of art. It is a deeply flawed novel, both stylistically and morally, but the sixties should not be given the last word on its meaning and significance. On the Road is a surprisingly melancholy book, and its originality renders every subsequent expression of youthful angst derivative and cheap. It is not an advertisement for the sixties version of personal freedom, but a warning against it.

25. LOLCat of the Week

more cat pictures

26. Agent Intellect on C. S. Lewis’s Fiction for Adults

27. How to remove most of the seeds when cutting up a watermelon (HT: Neatorama)

28. Missing Matter Of Universe Found; Cosmic Web Discovered — Although the universe contains billions of galaxies, only a small amount of its matter is locked up in these behemoths. Most of the universe’s matter that was cooked up during and just after the Big Bang must be found elsewhere. Now, in an extensive search of the relatively recent, local universe, University of Colorado at Boulder astronomers said they have definitively found about half of the missing normal matter, called baryons, in the spaces between the galaxies. This important component of the universe is known as the intergalactic medium and it extends essentially throughout all of space, from just outside our Milky Way galaxy to the most distant regions of space observed by astronomers.

29. Body Image Is Stronger Predictor Of Health Than Obesity, Says Study — In a study to examine the impact of desired body weight on the number of unhealthy days subjects report over one month, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health found that the desire to weigh less was a more accurate predictor of physically and mentally unhealthy days, than body mass index (BMI). In addition, the desire to lose weight was more predictive of unhealthy days among Whites than among African-Americans or Hispanics, and among women than among men.

30. To Block The Carcinogens, Add A Touch Of Rosemary When Grilling Meats — Rosemary, a member of the mint family and a popular seasoning on its own, also has benefits as a cancer prevention agent. Apply it to hamburgers and it can break up the potentially cancer-causing compounds that can form when the meat is cooked.

31. Smoking Is Addictive, But Quitting Is Contagious — Over the last 30 years, the number of smokers in the U.S. has steadily decreased–a tribute to the efforts of public-health workers everywhere. And while this fact is unarguable, less obvious are the social and cultural forces that lead an individual to kick the habit. In fact, when someone crumbles that last empty pack of their favorite unfiltered brand and vows to never buy another, he might not realize that he is less like the heroic individual grasping his own boot straps and more like a single bird whose sudden left turn is just one speck in the larger flock.

32. Fasting may fend off jet lag:

Starving yourself before a long flight may help prevent jet lag, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Normally, the body’s natural circadian clock in the brain dictates when to wake, eat and sleep, all in response to light. But it seems a second clock takes over when food is scarce, and manipulating this clock might help travelers adjust to new time zones, they said.

“A period of fasting with no food at all for about 16 hours is enough to engage this new clock,” said Dr. Clifford Saper of Harvard Medical School, whose study appears in the journal Science.

33. The Best Game Ever

(HT: Neatorama)