Asides

My mind is offi­cial­ly blown.

HHS: Bible pub­lish­er not a ‘reli­gious employ­er’

The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion is claim­ing that a ded­i­cat­ed Chris­t­ian pub­lish­er of Bibles and min­istry mate­r­i­al is insuf­fi­cient­ly reli­gious to qual­i­fy for an exemp­tion to the con­tra­cep­tion man­date in the pr…

Wait… the pic­tures your old high school class­mates send you can actu­al­ly make you more pro­duc­tive?

Look­ing at pic­tures of cute ani­mals makes you work more care­ful­ly and delib­er­ate­ly

Or so we are told: A new study by Japan­ese researchers now shows there are more ben­e­fits to look­ing at pic­tures of these uni­ver­sal delights than just get­ting a case of the warm and fuzzies. After­wards…

The final bit is the most inter­est­ing to me. I tru­ly think foot­ball is doomed in Amer­i­ca. Per­haps it will mutate and sur­vive, but its cur­rent form is sure­ly pass­ing away.

The Finest Young Sports­writer in Amer­i­ca

It may sur­prise you to learn the finest young sportswriter—perhaps the finest young writer period—in Amer­i­ca is a Chris­t­ian. It’s true: Thomas Lake, all of 31 years of age and cur­rent­ly a senior writer for Sports Illus­trat­ed, grad­u­at­ed from Gor­don Col­lege in Mass­a­chu­setts.
Lake has drawn major atten­tion for his long-form jour­nal­ism, which expert­ly mix­es soar­ing set pieces and ground-lev­el inves­ti­ga­tion. In most cas­es a jour­nal­ist excels at ei…

Per­haps my sense of humor is defec­tive, but this made me laugh out loud.

i.imgur.com/6zGb1.jpg

I would not have guessed the gap was so large. Part of it is easy to under­stand — every­one needs health care but edu­ca­tion tends to be lim­it­ed to cer­tain stages of life. But that only gets you to a 20–1 or so ratio. 

Ques­tions that are rarely asked

It is esti­mat­ed that less than $1B is spent in the U.S. each year on edu­ca­tion research, with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment spend­ing about $700M and uni­ver­si­ties, foun­da­tions and the pri­vate sec­tor spend­ing …

The last few sen­tences are pure gold.

Para­dox of Hoax­es: How Errors Per­sist, Even When Cor­rect­ed | Wired Sci­ence | Wired.com

Not only were peo­ple spread­ing incor­rect infor­ma­tion with recent hoax­es, the col­lec­tive inter­net con­scious­ness didn’t even rec­og­nize the return of the same error. And even when we do rec­og­nize such er…

Some­how this nev­er occurred to me. Wow. I knew 3D print­ers were going to give plen­ty of peo­ple headaches, but it nev­er occurred to me that they might also be respon­si­ble for exit wounds.

Guns don’t kill peo­ple, print­ers do!

Imag­ine an Amer­i­ca in which any­one can down­load and print a gun in their own home. They wouldn’t need a license, a back­ground check, or much tech­ni­cal knowl­edge, just a 3D print­er. That’s the vision a…

I con­sid­er myself fair­ly well-informed about this issue, but some of these cita­tions were new to me. 

Abor­tion and the Ear­ly Church

In this post, I’m going to address two mis­con­cep­tions that peo­ple often hold con­cern­ing abor­tion. First, many peo­ple assume that elec­tive abor­tions are a fair­ly recent phenomenon—something made pos­sib…

Heh. I love it when some­one uses sim­ple num­bers to explode a ridicu­lous claim (or in this case, a pur­port­ed­ly unan­swer­able ques­tion). 

Sand in the Gears » Blog Archive » Aban­don­ing chil­dren

What hap­pened in Nebras­ka does­n’t raise the ques­tion, it answers it. Using U.S. Cen­sus Bureau data, we can deter­mine that when Nebras­ka par­ents have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to give up their chil­dren with no c…

What a clever exper­i­ment. The human brain is fas­ci­nat­ing…

How to con­fuse a moral com­pass

Sur­vey ‘mag­ic trick’ caus­es atti­tude rever­sal.