Glen Davis

Hal­loween is upon us once again.

Three ran­dom links for your view­ing plea­sure:

* Extreme Pump­kins shows us the pump­kins that deep-down inside we’ve always want­ed to carve…

* In a true sto­ry, a tough sailor saves his crew by killing a 600 pound shark in 1–1 com­bat.

* The Home Star Run­ner Hal­loween series:
   2000: The Home­S­tar­Loween Par­ty
   2001: The House That Gave Sucky Treats
   2002: A Pumpakin Carve-nival
   2003: 3 Times Hal­loween Fun-job!

Time mag­a­zine has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the idea that one’s reli­gion is bet­ter than anoth­er’s. The author paints a more nuanced pic­ture than you might guess based on the title.

As a devout believ­er, Boykin may also won­der why it is imper­mis­si­ble to say that the God you believe in is supe­ri­or to the God you don’t believe in. I won­der this same thing as a non­be­liev­er: Does­n’t one reli­gion’s gospel log­i­cal­ly pre­clude the oth­ers’? (Except, of course, where they over­lap with uni­ver­sal pre­cepts, such as not mur­der­ing peo­ple, that even we non­be­liev­ers can wrap our heads around.) Although Boyk­in’s ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty seems less like monothe­ism than the star of a high school poly­the­ism tour­na­ment, his basic point is that Chris­tian­i­ty is right and Islam is wrong. Does­n’t the one imply the oth­er? Pre­tend­ing that my reli­gion is no bet­ter than your reli­gion may make for few­er reli­gious wars, but it seems con­trary to the very idea of reli­gion. For this, you take a leap of faith?

Read The Reli­gious Supe­ri­or­i­ty Com­plex (check out Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s weblog for relat­ed info).

Bored at 3am try­ing to get a paper done? Divert your­self with this smat­ter­ing of opti­cal illu­sions.

My favorite is the bio­log­i­cal motion illu­sion.

I just ran across a cool site: KwMap. In their own words KwMap.com is a com­plex key­word refin­ing tool, aim­ing to help you dis­cov­er new key­words. It is a fact that search engines can only help you in find­ing some­thing if you know the right key­words.

The results look pret­ty neat. Here’s a search on Stan­ford and here’s one on Chi Alpha.

If you pre­fer a more time­ly search, here’s one on Iraq.

The New York Times just ran an inter­est­ing arti­cle about how the same text­books you’re using at Stan­ford sell for half as much over­seas. As a result, some stu­dents have start­ed order­ing their text­books from Eng­land (or even Sin­ga­pore) and hav­ing them shipped here.

Many stu­dents, indi­vid­u­al­ly, have begun to com­pare the text­book prices post­ed on Amer­i­can sites like Amazon.com, with the low­er prices for the same books on for­eign sites like Amazon.co.uk.

The dif­fer­ences are often sig­nif­i­cant: “Lehninger Prin­ci­ples of Bio­chem­istry, Third Edi­tion,” for exam­ple, lists for $146.15 on the Amer­i­can Ama­zon site, but can be had for $63.48, plus $8.05 ship­ping, from the British one. And “Lin­ear Sys­tem The­o­ry and Design, Third Edi­tion” is $110 in the Unit­ed States, but $41.76, or $49.81 with ship­ping, in Britain.

Read the whole sto­ry.

It’s been a while since I’ve post­ed any­thing total­ly ran­dom, so pre­pare to be enter­tained and informed:

1) Hol­ly­wood Meets the Pews: In the mid­dle of it all was Jonathan Bock, a unique Hol­ly­wood pub­li­cist who keeps under­lin­ing one big sta­tis­tic for stu­dio lead­ers — week after week rough­ly five times as many peo­ple go to church as attend movies. In the past three years, his Grace Hill Media oper­a­tion has helped pro­mote 30 main­stream movies in reli­gious media, from small films such as “A Walk to Remem­ber” to epics such as “The Lord of the Rings.”

2) Mon­keys Con­trol Robot­ic Arm With Brain Implants (no, real­ly): At first, Nicolelis said, the mon­key kept mov­ing the joy­stick, not real­iz­ing that her own brain was now sole­ly in charge of the arm’s move­ments. Then, he said, an amaz­ing thing hap­pened.

“We’re look­ing, and she stops mov­ing her arm,” he said, “but the cur­sor keeps play­ing the game and the robot arm is mov­ing around.”

The ani­mal was con­trol­ling the robot with its thoughts.

“We could­n’t speak. It was dead silence,” Nicolelis said. “No one want­ed to ver­bal­ize what was hap­pen­ing. And she con­tin­ued to do that for almost an hour.”

3) Mar­tial Arts Expert Kills Two Raiders: Chi­nese mar­tial arts expert was in cus­tody yes­ter­day after turn­ing the tables on four bur­glars armed with knives, killing two of them and seri­ous­ly wound­ing a third. The 28-year-old man, known as “the doc­tor” for his prac­tice of acupunc­ture and tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese med­i­cine, man­aged to seize one of the two knives car­ried by his assailants and saw off the entire group with the feroc­i­ty of his reac­tion. The moral of the sto­ry: you just nev­er know whose house you’re break­ing into…

Any­way, I found those fas­ci­nat­ing. I hope you do, too.