Author: Joe Carter

1. How the digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

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2. Michael Wyly, a retired Marine Colonel, on professionalism:

It was during the European Renaissance that the professional class emerged and defined itself. It was during the Renaissance that the birthright nobility began to give way to a society led by persons respected for their merits — for what they did instead of who they were. Each profession had standards for entry, they professed something, and their study of it was daily, continual and life-long. They served their society. Medicine, law, the clergy and military leadership became during the 15th and 16th centuries — and still stand as — the classically defined professions. When we speak of a professional ball player or a professional musician, we are corrupting the term, for it means far more than getting a paycheck for what you do. A profession must be applied for and joined after being accepted, and its moral standards are as important as its philosophy.

(HT: Acton Institute PowerBlog)

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3. World’s youth more religious than reputed (except in Europe)

Worldwide, more than four out of five young adults (85 percent) are religious and almost half (44 percent) are deeply religious. Only 13 percent have no appreciation for God or faith in general.

However, there are large differences between individual countries and among the various denominations. Whereas young adults in Islamic states and developing countries in particular are deeply religious, young Christians in Europe especially are comparatively unreligious. For example, 80 percent of all young Protestants outside of Europe are deeply religious and 18 percent are religious, compared to just seven percent of young Protestants in Europe who are deeply religious, and 25 percent can only be classified as nominal members of their church.

It is a similar picture with young Catholics. Although the proportion of deeply religious Catholics in Europe is 25 percent, outside Europe this figure is 68 percent. Only a third of young people in Eastern Europe and Russia have been christened, and most young people have no connection at all to faith and the Church. Only 13 percent are deeply religious.

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4. If physical theories were women:

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she’s amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you’re not in touch very much anymore.

1. Electrodynamics is your college girlfriend. Pretty complex, you probably won’t date long enough to really understand her.

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5. Cassettes still a multi-million dollar industry… in prison

[W]ho is buying Paris’ cassettes? America’s 2.3 million prisoners. Which brings us to the second advantage of tape over compact disc: a tape can’t be broken apart and used as a shiv. Prisoners are allowed to have them. 60% of Paris’ business is in cassette tapes.

Paris’ excited conclusion: “[By selling cassette tapes] I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers,” Paris says. “I don’t have to worry about downloading, legal or illegally. The beauty of it is that prisoners don’t have Internet access and never will.”

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6. See yourself, know yourself?

Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself.

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7. Writing advice from Zadie Smith

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second – put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal – but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go on stage and read from them. It’s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your novel is two years after it’s published, ten minutes before you go on stage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all of the pieces of dead wood, stupidity, vanity, and tedium are distressingly obvious to you.

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8. Volunteering Notes — The Fresh Air Fund, which has provided free summer vacations to New York City children from disadvantaged communities since 1877, is in need of host families. Unless all prospective host families are screened and vetted by the end of July these 200 children may miss out on an invaluable experience

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9. Philanthropy Notes — The Gerard Health Foundation recently unveiled a new award called Life Prizes – up to $600,000 will be given to up to six leaders who have succeeded in awakening the conscience of America to uphold and preserve the sanctity of human life. Philanthropist Raymond B. Ruddy is giving this inaugural award in honor of his parents, in an effort to encourage and inspire a new generation of leaders in the pro-life movement. The nomination progress is beginning this week.

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10. How Much Does It Cost You in Wages if You “Sound Black?”

Continue reading Thirty Three Things (v. 70)

1. God Is Not Dead Yet — How current philosophers argue for his existence.

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2. William F. Vallicella on God in the Declaration of Independence

By my count, there are four references to God in the Declaration of Independence.

In the initial paragraph, we find the phrase “…Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God….” The phrase ‘Nature’s God’ rules out pantheism: God is distinct from Nature. In the second paragraph, there is the phrase, “…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights….” Combining these two references, we may infer that the God being referred to is not merely a deistic initiator of the temporally first segment of the physical universe, but a being involved in the creation of the human race. For if God endowed human beings with rights, this endowment had to occur at the time of the creation of human beings, which of course occurred later than the beginning of the physical universe. In traditional jargon, God is a creator continuans rather than a mere creator originans. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper, but a being who is continuously involved in maintaining the universe in existence.

So if by ‘deism’ is meant the doctrine that God is a mere metaphysical cause of the universe’s beginning to exist who is thereafter uninvolved in its continuing to exist, then the God of the Declaration is non-deistic.

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3. How To Lose Belly Fat

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4. The problem with Prozac

…[T]he success of Prozac hasn’t simply transformed the treatment of depression: it has also transformed the science of depression. For decades, researchers struggled to identify the underlying cause of depression, and patients were forced to endure a series of ineffective treatments. But then came Prozac. Like many other antidepressants, Prozac increases the brain’s supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter. The drug’s effectiveness inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing.

There’s only one problem with this theory of depression: it’s almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete. Experiments have since shown that lowering people’s serotonin levels does not make them depressed, nor does it does not make them depressed, nor does it worsen their symptoms if they are already depressed.

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5. The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating

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6. Quote of the Week: “Here’s a fundamental irony: At about the time that the first empirical evidence is accumulating to support the Christian doctrine of dominion — that God has granted to the human race a delegated but effective authority over the planet, as evidenced by our impact on not just local but global environments — you see Christians shrinking back from the doctrine.” — Rusty Pritchard, ‘Dominion’ means dominion

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7. How are wines arranged in the store?

The wine aisle in your grocery store is probably organized this way. Yes, I know there is a California section and an Import section and even a jug/box wine spot, but look within each wine display and you’ll see the clear price stratification effect. The wines you have come to buy are probably on the shelf just below your natural eye level, so that you cannot help but see those special occasion wines just above them (and the higher priced wines above them on the top shelf). Cheaper wines are down below, near the floor, so that you have to stoop down to choose them.

The physical act of taking the wine from the shelf mirrors the psychological choice you make — reach up for better (more expensive) wines, stoop down for the cheaper products. The principle will be the same in upscale supermarkets and discount stores but the choices (what price wine will be at the bottom, middle and top) will differ as you might expect.

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

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8. Top Ten Things Kids Stick Up Their Noses

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9. What Happens To Your Body If You Drink A Coke Right Now? (HT: The Presurfer)

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10. How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

Continue reading Thirty Three Things (v. 69)