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?
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
Category: Of Random Interest
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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I feel as though I’ve shared this already, but it popped up as unread in my RSS reader and it’s worth sharing again. Yikes.
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
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This brief article is full of surprising statistics, including an apparent contrast between how churchgoing LGBT adults view most denominations (most think of the church as a whole as unfriendly to them) vs how they view their personal congregational experience (only 6% feel their congregation is unfriendly to them). Am I reading that correctly? Because that’s a huge contrast.
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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.
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This is a wonderful interview. There are so many great lines. My favorite may be:
Q: How are the sharks cognizant enough to keep biting people while they’re flying through the air?
A: If you were a shark and you found yourself flying through the air, wouldn’t you keep biting? I think you’d be pretty pissed about being plucked out of your nice familiar ocean where you’re king of the predators, and you’d probably take it out on whoever got in your way. Honestly, I don’t understand why people are so perplexed by this concept. The logic is undeniable.
Google for the trailer.
We asked the writer of Sharknado some very serious questions
Tonight, Syfy debuts the greatest shark disaster epic since Sharktopus. It’s called Sharknado. And yeah, it’s about a tornado — full of sharks. Thunder Levin wrote the script, and we caught up with him to ask some philosophical questions about this important film that forces us to question the very nature of reality itself.
io9: Is there any scientific basis, however tenuous, for sharknado?
Thunder Levin: Yes. There are numerous confirmed repor…