Crunchy Cons: Birkenstocked Burkeans and Those Who Love Them

Interesting label for a semi-paradoxical sort of person.

A local man who probably qualifies as a crunchy con is Caleb Stegall, resident of Perry, Douglas County, Kansas. Stegall is editor of The New Pantagruel . Thanks to my professor ("S.B.") at Johnson County Community College for putting me onto the site.

Read more at crunchycon.nationalrevi...

"Homeland Security": Is the cure worse than the disease?

The people we are hiring to inspect our bags are stealing valuables from them. If so, they are LESS trustworthy than the typical person and arguably MORE likely to plant bombs in our luggage than the passengers are. Might we better improve homeland security by planting boobytrapped jewelry cases in our luggage? By using ink-filled devices such as on garments on stores, we could catch these thieves red-handed.

Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com/...

These t-shirts are pretty funny

http://www.noisebot.com/t-shirts_hoodies_tote_bags

"Make me one with everything"

This is hilarious.

Read more at www.disenchanted.com/di...

Reading leads to meeting?

Written biographical and autobiographical material can raise as many questions as it answers, and this is a good thing.

For example, after I wrote an acquaintance that I had Googled her and had learned a lot, she wrote back "now the mystique is gone." But actually, knowledge of these facts X, Y, and Z only made me want to ask her in person "How did you feel about X? What did you like about Y and Z?" etc. Information led to interest, which led to communication.

Might we view the entire human-readable portion of the internet as ultimately an introducer to real people? Going yet further, might we not say that even the goods and services a person provides are ultimately a set-up for that person's interactions with other people? (These ideas relate to my "Nearish" project, which follows from the personal-relationship-as-center-of-life value embraced by the "people of the Book.")

To just be together and to "just live"--is the rest of life a means to this end, or to an end somehow like this?

Google Desktop

I've been using Google Desktop for a few weeks. It provides (as of Version 2.0) an incremental search box similar to the "spotlight" in Mac OS X "Tiger." Every time I search, Google Desktop looks first among my emails, local files, and web history, which are "nearish" places. I like it.

Effect Size Estimates of Lifestyle and Dietary Changes

Google's company doctor reviews the findings of... yet another study? No! We do see so many newspaper reports of studies that it's hard to take them seriously, but this is the kind of article we'd like to see more often: one that ranks, in a sense, the importance of different pieces of advice.

Read more at googleblog.blogspot.com...

Could Gambling Save Science?

This guy has some pretty neat ideas. (He is also the inventor of Idea Futures.)

Read more at hanson.gmu.edu/gamble.h...