33 Things: The Week’s Amusing & Intriguing Links

Superbowl Fail Cakes, Free Office 2010 Beta, and thoughtful reflections on Lent…all in the same place. Welcome to 33 Things–33 ways to spend around 33 minutes of your lunch break.

1. Bees will do almost anything for sweet food, even recognize human faces.

2. A handy flow-chart for getting your picture featured on thesartorialist.blogspot.com.

3. A list of the ten least translatable words.

4. Everyone Matters, No Matter What

“If we believe moral worthiness is solely a byproduct of some measurable attribute or capacity—rather than being intrinsic—we will naturally disdain our future selves when, because of age, illness, or injury, we lose whatever it is that we decide gives life value.”

5. Is the professional woman picky when it comes to her potential spouse? (well… maybe that’s a generalization)

“Like many people who write about the marriage predicament of a narrow slice of America, Gottlieb is conflating her statistics. It’s true that the percentage of married women has been declining since the ’70s. But that decline has nothing to do with those unhappy lawyers and graphic designers. In fact, college-educated women—and Gottlieb’s book is filthy with attorneys and screenwriters and executives—are still getting married at extremely high rates. And these days they are far more likely to stay married than they were 40 years ago. Marriage, in fact, has never been kinder to the professional woman. So while there may be a few holdouts, it hardly amounts to a crisis. It’s a tiny problem for the very privileged picky few.”

6. How Not to Raise Your Children: Telling them they’re great all the time

“Surveys of parents show that nearly all now believe it’s important to tell their children they are bright and talented, to boost their confidence and therefore achievement. It’s a theory of self-fulfilling prophecy, born of the self-esteem movement of the 1970s.

But then Ashley and Po stumbled across the work of Carol Dweck, a Stanford professor. She has proved, in a growing body of work dating back 15 years, that telling a child they are bright causes the opposite result.” …..

“A radical new programme to teach teenagers how not to be bored? A failure (teenagers are genetically programmed to be bored). Here’s an interesting one: gratitude journals. When adults are asked to list the positives in their life they are thankful for, on a daily or weekly basis, it has been shown to lift their mood. When tried on young teenagers, it flopped. In fact, it made some teenagers even more downcast.”

7. If you give your cat a book by Sun Tzu…..

8. Ever wonder why voter action doesn’t seem to make sense?  So does the BBC.

9. Are we in a new age of race, or do our top films dealing with race tell us it’s just more of the same?  Film in the age of Obama.

10. Blood: water has a unique way to observe Lent and use that observance to raise awareness for those around the world without access to safe water.

11. In the aftermath of the quake, Haiti’s most vulnerable citizens are even more vulnerable than ever to an old danger: human trafficking.

12. Good thing I’m on Apple’s mailing list…

13. What if the earth had rings like Saturn?

14. Office 2010: free beta available

15. How to make your press statements twitter friendly

16. How NOT to train a dragon:

First, the obvious things. It’s supposed to be a movie about Vikings, and they wear horned helmets. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you surely know that the Vikings didn’t do that. The horned helmets come from Wagnerian opera.

But I can forgive that. It’s a cartoon.

17. Worst book pitch ever?

This book is meant to be a night light so to speak.  Whether you keep it by your nightstand and read a little before going to sleep or use it as a daily reminder or pick-me up from time to time.  It is a compilation of wisdom that has a profound ability to shift a person’s perspective in a matter of seconds.  It is designed to make a reader think and expand their horizons, to see life in a different light and to make he or she laugh when they least expect it.

18. Somewhere in Time: based on a true story.  Kind of.

The astonishing discovery I made on January 27, after I had finished reading the book is that the character of Elise McKenna was based on a real person, whose life story strongly parallels the fictional account. Most important of all, there is a real photograph behind the account of Richard Collier’s obsession.

19. Because sometimes, you just need kind regards.

20. How to steampunkify your keyboard.  Because it’s awesome.

21. Dear Astrology, from Science.

22. The Mona Lisa in…Coffee!?

23. Give space a chance!

24. Obama as Pez dispenser…dispending money. (No money tree, but who woulda  thunk?

25. Ready for your Superbowl party? Don’t make a cake like these cakes… Epic FAIL.

26. Go where the food is—the bears do. Hungry bears invade Los Angeles.

27. Professor Fouad Adjami, Middle East expert and fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, pens a pointed analysis of the increasingly unpopular Obama presidency from a global perspective:

“A historical hallmark of “isms” and charismatic movements is to dig deeper

when they falter—to insist that the “thing” itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.”

28. Ken Auletta, author of “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It,” on the ideas and people behind one of the world’s most powerful companies:

29. Farmer loses High Court fight to save hidden castle:

The judge said: “Mr Fidler made it quite clear that the construction of his house was undertaken in a clandestine fashion, using a shield of straw bales around it and tarpaulins or plastic sheeting over the top in order to hide its presence during construction.

He stated that he knew he had to deceive the council of its existence until a period of four years from substantial completion and occupation had occurred as they would not grant planning permission for its construction. I accept that the act of concealment does not in itself provide a legitimate basis for the council to succeed, as hiding something does not take away lawful rights that may accrue due to the passage of time.”

The castle has ramparts and a replica cannon.  I wonder if he lives next to Mr. Banks, the man with the nanny who flies with a parasol.

30. Russell Moore on the Evangelical Engagement with Culture:

Christians must make sense of pop culture by judging it in terms of the story we embrace. When that happens, we’ll find ourselves back on Mars Hill. But let’s make sure we’re there because we are, as Paul was, preaching Jesus and the resurrection, not because we’ve started a new business making “unknown god” action figures. We probably won’t be considered “cool” to the culture—whether or not we’re able to sell music downloads to Christians.

But, once on the Hill, let’s not be surprised if, at the mention of the resurrection of the body, a bored-looking American consumer presses the pause button on his iPod, to listen for a while.

31. (Shameless Self-Link Warning!) Playing the (a)Theological Mystery Card

Every theologian, wanna-be theologian, a-theologian, and otherwise thinking person has one. Discuss a point of theology long enough, and you’ll inevitably see it played.  Call it Anderson’s Law:  as a theological conversation grows longer, the probability of seeing the mystery card approaches one.

32. How to Clip, Sort, and Cite the Entire Web with Zotero

33. In Honor of Black History Month: “Memorable Quotes from Iconic African Americas”