Random Notes from a Crank

The Atlantic has a couple of articles worth a thinking person's time in the April issue. 

The first is "The Nancy Pelosi Problem," an article that demonstrates that the vitriol spewed against Pelosi by various people has a gendered proclivity. As the article shows, she's been pretty darn good at her job as Majority and Minority Leader. But a lot of what she's up against (and the Democrats for that matter) is showcased in the study that presents how people react to "John Burr" and "Ann Burr."

Another good piece features Julie Washington's work and research. She's a linguist who is trying to use AAV to help students succeed. Check out "The Code-Switcher: Julie Washington's Lifelong Quest to Change the Way We Teach Young Speakers of African-American English." 

"More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows" by Melinda Wenner Moyer in Scientific American should be required reading. I read it when it came out in October. The article won the American Society of Jounralists and Author's Excellence in Reporting Award.

In a more recent article in Scientific American, "The Number of Americans with No Religious Affiliation is Rising," the author reports on how the number of "nones" is getter larger in the US. I tend to agree with Shermer's statement that "This shift away from the dominance of any one religion is good for a secular society whose government is structured to discourage catch basins of power from building up and spilling over into people's private lives." Also, like the author, I find some of the beliefs of these non-religious people puzzling and downright silly.

Random Notes from a Crank

With college football on Saturday and us doing stuff on Sunday, I forgot that Luke Cage was available on Netflix this past Friday. I'm only a few episodes in, but I like it a lot. 

One of my favorite classes I had as an undergrad was Mythology. I stumbled across this article via Scientific American the other day: "Scientists Trace Society's Myths to Primordial Origins." I like the research this person is doing, but you can see these patterns just by studying world mythologies. There are four types of creation myths and two types of fertility myths. Reading Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Frazier's The Golden Bough, and Mencken's Treatise on the Gods can do everyone a lot of good. Reading those could certainly help people from saying their religion/mythology is the "right" one. 

One of my dad's stories that he has related over the years is that when he was in Iowa and went to bar and asked the waitress for a Griesedieck, he got slapped. The company is apparently going to open a brewery sometime soon. 

I read recently that ABC is reviving The Gong Show. I look forward to that. In that same article, the author relates that both the 20,000 Pyramid and The Match Game were aired this summer, and they'll be back. How the hell did I miss those? 

A listicle about the "20 Saddest Cities" came across my FB feed, so I figured to click away. Some of my quick takeaways are the following:

• Don't move to Ohio.
• I'm surprised St. Louis and Indy are on it.
• Knoxville is supposed to be great, I'm told.
• Detroit and Buffalo are not surprising.
• Same goes for Birmingham.
• I like Louisville, and how can it be sad with easy access to such a diversity of bourbon?  
• Memphis has the second-highest violent crime rate in the nation? Wow.

Random Notes from a Crank

Chile is investing in alternative energy, building a smarter grid, and using a carbon tax, all to be sustainable but also to have an economy that grows in a smart way. Check out "Solar Power Lights the Way to a Cleaner Economy in Chile" if you're intrigued. 

Over at The Atlantic, Sarah Boxer published a detailed and interesting article about Peanuts: "The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy." I'm not a hater of Snoopy like some critics, but for me Charlie Brown was the best character of that strip even though I started reading the comic during the heyday of Snoopy. I also always checked out Peanuts books from the library that had the older strips from the 50s and 60s. 

I'm surprised about Coach Spurrier's immediate retirement. I agree with Ryan Nanni's sentiment from the EDSBS thread that "if he's leaving, I'm gonna miss the gel out of Steve Spurrier. Were not getting another one, and I suspect he knows that." The search of South Carolina head coach job will be a high-profile one, and it'll be a search that will probably make some current coaches get pay raises. 

After watching a bunch of MLB games over the past couple of weeks, I'm really tired of all of these pecker-pill commercials. 

Random Notes from a Crank

To counter the intellectual jock sniffing I've done this season on Sunday Hangovers and my last post, I'm providing a couple of articles from The Atlantic that take a justly cranky and reasonable view about our sports-obsessed culture. 

First up is "The Case Against High-School Sports" by Amanda Ripley, which points out the outrageous costs and mental energy we put toward high school athletics in American culture. As a lot of people know, football costs a tremendous amount of money, and the author details a school district in Texas that eliminated all of their sports programs and the academic benefits they reaped from such a move. She also questions the reasoning behind the claim that sports motivate students to do well in school. It might help a small percentage, but what about the majority of students? 

Of course, I read this article the day after I went to a local high school basketball game. At least basketball is one of the cheaper sports. 

Next is "How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers" by Greg Easterbrook. Like churches, the NFL enjoys tax-exempt status. (The tax-free status of churches could be the source of a rant for another day). As the author puts it, "That's right--extremely profitable and one of the most subsidized organizations in American history, the NFL also enjoys tax-exempt status. On paper it is the Nonprofit Football League." 

In a more positive note for those of us who still believe in physical books and magazines, Scientific American (SA) has an article by Ferris Jabr called the "Why the Brain Prefers Paper." The writer culled a good bit of research, but here are some juicy snippets from the article because SA is smart enough to not give away their articles for free unless you go to your public library (or use a database) to read it:

• "Despite all the increasingly user-friendly and popular technology, most studies published since the early 1990s confirm the earlier conclusions: paper still has advantages over screens as a reading medium. Together laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicate that digital devices prevent people from efficiently navigating long texts, which may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. Whether they realize it or not, people often approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper. And e-readers fail to re-create certain tactile experiences of reading on paper, the absence of which some find unsettling."
• Here's a visual aid that explains how "the physicality of paper explains this discrepancy." 
• For educators, this conclusion merits attention: "When reading on screens, individuals seems less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation--setting goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way."  

Random Notes from a Crank

I've had John Brereton's The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925: A Documentary History for a long time, and I finally got around to reading it the other day. I usually enjoy examining writing from the 19th century because it's fun to read an older style of writing. I was reading a report by Adams Sherman Hill, and here's a passage that demands attention: "Awkward attitudes, ungrammatical or obscure sentences, provincial or vulgar locutions, fanciful analogies, far-fetched illustrations, ingenious sophisms, pettifogging subtleties, ineffective arrangement--all come in for animadversion; and corresponding merits for praise." It reads exactly as you would expect the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard to write, but I like the word pettifogging, which is a derivation of pettifogger, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as a "petty, quibbling, unscrupulous lawyer" or "one who quibbles over trivia." I want to work that word into my vocabulary, and I may get a chance soon since tomorrow is Election Day.

I recently read "Ecosystems on the Brink" by Carl Zimmer in Scientific American. SA only gives you a preview unless you're a subscriber, but the upshot is that researchers are using mathematical models and empirical research to create early warning systems to try to stop ecosystems from crashing. The research is interesting and important, but what I'm more concerned about is whether homo sapiens really gives a damn about the environment and if  we're willing to actually do something about tipping points and the results of data-driven, scientific research. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Within a span of thirty minutes this Tuesday, my five-year old son was crying and telling me that "I'm always mean" to him and I "don't like" him and I don't "trust him," and then he was stating this: "I'm sexy, and I know it." Stupid hormones and commercials, respectively.

I know I've said variations of this before, but I don't think I've ever posted it on the blog. Regardless, to me it seems like people think they can make themselves look intelligent by being sarcastic. All being sarcastic shows is that you're being sarcastic, not necessarily intelligent. Sarcasm does not equal intelligence. Sarcasm = Sarcasm.

One of the presents my son got for his birthday in June is an adjustable basketball hoop. Because he's only five, we keep it at the lowest setting, which is 8 feet. I have to say, I'm a damn fine basketball player on a basket at only eight feet. I can even dunk. Shooting around on this hoop got me thinking. There needs to be a league for the shorter folks in the world. I hereby propose a co-ed basketball league that only permits players who are 5'10" and below, and they get to play on a 8 foot rim. If you're 6', Hell no! If you're 5'11," that's too bad. I could have a future in that league.

The article "How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God" is an interesting article from Scientific American, and I'm sure people will question the research methodologies used, but what about agnostics? They only worked with religious people and atheists. Harumph!

Just when you think the self-replicating code of Starbuck's has eased, there's this: one's going into a funeral home. Thinking about this analytically though, wouldn't a bar turn a better profit?

Living Beyond Our Means

In an opinion column in the the NY Times a while back, Friedman's "The Earth is Full" provides a perspective that I've read before.

Repeatedly.

Two articles in the May issue of Scientific American connect to what Friedman is talking about and the Panglossian outlook from the "eco-optimist" Paul Gilding that Friedman quotes from extensively.

But I'm no eco-optimist.

As Daniel T. Willingham relates in "Trust Me, I'm a Scientist," "Because we want to see ourselves as rational beings, we find reasons to maintain that our beliefs are accurate. One or two contrarians are sufficient to convince us that the science is 'controversial' or 'unsettled.'"

It's difficult to move people mainly on logical appeals, which scientists have been trying to do for decades upon decades. Scientists who study global warming have been banging up against beliefs for a long time. I'm repeating myself a bit since last month I covered some of this ground in "This Has All Been Related Before." But what the hell.

In a more hopeful vein, the editors of Scientific American feature seven "Radical Energy Solutions" that are rated on their likelihood to happen and their potential impacts. The seven are these: "fusion-triggered fission," "solar gasoline," "quantam photovoltaics," "heat engines," "shock-wave auto engine," "magnetic air conditioners," and "clean(er) coal."

Solar Gasoline, aka "syngas" created by concentrated solar collectors, sounds pretty cool to me, an invention that might have a partial answer to the satirical lyrics of Merle Haggard's old song, "Rainbow Stew."

If you don't like eating rainbow stew, James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency is a book to read, especially if you have a darker sensibility or if you're no eco-optimist.