{"id":5047,"date":"2018-07-06T15:18:16","date_gmt":"2018-07-06T23:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/?p=5047"},"modified":"2018-07-06T15:18:16","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T23:18:16","slug":"things-glen-found-interesting-volume-159","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2018\/07\/06\/things-glen-found-interesting-volume-159","title":{"rendered":"Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 159"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On Fridays I share articles\/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.<\/p>\n

Things Glen Found Interesting<\/h3>\n
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  1. Police attacked me for stealing a car. It was my own.<\/a> (Lawrence Crosby, Washington Post): \u201cEvery time I see the video from that October 2015 encounter, I experience fear, anger and terror. Fear that the color of my skin will make me out to be a criminal when I have broken no laws. Anger at the blatant disregard for human life and rights that the Constitution is supposed to guarantee to all citizens. Terror to have come \u2014 perhaps \u2014 within seconds of being shot by people sworn to serve and protect.\u201d Lawrence is an alumnus of our Chi Alpha ministry. He just earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern in Materials Science and Engineering.<\/li>\n
  2. Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity<\/a> (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): \u201cThey put the arachnids on vertical strips of cardboard in the center of a plastic box, and then generated electric fields between the floor and ceiling of similar strengths to what the spiders would experience outdoors.\u2026 Many of the spiders actually managed to take off, despite being in closed boxes with no airflow within them. And when Morley turned off the electric fields inside the boxes, the ballooning spiders dropped.\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. Dissolving the Fermi Paradox<\/a> (Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex): \u201cImagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 billion alien civilization. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one parameter Drake Equation, we determine that on average<\/em> there should be 5 billion alien civilizations. Since we see zero, that\u2019s quite the paradox, isn\u2019t it? No. In this case the mean is meaningless. It\u2019s not at all surprising that we see zero alien civilizations, it just means the coin must have landed tails. SDO say that relying on the Drake Equation is the same kind of error.\u201d<\/li>\n
  4. Why Sexism and Racism Never Diminish\u2013Even When Everyone Becomes Less Sexist and Racist<\/a> (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): \u201cWhen strong sexism declines, for example, the Overton window shrinks on one end and expands on the other so that what was once not considered sexism at all (e.g. \u2018men and women have different preferences which might explain job choice\u2019) now becomes violently sexist.\u201d<\/li>\n
  5. Forget About It<\/a> (Corey Robin, Harper\u2019s Magazine): \u201cEver since the 2016 presidential election, we\u2019ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It\u2019s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized \u2014 it\u2019s the not-so-distant past.\u201d<\/li>\n
  6. A Time of Reckoning<\/a> (Mary Eberstadt, The Weekly Standard): \u201cOver the years, a great many people have claimed that sex is merely a private act between individuals. They\u2019ve been wrong. We know now that private acts have cumulative public effects. Individual choices, such as having children out of wedlock, have ended up expanding the modern welfare state, for example, as the government has stepped in to support children who lack fathers. The explosion of sexual activity thanks to contraception has been accompanied by levels of divorce, cohabitation, and abortion never before seen in history.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Less Serious Things Which Also Interested\/Amused Glen<\/h3>\n