A bit like being in a Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder (thank you ARTH 101) painting. I’ve never seen the human body being abused, demented, and spoiled in so many ways — sleep deprivation, drugs, sex, disgusting food, sunburns, mosquito bites, loud music, paint, prolonged standing, dehydration, not showering. Beer sloshed, sunny bodies fat and thin, white skin, scraggly beards, glassy eyes, abused grass, hippies sleeping in sewage drains, mohawked punks lounging in heaps of garbage, girls covering their nipples with corporate logos, and everywhere flags flags — nationalist flags, army flags, musical group flags, regional flags, spongebob flags, flags of unclear meaning and origin flying with unflappable gusto. tents. the occasional lost child.

Basically, an email inbox is duotypic—it has two types of messages: Unread and Read. For the Inbox Zero user this distinction is useless, because you fully process your inbox when you check your email, and you check your email on your schedule (not your email’s schedule). The Unread type is distracting, and can disrupt your schedule discipline by luring you with the promise of new and exciting things. If you remove the Unread type, this phenomenon is eliminated. To do this, simply set up a filter that marks all new messages as “Read”.

I would be different person today if I’d discovered Study Hacks in college. Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn how to get different types of things done, so I’ve been reading up on the field I didn’t learn (and learned to think I didn’t need) when, in fifth grade, I was put in Advanced Reading instead of Study Skills.

Whoa.

I’m trying to live the Paleo life these days, which has a substantially different food pyramid than the federal recommendation above. Nevertheless, the one thing almost everyone can agree on is that we should eat a lot of vegetables. And look at that cute little .37% in veggie subsidies up there!

I suspect that the subsidy balance is influenced by how “addictive” they are. Threaten to take away America’s Brussels sprouts and America shrugs; threaten to take away America’s T-bone, and America is up in arms. That’s a huge marketing advantage for the beef lobby.

(from PCRM Volume XI, Number 4: Health vs. Pork)

Designer has an awesome site too.

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Riiight. Just to be sure I checked the craigslist scams page.

Adam Gopnik’s piece “Van Gogh’s Ear” in last week’s issue did this to me yesterday with its last paragraph:

It’s true that moral luck dramatized by modern art involves an uncomfortable element of ethical exhibitionism. We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for out own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.

(“Moral luck,” here, is “making something that no one wants in the belief that someone someday will.”)

And this is just a book review! But it indicates a deep understanding that the meaning of a book is its relationship to all the other stuff out there in the world, not just the words on the pages.

Last night, John Granger dispelled my resistance with his recent essay in Touchtone (“A Journal of Mere Christianity”). It’s a lengthy, well-crafted piece that maps out the very solid relationship between, on the one hand, the books’ characters and plot, and on the other hand, the author’s defenses and criticisms of her Morman faith.

I suggest that the Twilight series is something for thoughtful people to be aware of and to think seriously about, first, because of its remarkable hold on the imagination of American readers and movie-goers, but second, and more important, because of the reason these books are so popular: They meet a spiritual need.

(via clusterflock)

“As I look back, it now seems that, with all the thought and work and good intentions, which we provided, we achieved absolutely nothing … nothing that I did, and very little that old Ben [Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,] did, internationally produced any good effect—or indeed any effect at all except that we collected money from a lot of poor devils and gave it over to the four winds.”

I’ve seen the last part of the quote cited before as evidence against the ability of central bankers to effectively do anything at all. It just came to my attention again at the end of Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed’s wonderful book examining how the heads of the four major central banks (and others) accidentally steered the world economy into the Great Depression.

I don’t think this quote discredits the efforts of the people who run our economies. Instead, I think it is a reflection on the limitations and futility of economic control. If we knew exactly how the economy worked, we could control it well. We don’t. We do understand it better every day, however when “we” understand “it” better, “it” changes, because “we” comprise “it.” We comprise the system, and our models of the system change it. In a very real sense, our models of the system are the system. If our models of the system were perfect, then parts of the system (our models) would be equivalent to the whole system—they would be fractal: infinite. So our models must be either useless or approximate.

Thus, there are limits on how much we can know or control, and they are not precisely known. Perhaps neither we nor Montagu Norman ran into them, but I think the existence of these limits means that when Norman says he “took money from a lot of poor devils and gave it over to the four winds,” we should not demonize him, but acknowledge his “good intentions,” remind him that the road to hell is paved with those, chide him for his lack of humility, and be on our way. There is yet more world to save.