Saturday, June 30, 2007
Poison Got it Right
I haven’t kept up on much of anything lately, but this blog entry from Obama’s target audience I found interesting. I especially liked the Poison reference.
For the pop culturally impaired:
Something to believe in-Poison
Will I see him on the tv
Preachin bout the promised land
He tells me to believe in jesus
And steals the money from my hand
******
chorus:
And give me something to believe in
If theres a lord above
And give me something to believe in
Oh, lord arise
******
Sometimes I wish to God I didnt know now
The things I didnt know then
And give me something to believe in
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
no free roaming
Another remark that resembles me: How children lost the right to roam in four generations
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.
This sucks and we’re doing it to our kids, too.
Monday, June 25, 2007
I was wrong ...
Some values clearly aren’t universal to all religions. When’s the last time you heard fundies teaching values like these??
Throughout the summer, your children will be learning about many different Jewish values and I would like to provide you with an overview of the session II values that the camp will be focusing on. Each camper group will be learning values through stories, activities, arts and crafts projects, music, cooking, theater and group discussions.
With values, words alone do not suffice. Values education must include backing speech with action. They are learned beliefs and attitudes that individuals and groups embrace and which shape our behavior. We hope that you will ask your child about the value of the week.
During session II Camp Shalom will focus on the global theme of Kindness and the Jewish Values of Knei L’cha Chaver (making a friend) and G’milut Chasadim (acts of kindness and compassion).
Below is a thumbnail sketch describing each value:
Knei L’cha Chaver - Chaverut- Making a Friend
“..Acquire a friend for yourself.” Pirkei Avot 1:6
We can have many people with whom we spend time, but a true friend is unique. A true friend is a partner, one who shares our journey. Camp will focus on the concept of friendship and the recognition that the world is filled with many different kinds of people. Groups will discuss ways that we are different, and the ways we are alike. Judaism places great value on friendship. Rabbi Eliezer says “The honor of your friend should be as important to you as your own” Pirkei Avot 2:10
G’millut Chasadim- Acts of Kindness/Compassion
Rabbi Shimon the Righteous says: The world stands on three things: on Torah, on work, and on acts of loving kindness. G’millut Chasadim is the action of doing kind things for others and on behalf of others. It is given a higher level of value than the giving of charity. This is due to the fact that it is more difficult to do G’millut Chasadim than Tzedakah. Many institutions in the Jewish community are based on fulfilling the fundamental value of G’millut Chasadim such as orphan homes, homes for the aged, free loan associations, and burial societies. Camp will guide children toward an understanding that Loving Kindness is a practical part of everyday life. We will encourage kind, caring behaviors and facilitate the development of empathy and sympathy for others.
Nah, let’s go picket some funerals instead and rave about “fags destroying the earth.”
Friday, June 15, 2007
art imitating life?
Second Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner
Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.
Go and read the winning entry. Water is evil.
daddy brain
Stretch Marks for Dads: What fatherhood does to the body and the brain.
Last weekend, Tufts University hosted a scientific conference on the “parental brain.” Or at least the maternal brain, which was the subject of eight symposia, while fathers and their brains were the focus of just one. Once, this imbalance would have seemed inevitable, since there didn’t seem to be much to say about how becoming a father affects men physically. But now, evidence is accumulating that pregnancy and parenthood leave their marks on men’s bodies. Women are not the only ones who are built for parenting, and recognizing that is good for fathers and the rest of us, too.
I resemble that remark.
But in the last handful of years, scientists have shown that normal, healthy, non-pregnancy-envying men often undergo real bodily changes when they’re expecting children. Research shows that male marmosets and cotton-top tamarins—primates that, like humans, split child-rearing duties between the mother and father—gain as much as 20 percent of their body weight while waiting for the birth of their offspring. The finding suggests that couvade is biologically adaptive rather than psychologically neurotic: The hypothesis about the marmosets and tamarins is that the pregnancy paunch prepares a dad for the extra energy he’ll expend in helping to rear his baby.
Daddy pouch! And I thought it was due to being nailed down all the time and eating the kid’s leftovers
In addition, dads-to-be have elevated levels of cortisol and prolactin, hormones that are also present in high levels among mothers who are attached and responsive to their children. A father’s testosterone level also drops by about a third, on average, in the first three weeks after his child is born. (...) If dads roared along on their usual levels of the hormone, the theory goes, they’d be too busy fighting other men and seducing other women to do much diaper-changing.
The plot thickens. Or is it the waistline?
There’s also preliminary but tantalizing evidence that fatherhood can change the brain. A 2006 study found enhancements in the prefrontal cortex of the father marmoset. After childbirth, the neurons in this region showed greater connectivity, suggesting that having young children could boost the part of the brain responsible for planning and memory, skills parents need when having kids gives them more to keep track of.
Figures. I already have problems not getting the kid’s names mixed up, never mind keeping track of which wall they’re bouncing off.
Yay for New Jersey
Bill would require pharmacies to fill orders no matter beliefs
A pharmacy would be required to fill prescriptions for any drug it stocks such as birth-control pills regardless of a pharmacist’s moral beliefs under a bill that cleared the Legislature on Monday.
The bill, approved 56-18 by the Assembly, establishes a pharmacy’s duty to fill lawful prescriptions without undue delay and without consideration for a pharmacist’s moral, philosophical or religious beliefs.
If a pharmacy doesn’t have a prescription in stock, the pharmacy would have to either obtain it under expedited ordering or find a nearby pharmacy to fill the prescription.
It’s sad that this is even a legislative matter.
Posted by elwedriddsche on 06/15 at 11:47 AM
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the Vatican needs a morality checkup
Now they’re after Amnesty International:
Vatican Shuns Amnesty International
Vatican Tells Catholics to Stop Donations to Amnesty
Outrage at Catholic Cardinal’s attempt to cut money from Amnesty
Vatican cardinal calls on Catholics to stop funding Amnesty
As time goes by, it gets harder and harder for me to keep my temper when I stumble over news from the Vatican.
(Guardian)A senior Vatican cardinal said yesterday that Catholics should stop donating to human rights group Amnesty International because of its new policy advocating abortion rights for women if they had been raped, were a victim of incest or faced health risks.
(Spiegel) So it is a sign of the uncompromising hard line that the Catholic Church takes on abortion that a Vatican cardinal Wednesday urged Catholics to stop donating money to Amnesty over its stance on abortion. In April, Amnesty adopted a new policy on abortion, urging government to ensure access to abortion services for women in the case of rape, incest or when pregnancy puts the mother’s health at risk.
Sure, let’s try to target the funding of one of the few organizations whose members actively minister to the needs of the persecuted, often at great personal risks—the persecuted often including (lesser) members of the clergy.
As far as I’m concerned, denying an abortion if the pregnancy is the result of rape is a crime worse than murder. Denying an abortion if the pregnancy puts the mother at risk is equally beyond the pale. The moral theology of the Catholic Church has an almost pathological character to it.
they itch so bad it must hurt
G-8 AFTERMATH: Deployment of Spy Jets against Protesters Angers German Opposition
It angers me, too.
A senior member of the Social Democrats claims that Germany’s conservative Defense Minister lacks political judgement because of his decision to deploy reconnaissance jets on a mission to spy on G-8 protesters.
The German government’s deployment of reconnaissance jets to spy on a camp of anti-globalization activists attending protests at last week’s G-8 summit has prompted an outcry in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition.
The kerfuffle began in earnest after protesters alerted Hans-Christian Ströbele, a Green member of the German parliament, that they had seen a reconnaissance jets conduct a flyover of the camp in Reddelich near Heiligendamm.
The jets had been deployed in order to monitor the area for signs of a possible terrorist attack or danger to G-8 leaders meeting at Heiligendamm as Germany hosted the group’s annual summit. On Tuesday, Germany’s Defense Ministry confirmed that two of the jets, which are currently being used to monitor Taliban activity (more…) in Afghanistan, had been deployed during the summit to monitor the area surrounding the massive security fence that had been erected to separate G-8 leaders from protesters. One of the planes flew over the G-8 protest camp at the lowest permitted altitude of 150 meters (492 feet) on June 5, one day before the summit kicked off.
The CDU is itching to use the armed forces for domestic police action, a place no sane person should want to go unless in a dire state of emergency.
And there’s more:
In separate post-G-8 fallout, senior members of the Green Party are also displeased about the way protesters at the G-8 summit were treated after violent riots broke out (more…) on June 2 in the German port of Rostock, located near Heiligendamm. Renate Künast, who heads the Greens’ parliamentary group, said she would take up the issue in the Bundestag. Many protesters, she said, were “unjustly” arrested and were not provided with access to attorneys.
Detained protesters were also placed in cages that Künast said evoked images of “animal husbandry.” Those detained, she said, were under “constant video surveillance, they could be seen (in the cages) from all sides, there was no gender separation and the lights were on constantly.”
Was Merkel trying to impress her good friend George with a Guantanamo look-alike?
I’d go see the play
War and Censorship at Wilton High
Bonnie Dickinson has been teaching theater at Wilton High School in Connecticut for 13 years. She and her students developed the idea of a play about Iraq, initially inspired by the Sept. 3, 2006, death of Wilton High graduate Nicholas Madaras from an IED (improvised explosive device) blast in Baqubah, Iraq. The play uses real testimonials from soldiers, from their letters, blogs and taped interviews, and Yvonne Latty’s book “In Conflict,” with the students acting the roles. The voices of Iraqis are also included.
In mid-March, after students spent months preparing the play, the school administration canceled it. Superintendent Gary Richards wrote: “The student performers directly acting the part of the soldiers ... turns powerful material into a dramatic format that borders on being sensational and inappropriate. We would like to work with the students to complete a script that fully addresses our concerns.” (The students have modified the script; they perform Richards’ letter, its cold, condescending bureaucratese in stark relief with the play’s passionate eyewitness testimonials.)
Can’t have these peacemongering students perform a play that’s critical of the rah-rah-rah party line, can we?
After The New York Times published an article on the Wilton High censorship scandal, Ira Levin, the author of “The Stepford Wives,” wrote the paper a letter: “Wilton, Conn., where I lived in the 1960s, was the inspiration for Stepford, the fictional town I later wrote about in ‘The Stepford Wives.’ I’m not surprised ... that Wilton High School has a Stepford principal. Not all the Wilton High students have been Stepfordized. The ones who created and rehearsed the banished play ‘Voices in Conflict’ are obviously thoughtful young people with minds of their own.”
Young people with minds of their own? The horror!
Wilton High School principal Timothy Canty was quoted in The New York Times article saying that the play might “hurt Wilton families ‘who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,’ and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide ‘a legitimate instructional experience for our students.’ ”
Hurt them exactly how? I’d say the way events unfolded are indeed a legitimate instructional experience, just not the wholesomely righteous kind the principal envisions.
I asked the student actors about their opportunities to discuss the war at school. Jimmy Presson, 16 years old, said his U.S. history class has a weekly assignment to bring in a current-event news item, with one caveat: “We are not allowed to talk about the war while discussing current events.” The students said that they can discuss the war in a Middle Eastern studies class, but, they said, it is not being taught this year. “Theater Arts II was the only class in the school where students were discussing the war,” Dickinson said. Jimmy added, “We also get to speak about it with the military recruiters who are always at school.”
I see—the Iraq fiasco is off-limits, except if students wish to talk to purveyors of fresh, warm bodies to sacrifice.
traveler’s dilemma
I don’t get backward induction.
Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.
Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty—the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44.
What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?
The true price I paid, or absent that information $100. Duh.
In the years since I devised the game, TD has taken on a life of its own, with researchers extending it and reporting findings from laboratory experiments. These studies have produced insights into human decision making. Nevertheless, open questions remain about how logic and reasoning can be applied to TD.
To see why 2 is the logical choice, consider a plausible line of thought that Lucy might pursue: her first idea is that she should write the largest possible number, 100, which will earn her $100 if Pete is similarly greedy. (If the antique actually cost her much less than $100, she would now be happily thinking about the foolishness of the airline manager’s scheme.)
Soon, however, it strikes her that if she wrote 99 instead, she would make a little more money, because in that case she would get $101. But surely this insight will also occur to Pete, and if both wrote 99, Lucy would get $99. If Pete wrote 99, then she could do better by writing 98, in which case she would get $100. Yet the same logic would lead Pete to choose 98 as well. In that case, she could deviate to 97 and earn $99. And so on. Continuing with this line of reasoning would take the travelers spiraling down to the smallest permissible number, namely, 2. It may seem highly implausible that Lucy would really go all the way down to 2 in this fashion. That does not matter (and is, in fact, the whole point)—this is where the logic leads us.
I simply do not understand this line of reasoning. If both pick $100, the combined payout is at its maximum $200 and it’s not worth the gamble over $2 up or down to pick a number less than $100.
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