"Imagine, a grown man too ignorant to believe in the Devil!" — R.A. Lafferty, Past Master
Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.
Nicholas Taleb off on a delicious rant.
Tip from Gary Jones, who did make the smallest peep of a comment (so I know he likes it).
*I’m more of an intellectu’all. And I DO deadlift.
with mastery, won in most cases before thirty, comes leisure which can be truly enjoyed, not leisure stolen from duty.
Dr James Thompson (no relation) gives us a short professional biography of a pioneering educational psychologist. More biography here and here.
Good for your body, good for your brain.
Tip from Twisted Sifter, in the latest Shirk Report.
Just when you think science can’t get any more weird, we get something like this
A new species of blood fluke was found infecting the lungs of turtles in Malaysia. This parasitic flatworm has been dubbed Baracktrema obamai, in honor of the President of the United States (who is the fifth cousin twice removed of one of the discovering scientists).
A parasitic flatworm? I thought this was a spoof until I followed the link to the Jounal of Parasitology. For reals.
* Classical reference: Welcome to the Turtle Society. The only duty of membership is to give the correct response to the question “Are you a Turtle?” The correct response is “You bet your sweet ass I am.”
Update: got a like from Julius at Logical Quotes, a great place to get exposed painlessly to some of the great classical philosophers.
Update: Apparently turtles have more going for themselves than we knew. Check out this guy.
Holy crap! Staying in the hospital ICU can make you sick.
Tip from Gary Jones, who wouldn’t put a dog (or one of his cattle) in an ICU.
No, really.
I suppose men standing around the barbecue burning meat and drinking beer is just another ritual of the Patriarchy.
Mark Twain was hip to this sort of thinking over a century ago:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
–Life on the Mississippi
Scurrilous Commentator Fred Reed demonstrates how a grown-up examines his prejudices on the way to wisdom
Most Latinos of the south are either a mixture of Spanish and Indian, or sometimes pure Indian….Are they, as nativists insist, of very low IQ–83–and have they enstupidated the Spanish? Horrendously primitive?
Without thinking about it, I had the entrenched idea that they were just that. I wasn’t conscious that it was either an idea or entrenched–just a fact. It didn’t occur to me that I knew virtually nothing about these people, or that there was anything to know.
What pulled me up short was their architecture.
and gives us a cultural history lesson along the way.
Included is this wonderful link to the Mayan numbering system, which makes ours look a bit rickety.
