December 2011
32 posts
Ancient Texts Tell Tales of War, Towers... and Bar... →
Among the finds is a haunting, albeit partly lost, inscription in the words of King Nebuchadnezzar II, a ruler of Babylon who built a great ziggurat — massive pyramidlike towers built in ancient Mesopotamia — dedicated to the god Marduk about 2,500 years ago.
The inscription was carved onto a stele, a stone slab used for engraving. It includes a drawing of the ziggurat and King Nebuchadnezzar...
Ruins in Georgia Mountains Show Evidence of Maya... →
Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of... →
After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar...
Panama's Nata Chiefs →
Tyler Cowen on Stories →
One interesting thing about cognitive biases - they’re the subject of so many books these days. There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and...
How Luther Went Viral →
Bashar al-Assad Is Every Bit His Father's Son →
Is Work Still Meaningful? →
On its face, “meaningful work” may sound elitist, an offshoot of late 20th century “professionalism” that encouraged the privileged few to “express themselves” through their jobs. And historically, the widespread demand for meaningful jobs is new, a consequence of developments stretching back barely a generation. But the decline of manufacturing and the rise...
Can Men and Women Be Friends? →
Although women dig men’s lighthearted attitude, most male-female friendships resemble women’s emotionally involving friendships more than they do men’s activity-oriented relationships, according to Kathy Werking, at Eastern Kentucky University and author of We’re Just Good Friends. Her work has shown that the number one thing male and female friends do together is talk...
Original Offering Found at Teotihuacan Pyramid →
How Does the Brain Perceive Art? →
Zombie Borders →
Mormons in the United States 1990-2008:... →
Highlights:
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The Mormons of Utah are the only religious group in the U.S. today that comprises a numerical majority of a state’s population (57% of Utah).
Mormons remain the most geographically isolated and uniquely distributed American religious group (only 19% are found east of the Mississippi River).
The Mormon population increase 1990-2008 was more modest than claimed by the...
Is the Bible a Reliable Moral Guide? →
What, then, are those who read the Bible to do? Shall we just pick and choose the laws and commandments that appeal to us and disregard the others? Curiously, I’m tempted to answer a qualified “yes.” I do so largely because I suspect the Bible was never intended to serve primarily as a moral reference. Rather, I think that the Bible comes to us as a collection of confessions of...
Ron Paul for the GOP Nomination →
I am, like many others these days, politically homeless. A moderate, restrained limited government conservatism that seeks to amend, not to revolt, to reform, not to revolutionize, is unavailable. I’m a Tory who has come to see universal healthcare as a moral necessity that requires some minimal government support, who wants government support for a flailing reovery now, but serious...
If I Were a Poor Black Kid →
The Theoretical Case Against Deterrence →
The inmates on death rows across the country are a fairly uniform bunch. They are poor, they are male, and roughly half of them reside in only four states, California, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. They are often addicted to drugs or alcohol; they are the losers in our society, on the bottom rung of the ladder. Many of them –- and, indeed, convicted felons in general -– view the world and...
Millennial Mormons Watch Romney with Anticipation... →
Mormonism remains both the most conservative and most Republican religious group in America. A Gallup Poll found that 59 percent of Mormons polled classified themselves as conservative, according to 2009 polling data. Just 8 percent of Mormons considered themselves to be liberal, the lowest of any of the polled religious groups.
This actually surprised me.
“It seems that anytime a...
When It Comes To Marriage, Many More Say 'I Don't' →
From Finland, An Intriguing School-Reform Model →
Democracy Is Not a Truth Machine →
In democratic politics, after talking like that for a while, we participate in a social choice exercise that transforms those individual opinions into a collective decision - we vote to decide which opinions are most agreeable to us. But ethical precepts like ‘don’t lie’, religious beliefs like ‘Jesus loves you’, or literary judgements like ‘Ulysses is the...
Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology →
I think we’ll be headed in this direction within my lifetime. But probably not soon.
The Problem Solvers →
In a conversation with Inside Higher Ed last week, Khan expressed some ideas on how to improve the signaling quality of academic credentials. Under the current regime, a degree from a college amounts to something similar to an acceptance letter from that college, he says. And that is not ideal for employers. “We find a lot of college grads with high GPAs that have been exposed to many things …...
Violent Knights Feared Posttraumatic Stress →
Ethics, Politics and Economics →
If Italy had control of its own currency, and got into the kind of trouble its in now – slowing global growth making it harder to service its debt – it could resort to devaluation to sustain itself. Which is just what Italy used to do on a regular basis back when it had its own currency, and because Italy had a reputation for doing that, it paid much higher interest rates than countries with...
The Long, Strange History of Christmas Carols →
The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy →
Here, we might consider three views in particular that put Averroës outside the mainstream. First, he contends that both philosophy and the text of the Qur’an point toward the conclusion that the world has always existed in some form or another—that although God has shaped the nature of creatures, the physical world itself has eternally existed, just as God himself has. Second, he contends that...
After Duty, Dogs Suffer Like Soldiers →
Don't Just Ask: Why Women Don't Negotiate →
15 Infant Dinosaurs Discovered Crowded in Nest →