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July 31, 2005
What interests us about this Local Boy Makes Good long shot (Area Man lands 'Dukes of Hazzard' dream job, story in today's Austin American Statesman -- oh, go ahead, register. It's a short form), is, what made the difference between his story and hundreds of thousands of other idiosyncratic monomaniacs of one kind or another? We speak with a genuine personal interest here.
July 30, 2005
David B. Hart, the author of one of the books (The Beauty of the Infinite) that inspired this blog about Virtue and Happiness, on John Paul II's Theology of the Body. He looks hard at the transhumanist disdain for the meaning and destiny of "the earthly body in all its frailty and indigence and limitation..."
Via Mere Comments
July 29, 2005
Partly because Kyoto-nagging-discourse may take a sharp dive, it's legitimate to celebrate the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate
Powerline parses the policy -- having previously poignantly picked a peck of pickled peppers with parachuting Peter. :) 
The pact includes the U.S., Japan, Australia, China, India and South Korea; these six countries account for most of the world's carbon emissions. The treaty is, in essence, a technology transfer agreement. The U.S., Japan and Australia will share advanced pollution control technology, and the pact's members will contribute to a fund that will help implement the technologies. The details are still sketchy and more countries may be admitted to the group later on. The pact's stated goal is to cut production of "greenhouse gases" in half by the end of the century.
The Social Affairs Unit is on a roll lately. Theodore Dalrymple (may his tribe increase!) on an enlightened caste system and cultivating opportunity for all; a review of We by Yegeny Zamyatin, the earlier dystopian novel (1924); and Myles Harris on evolutionism's rigid terror of the emergent creativity in which we seem to live.
July 28, 2005
In the Freakonomics genre, more intuitive and counter-intuitive economic thinking applied to daily life. We especially appreciate the interpretation of The Rules,
You think that the rule is designed to signal unavailability.... The true role of the rule is not signalling but screening. The “no last-minute dates” rule automatically disqualifies any man who is inconsiderate, short-sighted or just not particularly into you. Screening theory, which won enfant terrible Joe Stiglitz a share of the Nobel prize in 2001, recognises the fact that without some foolproof system, women are incapable of telling a Mark Darcy from a Daniel Cleaver...
and the matrix of balancing present value against the utility of additional information.
Continue reading "Dwarf-tossing Caffeine-starved Rules Meet the Financial Times Economist " »
Papercraft site, [update] including downloads for rare animals. Why wasn't this available when we were about 8?
Via Boingboing. And what kind of temperamental profile wants a Hello Kitty chess set?
Maeda tackles the subject of meetings. There is plenty of simple and abstruse helpful advice on this, but we like his wide-eyed formulations, which can enhance more than business meetings.
The definition of wa embraces ring, hoop, circle, sum, harmony, peace, counted number of birds, rabbits, bundles, even a whole nation's identity.
Drawn by Julian Beever.
Via bright Mystery
he marriage of word and pictures in ceremonial or sacred-content manuscripts is one of the great beauties bought forth by human civilization. The generous website of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University offers a virtual preview of the upcoming illuminated manuscripts exhibition 26. July - 11. December this year. There's even an interactive "making manuscripts" feature.
