Asides

This should not sur­prise me, but it does.

Who are the three high­est paid offi­cials on the Pen­ta­gon bud­get?

The foot­ball coach­es at Army, Navy and Air Force. Here is more (most­ly on oth­er top­ics), hat tip to @jtlevy.  Here are some com­pa­ra­ble answers for state gov­ern­ment employ­ees.

How inter­est­ing. Whether this study is valid or not (I have not exam­ined their methodology/data), I think the approach has mer­it.

The Home­r­ic social net­work

The struc­ture of the social net­work among char­ac­ters in Home­r’s Odyssey indi­cates the sto­ry is at least par­tial­ly based on actu­al

Indi­rect val­i­da­tion of the church plant­i­ng assess­ment process.

Google Inter­view Ques­tions

The famous Google inter­view ques­tions? They don’t work. Here’s Las­z­lo Bock, senior vice pres­i­dent of peo­ple oper­a­tions at Google: On the hir­ing side, we found that brain­teasers are a com­plete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an

I real­ly do won­der if our soci­ety’s legal struc­ture is unten­able. There comes a point when there are so many laws that peo­ple are forced to ignore or dis­obey that peo­ple must begin to dis­par­age the law more gen­er­al­ly. We are cer­tain­ly there in some peo­ple’s minds — how long until con­tempt for the legal sys­tem under­mines our abil­i­ty to func­tion as a soci­ety?

No One is Inno­cent

I broke the law yes­ter­day and again today and I will prob­a­bly break the law tomor­row. Don’t mis­take me, I have done noth­ing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have bro­ken. Nev­er­the­less, I am rea­son­ably con­fi­dent that I

I won­der if this is true of oth­er dis­ci­plines as well. How inter­est­ing.

Aca­d­e­m­ic eco­nom­ics is more win­ner-take-all than you might think

John P. Con­ley and Ali Sina Onder write (pdf): We study the research pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of new grad­u­ates of top Ph.D. pro­grams in eco­nom­ics.  We find that class rank is as impor­tant as depart­men­tal rank as pre­dic­tors of future research pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. 

The clos­ing anec­dote is chill­ing.

You com­mit three felonies a day

In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civ­il rights lawyer Har­vey Sil­ver­glate says that every­one in the US com­mits felonies

This is a very inter­est­ing read, espe­cial­ly because most peo­ple who talk about inter­net porn are either absolute­ly con­vinced that it is addic­tive or are adamant­ly insist­ing that it is not.

Was I Actu­al­ly ‘Addict­ed’ to Inter­net Pornog­ra­phy?

Addic­tion isn’t a term to be thrown around light­ly. But some argue that it’s pos­si­ble to become neu­ro­log­i­cal­ly depen­dent on porn.

This nev­er occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense.

Our gov­ern­ment will end up thwart­ing tech inno­va­tion and balka­niz­ing the web

…Google Glass + NSA PRISM essen­tial­ly amounts to a vision in which a for­eign coun­try is sud­den­ly going to be flood­ed with Amer­i­can spy cam­eras. It seems easy to imag­ine any num­ber of for­eign gov­ern­ments hav­ing a prob­lem with that

This is the sort of stuff I hear from stu­dents at Stan­ford. Inter­est­ing.

Lis­ten­ing to Young Athe­ists, Lessons for a Stronger Chris­tian­i­ty

When a Chris­t­ian foun­da­tion inter­viewed col­lege non­be­liev­ers about how and why they left reli­gion, sur­pris­ing themes emerged.

I gen­er­al­ly like this sort of approach, although I don’t think it works as well when com­par­ing poet­ry to prose. I think the Psalms still have pride of place when mea­sured in terms of thoughts.

What Is the Longest Book in the Bible?

Hint: it’s not the Psalms.