33 Things: The Week’s Amusing & Intriguing Links

1. Cut the jargon: The next generation (hopefully) of academic writing.

2. We credit or blame the current president with job growth during his term, but should we?

3. Forget Tribbles. Steven Greydanus explains the trouble with trailers.

4. When the “application” of social networking gets a little out of hand.

5. While the country watches Supreme Court Justice nominee Kagan, 9th Circuit nominees slip under the radar.

6. Clothing of the Future, From the Past: What 1930′s Designer’s Thought We’d Be Wearing in A.D. 2000:

7. 44 ways to ruin your financial life by age 30 – guaranteed.

8. Our Errors: thoughts on a young man’s death in Malaysia:

I thought of the politicians who must hungrily martyr him now, parading his image, concocting their story on a lost life as if they bore and raised him, as if his life was an open eulogy for political campaigns. Do souls rest, when they feed the selfish objectives of the living?

9. On the absurdity of telephones in polite society.

10. Inattentional Blindness is an old, wacky phenomenon.  Try it on yourself: you’d be amazed at how much you miss when you’re preoccupied with searching for specific.  They’ve even written a book to explain how it happens.

11. ‘Fake it till you make it’ is usually a bad strategy when it comes to selling fine art– but sometimes it works.  England’s National Gallery is preparing to exhibit the forgeries they fell for over the years.

12. The Olympics have traditionally been heralded as a show of amateur human excellence in sports… China might be about to change that.  No, not with steroids… with robots.

13. Just another Platonic dialogue.

14. How wasteful are we with our water?

15. How the Pope’s scholarship will affect how he weathers the sex abuse scandal.

16. Does it go to 11?

17. Opportunity breaks a record (at least until Spirit wakes up)

18. 7 Habits of Highly Effective Zombies.

19. The placebo effect: Should it be used institutionally?

20. Gesundheit!

21. Salvador Dali advertises for Alka Seltzer:

22. “Apple is a marketing-obsessed company with corporate teams that don’t talk to one another. Toyota’s leadership is too old. HSBC doesn’t coordinate nearly as smoothly as those identical airport ads suggest, and General Electric is struggling to create an integrated whole.

Those are some of the conclusions I’ve drawn from examining the websites of 75 of the world’s largest corporations.” (HT: Dave Martina)

23. Got an idea for an iPhone app?  Here’s a breakdown of what you can realistically expect to sell and an overview of best sales practices.

24. At the Panera in Clayton, MO. you pay what you want for your food.  No tax, no tricks, no guilt.

25. The Los Angeles Times would like to introduce you to the man who wrote the Arizona Immigration Law.

26. “Mr. President, I need a freaking job.”

27. “A new clue to explain existence.”  Matter, anti-matter, does it matter?  Sure – you know you’re impressed by the science.

28. Creativity Linked to Mental Health

“High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.”

29. Computer Generated Classics? Yup.

30. A Warning Against Manipulation from Seth Godin

31. Get 40 Classical Music Songs for $0.99

32. What Bobby Jindal Saw While Touring the Marshlands

33. Against Pro-Life Statists:

The bigger government becomes, the more invasive it becomes, the more it becomes the enemy of life and freedom. So these pro-life statists show a deep ignorance of government and freedom: the greatest freedom is economic freedom. I say that because if you are an economic ward of the state, you can neither be politically or religiously free. Exhibit A: China. The invasive state dictates how many children you may have, the free flow of information, and political freedom is not even worth really discussing. ‘