The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr

Quote of the Day

“The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it.”

-Hubert H. Humphrey

Quote of the Day

"I am glad for my heart whose gates apart / Are the entrance-place of wonders, / Where dreams come in from the rush and din / Like sheep from the rains and thunders."

-Rhapsody, William Stanley Braithwaite

Love Rules The Court

"Love rules the court,
The camp, the grove,
And men below, and the saints above,
For love is heaven
and heaven is love."

-Sir Walter Scott

Paul Bloom Interview

Question: What learning capacities do we lose after childhood?

Paul Bloom: So one interesting question is, in what ways are children superior to adults? What gifts and capacities do children have that adults lack? And I think that there's two ways of answering that question that give intersecting answers. One is evolutionary, which is what would you expect a child to be good at, given that what childhood is, is a period before maturity where you get everything up to speed. The second one is, developmental psychology and observation. What do we see that children do that's really good and that's better than adults? And I think one answer, for instance, is language. So children are better at learning language than adults, because that's the main task of childhood. By the time you're an adult, you had better know a language and there's not much evolutionary pressure to wire up your brain to learn more, you're done, you should be knowing it by then.

Children are, I think, better learners regarding motor skills, possibly regarding certain aspects of social interaction. We'd be really screwed if we had to start our life over again as children with our brains right now, because I think we lose the plasticity and flexibility.

One claim, which I'm not sure about, is whether children are better pretenders and better players than adults. And that I'm not sure, but there's a romantic notion that children know how to play and they know how to pretend and we lose this as adults. But I look around at my own life and the life of my friends and life of other people, and all I see is play and pretend. I see people, you know, playing video games, going to movies, reading books, doing all sorts of things. So I'm not sure that the play part ever goes away, I think that might be just as strong in adults as it is with kids.

uestion: What connection, if any, exists between religion and morality?

Paul Bloom: Many people, many religious people, many people in general, think that religion plays an important role in one's moral life. The very strong view, which I think nobody can take seriously, is that without religion we'd be monsters, we wouldn't care about other people. And the existence of atheists, who don't rape and murder and so on, seems to falsify that claim. But what about a more subtle claim, which is that religion on the whole makes you nicer? Well, this isn't a crazy theory, there's actually some statistical evidence in favor of it. So, for instance, religious people in the United States tend to give more to charity than atheists, even when you factor out religious charities, even when you think about things like donating blood or giving to the homeless.

And so you might think that religion is sort of ramping up your niceness in general, but I think there's another explanation, which is that religious in the United States are part of the vast majority and they tend to be happier and they tend to be parts of communities to a greater extent than atheists. And it might be the happiness and the community nature that explains this difference in giving, not religion per se.

And the reason why I believe this to be correct, is that you have now societies in Europe, like Scandinavian countries, that are quite a bit atheist, far more than the United States, and if religion makes you nice, you would expect these societies to be monstrous, high rates of crime, of exploiting one another, and none of that's true. In fact, these are swell places to live. These atheist communities are filled with people who don't tend to murder each other, don't tend to rape each other, don't tend to have all sorts of social ills that the United States have.

So I think the relationship from religion from morality is going to be complicated and interesting. I think it won't be hard to find places where religion corrodes morality, where religious belief leads to people rejecting their gut and appropriate moral feelings and doing monstrous things. Religion is an ideology and all ideologies have that power. But for the most part, I think people can be religious and good and be atheists and good, and that's what the data shows us.

- More Here

Best Hindi Song of 2010 - 15

Essential Skills We Can Never Learn in College

It's almost 16 years since I stepped out of college, every thing in this list I know its true (and the list is too small) - via FS:

It's the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn't enough anymore. You need to know how to swing through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie.

• Statistical Literacy : How to parse polls, play the odds, and embrace uncertainty.
• Post-State Diplomacy: How to practice statecraft without states.
• Remix Culture: How to analyze—and create—artworks made out of other artworks.
• Applied Cognition: How the mind works and how you can make it work for you.
• Writing for New Forms: How to adapt your message to multiple formats and audiences—human and machine.
• Waste Studies: How to become a smarter consumer, investor, and conserver
• Domestic Tech: How to apply hard science and engineering to everyday life.

How to Create an Electrical Battery Using Only Stone-Age Materials

"Some people have viewed this project through the lens of sustainability. While self-sufficiency and locally sourced material would certainly seem to be sustainable, my methods fail quite spectacularly in environmental analysis. For one, I used an estimated 20 kg of charcoal to produce perhaps 20 g of metal…

My project is about the origin of technologies- the ability for them to emerge out of context- but not their ability to sustain themselves.  A sustainable society is not really the most natural option; humans began as a nomads exhausting the resources of places and then moving on.  Maybe people in the future will look back on us just as we can look back on our predecessors, and see the answer to a lasting society lying on the ground all around us, just waiting to be put together with the right information."
- More Here

$19 Billion Later, Pentagon’s Best Bomb Detector Is a Dog

Do I really need to add more - here? (via Andrew)

"Drones, metal detectors, chemical sniffers, and super spycams — forget ‘em. The leader of the Pentagon’s multibillion military task force to stop improvised bombs says there’s nothing in the U.S. arsenal for bomb detection more powerful than a dog’s nose.

Despite a slew of bomb-finding gagdets, the American military only locates about 50 percent of the improvised explosives planted in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that number jumps to 80 percent when U.S. and Afghan patrols take dogs along for a sniff-heavy walk. “Dogs are the best detectors,” Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the commander of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, told a conference yesterday, National Defense reports. That’s not the greatest admission for a well-funded organization — nearly $19 billion since 2004, according to a congressional committee — tasked with solving one of the military’s wickedest problems."

To me, fair Friend, you never can be old

"TO me, fair Friend, you never can be old,  
For as you were when first your eye I eyed  
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters' cold  
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride;  
  
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd          
In process of the seasons have I seen,  
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,  
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.  
  
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,  
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;   
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,  
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:  
  
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,—  
Ere you were born, was beauty's summer dead."

-William Shakespeare