Recently, there was an interesting essay in the St. Petersburg Times about serendipity. The author is concerned that it is in danger in today’s world:

Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find – with an irritating hit or miss here and there – exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding. Inside, the book might be a loser, a waste of the effort and calories it took to remove it from its place and then return. Or it might be a dark chest of wonders, a life-changing first step into another world, something to lead your life down a path you didn’t know was there.

I’ve become a big public library patron the last couple of years. During one of the interviews for my new job, the interviewer asked me some personal questions, among them, “What are you reading right now?” One of the books was a novel that I’d picked up while browsing through the new books display at the library. It was by an author I’d never heard of and I couldn’t recall the author’s name for the interviewer. I remember feeling slightly embarrassed that I wasn’t reading something intentional or directed, that I didn’t have any sort of goal in reading this novel.. After reading this essay, I realize that there’s absolutely no shame in browsing.

As I’ve expressed before, I’m skeptical of the current craze for hybrid cars. As I understand it, they were initially developed for their low emissions; better gas mileage was a bonus. But now, a lot of people are buying them for their general ‘green’ fuzzy feelgood value.
This New York Times editorial confirms my suspicions regarding some people’s relatively unconsidered reasons for buying hybrids:

Lately, people have been calling me and telling me they’re thinking about buying the Lexus 400H, a new hybrid SUV. When I tell them that they’d get better mileage in some conventional SUVs, and even better mileage with a passenger car, they protest, “But it’s a hybrid!” I remind them that the 21 miles per gallon I saw while driving the Lexus 400H is not particularly brilliant, efficiency-wise – hybrid or not. Because the Lexus is a relatively heavy car and because its electric motor is deployed to provide speed more than efficiency, it will never be a mileage champ.

The article also offers some useful advice on when a hybrid is and isn’t a good choice. For example:

Indeed, [with highway driving] the [Prius’] gasoline engine worked so hard that we calculated we might have used less fuel on our journey if we had been driving Toyota’s conventionally powered, similarly sized Corolla – which costs thousands less.

The article concludes with a warning about the government’s current penchant for supporting hybrid purchases:

So the ideal hybrid car is one that is used in town and carefully disposed of at the end of its days. Hybrid taxis and buses make enormous sense. But the market knows no such distinctions. People think they want hybrids and they’ll buy them, even if a conventional car would make more sense. The danger is that the automakers will co- opt the hybrids’ green mantle and, with the help of a government looking to bail out its troubled friends in Detroit, misguidedly encourage the sale of hybrids without reference to their actual effect on oil consumption.
Pro-hybrid laws and incentives sound nice, but they might just end up subsidizing companies that have failed to develop truly fuel-efficient vehicles at the expense of those that have had the foresight to design their cars right in the first place. And they may actually punish citizens who save fuel the old- fashioned way – by using less of it, with smaller, lighter and more efficient cars. All the while, they’ll make a mockery of a potentially useful technology.

So, I’m definitely going to hold onto my eight-year-old Corolla. She’s homely but she gets the job done quite efficiently.

Over at kottke.org, guest blogger Greg Knauss proposes that bloggers fall into two categories:

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

I’m definitely primarily a referential blogger. The primary reason for this is that I’m introverted and am therefore reluctant to share my personal life with people whom I don’t know well.
But Greg’s observations are timely for me, as I wrote an experiential blog post just last night. Writing that post felt kind of strange to me. Now I see why. But, I do think I’ll try to write more experiential posts.

Researchers examined whether bilingual individuals showed different personality traits when communicating in each language. The short answer: yes. Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the entire paper.
As a bilingual person, that result doesn’t surprise me. I know I behave differently when speaking German than I do when speaking my native language, English. But upon reflection, I’d say the reasons for that are complex: relative insecurity with my mastery of German, different cultural conversational conventions and expectations, etc. I’d like to know how the researchers controlled for various influencing factors.
Ivia Follow Me Here)

These study results are really interesting:

In the 1960s Jack Block . . . began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality . . . A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
. . .
In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it’s a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

(via Follow Me Here)

According to this article, a high school art teacher is facing sanctions from his school district for “recommending that some of his advanced students consider taking figure drawing courses that included nude figure drawings.” The article lists some other circumstances that may have played a role in the district’s decision to pursue this course of action against the teacher.
This reminds me of an incident that happened when I was in high school. One of the women’s coaches, Coach Mac, was my health teacher. I thought she was an awesome teacher. About halfway through the year, she was charged with having used inappropriate language in class. Turns out, the charges were based on a lesson she taught my class. I don’t remember the point of the lesson, but it was some lesson in development that involved Little Johnny ‘learning the word Firetruck without the middle,’ meaning the word ‘Fuck’. She never actually said the F word in class.
But Coach Mac was brought before the school board for this alleged infraction. I attended the board meeting as a show of support for her. Soon afterwards, she left the district, and I frankly no longer recall whether she was fired or just gave up and left of her own accord. The result was the same for me: the loss of a teacher from whom I learned a lot.
Only later did I discover that Coach Mac’s supposed language in class was just a front for the real issue: she was a lesbian and a girls’ coach. But this issue was never uttered at the school board meeting. To this day, I have no idea if sexual impropriety was suspected or accused, or whether it just rubbed some parents the wrong way to think that a lesbian had access to the the girls’ dressing room. Either way, the whole process was a sham undertaken by a community that must have known enough that its bigotry was inappropriate to pick a cover issue for their witch hunt.
In reading this story, you have to take the time and place into consideration. This was a mostly rural school in the 1980s. Personally, I did not know any homosexuals (that I knew of), I thought the Village People were just a gimmicky group, and non-heterosexual lifestyles were not an issue that I’d even given much thought to. The only reason I know that the lesbian charges were real was that sometime after she left, Coach Mac dropped back by the school with her girlfriend. That visit must have been her parting ‘fuck you’ to the community, so to speak.
Reading the linked article, however, it looks like things haven’t changed a whole lot.

I read yesterday that Bart D. Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is selling briskly. In the book, Dr. Ehrman presents some reasons why we can’t just take the Bible at face value: a plethora of conflicting source documents, errors in translation, the politics of canonization, etc. Or, as the Washington Post article says, his book “casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.”
I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds like New Testament 101 type stuff to me. I’m really happy that Ehrman’s book is presenting these ideas to people who are not familiar with the complex processes which have resulted in the book we call the Bible. Maybe I should keep a copy or two on hand to give out.

A new study finds that people significantly overestimate the ability of themselves and others to accurately understand the intended tone of online text communications:

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explains.
At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.
The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective.

This is a good case for the value of adding emoticons to your online communications, though such usage is often frowned upon for more formal communication. Maybe our younger Internet-savvy cohorts figured this out already.

I’ve been thinking more about the New Yorker article about banning aggressive dog breeds that I blogged about yesterday. Gladwell concludes the article by listing the series of steps that government officials could have taken–or arguably should have–to prevent the one dog attack that he profiles.
But even if authorities were prepared to take such measures, it would not prevent many dog attacks. The main problem, I believe (and Gladwell says this to some extent), is people who think of themselves as bad-ass and who have dogs whom they view as extensions of this projected personality. Identifying such people and somehow preventing their dogs from hurting others would be a thorny, and probably impossible, sociological task.
To generalize, it seems to me that flagrant disregard for the well-being of others is an integral part of this tough-guy persona, and, as Gladwell mentions, such people often have a history of violence. Since we, as a society, don’t have a problem with limiting the rights and behaviors of convicted criminals (e.g., convicted felons can’t vote), then maybe it would be effective just to not allow people who have been covicted of violent crimes from dog ownership. But even that doesn’t seem like a very targeted means of avoiding dog attacks, which are actually a relatively uncommon problem. Just thinking out loud here.

This article makes me ill. Some excerpts:

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn’t engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.
He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.
“We’re going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles,” Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham’s ministry, Answers in Genesis.

In two 90-minute workshops for children, Ham adopted a much lighter tone, mocking scientists who think birds evolved from dinosaurs (“if that were true, I’d be worried about my Thanksgiving turkey!”).
In a bit that brought the house down, Ham flashed a picture of a chimpanzee. “Did your grandfather look like this?” he demanded.
“Noooooo!” the children called.
“And did your grandmother look like that?” Ham displayed a photo of the same chimp wearing lipstick. The children erupted in giggles. “Noooooo!”
“We are not just an animal,” Ham said. He had the children repeat that, their small voices rising in unison: “We are not just an animal. We are made in the image of God.”

Can’t we be animals and made in the image of God?