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Monday Muster: 1.30.12
By now, you know the drill. These are links to help you survive the work week, assuming you hate your job, which I don’t. (Mine, that is. I might hate yours.)
1. Originally stumbled across this via boingboing some time ago. It’s a brief (but fascinating) account of how one becomes a shaman in Iquitos, Peru, along with a rudimentary recipe for hallucinogenic ayahuasca. Throw in the disconcerting revelation that apparently Peruvian shamans look a lot like out-of-work house painters, and it’s golden.
2. Less tedious fare: be careful what you tweet, since two British kids found themselves caged, questioned, and deported this week for hinting that they were coming to “destroy America.” Evidently, “destroy America” also involved facetiously tweeting their plans to dig up Marilyn Monroe. I assume that order came from the ghost of bin Laden himself.
3. I’m sure RIM’s new CEO has many plans to revive the floundering, aging giant. However, I primarily find myself mesmerized by the fact that he appears to be an elongated, Germanized near-clone of NewsRadio star Dave Foley.
4. Via challies, a short piece in Wired magazine on the concept of interleaving, which involves studying or practicing multiple related items simultaneously over time, rather than the hyperfocused “cramming” that many students insist on utilizing.
over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn… [When] information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful…
This is something I’ve been telling my students for years, and it may also explain why a curriculum like Saxon Math works so freaking well–just do the lesson, and don’t panic if you’re not getting it perfectly correct already–and why people who read widely and nonacademically are still so freaking smart.
5. Speaking of people who read well: in 1988, the average 5th grader was reading 4.6 minutes per day outside of school. 5th graders in the 90th percentile read 21.1 minutes per day. This accounts for an additional 1.6 MILLION words per year. It turns out that 5th grade reading volume is a pretty doggone good predictor of high school GPA and future standardized test scores. And what’s a good predictor of 5th grade reading volume? BOOM. FIRST GRADE READING ABILITY. No pressure. It just looks like if you don’t teach your own kid to read before first grade, you’ve doomed them to live under a bridge and drink rainwater from an old boot. All of that (minus horrible prophecies) is presented very convincingly and clinically right here.
6. Here, Clay Shirky argues against the apocalyptic case for internet-induced “digital stupidity” and in favor of the proposition that the internet “restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.” I’m inclined to agree. But then, I love Clay Shirky. Warning: this piece is fairly long (but well worth it).
7. Fantastic analysis by David Friedman which suggests that the murder rate in the US can’t be linked to rates of gun ownership: rather (by comparing it to Prohibition and doing fancy numerical graphy-type things), he claims that we keep killing each other because of the War on Drugs. Food for thought, indeed.
… if the objective is to reduce violent crime, there is a presumption… that drug prohibition is an inefficient way of achieving that objective–that one can get a greater reduction at the same cost by targetting [sic] violent crime directly.
8. Hey…remember that time we accidentally dropped two…TWO(!?)…nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966?
That’s all for today. If you see me this week, ask me about my experiment in pig ownership. I’m tempted to make an “EPORK FAIL” joke, but I won’t.
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I’m re-posting the most popular content of 2011 over Christmas break. This entry technically cheated, since it was published once in February and once in December.
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Dear Christendom:
It’s time for a Christmas letter. I hesitate to publish it, because I didn’t want to ruin anybody’s Christmas. And by anybody’s, I mean mine.
Here’s the giant idea: it turns out, after all, that people who don’t believe in Christ…aren’t Christians.
Each year, starting around Thanksgiving, I’m treated to the virulent outrage of hundreds of Christians, each angered over the latest deletion of “Christ” from “Christmas.”
Some years, it’s their city council foregoing the annual nativity scene, or moving it to a less prominent location. Some years, it’s their favorite store forcing employees to say “Happy Holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas.” When I was in high school, it was the trend of writing “Xmas” rather than “Christmas.”
And out in deep left field, there are the people who executed Santa. .
(Please click the link. It’s spectacular. But make sure you come back and finish.)
I have no problem with any of those things. I genuinely don’t care where the city nativity scene is; my wife typically puts upwards of five in my living room. When a cashier tells me to have a happy holiday, I assume, based on the demographics of my community, that she refers to neither Ramadan nor Hannukah. As for Xmas, all written letters are arbitrarily chosen representations of mental concepts. I don’t think any of the anti-X-ers are insisting we return the ORIGINAL original wording and say it in Aramaic (although, come to think of it, I’d love to hear “Little Drummer Boy” in Hebrew).
Ultimately, Christmas is about celebrating, with my family and friends, the birth of a man who was God. And I’m going to celebrate the miracle of that birth, and tell my children about it, regardless of where the Officially Sanctioned State Holiday Manger Scene is located, and regardless of what words the JC Penney sale ad chooses to identify the day.
I find it exceedingly odd that the very people who malign Islam’s tendency to force “belief” at the edge of the sword insist–with no appreciation for irony–that everyone celebrate OUR holiday in a manner that WE approve. Jesus never forced himself on anyone.
He never said “Behold, I stand at the door and kick the sucker down.”
I have a theory. I have many, many theories, of which my wife and friends have grown increasingly weary (which is kind of how this blog started).
I think Christians have imposed a faux Christ on the world around them in an effort to insulate themselves from reality. We force “Merry Christmas” onto the lips of strangers, and we bemoan the lack of prayer in public schools, and we verily bristle with hostility over any implication that we’re not a Southern Baptist Christian nation—and we do it all because we desire the warm, velvety comfort of being part of the cool kids’ lunch table, where everyone is just as nifty as us, and no one ever causes us discomfort.
That’s the ultimate pipe dream, isn’t it? If we live in a “Christian nation,” we’ll never see persecution. If we live in a “Christian nation,” no one will ever be able to disagree with us on fundamental issues. If we live in a “Christian nation,” we can just be vaguely sort of Christianish and no one will ever question our lifestyle, or our spending habits, our dismissal of the poor, or our complete neglect of the fatherless and the widow.
The problem with the idea of a Christian nation is that Jesus adamantly, insistently, categorically rejected it. He said some things are Caesar’s, and some things are God’s. And then he avoided forcing them into an intersection. He mocked the Roman military parade by riding a donkey into town. He insisted on a kingdom of heaven, not a heavenly kingdom on earth. Heck, the God-man even dodged his taxes at one point, until he got caught.
He said to Pilate “If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have fought you.”
If! He said if! It’s right there!
One could make a pretty strong argument that Jesus Christ was killed by the intersection of religion and government. He was handed over by priests (who had been coopted by Roman rule) to serve as the most effective vehicle for pacifying the masses. The modern incarnation of these priests are pastors who embroil their congregation in Target (or Disney or Harry Potter or Ford) boycotts.
Jesus experienced both persecution and disagreement, and his life culminated in a cross. And that is decidedly not an attractive lifestyle.
We insist that American is a Christian nation, and we fight to maintain a thin sheen of plastic Christianity in our culture, all so we can be Christian without acting like Christ.
We’ll make sure Christmas bears his name, so we won’t have to.
I’ve only just realized this in the past year or so, and it represents a pretty marked shift from the way I thought for the first thirty years of my life. I’m not sure how it’s all going to play out just yet. I have a hunch it’s going to complicate things a bit.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Friends disagree with civility.
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