Church Stages Kidnapping of Youth Group Members
Colleen Curry, ABC News:
A church pastor in Pennsylvania could face felony charges for staging a fake kidnapping of youth group students in order to teach them about religious persecution.
Teenagers at the Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church in Middletown, Pa., were surprised when they attended a youth group meeting at the church on March 21 and were ambushed by what seemed to be real kidnappers.
I don’t have any words for this that aren’t vulgar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEaejOZyImA
Short but sweet on this Tuesday is Victor Wooten’s bass groove simply titled “Groove.”
Video of Nas performing “Illmatic” live at SXSW
This is not to be missed. DJ Premier is on the turntables (and acting as hype man), and AZ and Pete Rock both show up. Seriously, this is really, really great stuff.
(Probably my favorite part is that Premier is wearing an Illmatic T-shirt. That’s a level so completely beyond “wearing the band’s T-shirt to their show” that I don’t even know if it’s cool or not. Which makes it very cool.)
Remembrances of First Dates Past
What if scenes from our lives were critiqued by reviewers?
Here’s a short piece by John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, that ran in Book magazine in 2002. It’s also featured in expanded form in Warner’s book Fondling Your Muse, which I recommend if only just for the best burn of Tom Clancy ever committed to paper.
Debunking the Universal Grammar… or not
Fantastic profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tom Bartlett of the “war of words” (I’m so sorry) that has erupted between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky on whether Everett has debunked Chomsky’s ill-defined “Universal Grammar”. The whole piece is fantastic, but this was my favorite bit, from later on in the article.
Everett is far from the only current Chomsky challenger. Recently there’s been a rise in so-called corpus linguistics, a data-driven method of evaluating a language, using computer software to analyze sentences and phrases. The method produces detailed information and, for scholars like Gibson, finally provides scientific rigor for a field he believes has been mired in never-ending theoretical disputes. That, along with the brain-scanning technology that linguists are increasingly making use of, may be able to help resolve questions about how much of the structure of language is innate and how much is shaped by culture.
But Chomsky has little use for that method. In his lecture, he deemed corpus linguistics nonscientific, comparing it to doing physics by describing the swirl of leaves on a windy day rather than performing experiments. This was “just statistical modeling,” he said, evidence of a “kind of pathology in the cognitive sciences.” Referring to brain scans, Chomsky joked that the only way to get a grant was to propose an fMRI.
The hypocrisy of Chomsky in the above and below is frankly hilarious:
Another Chomsky nugget is the way he responds when asked to give a definition of Universal Grammar. He will sometimes say that Universal Grammar is whatever made it possible for his granddaughter to learn to talk but left the world’s supply of kittens and rocks speechless—a less-than-precise answer.
Oh Noam. We love you anyway, you crazy old coot.
PBS NewsHour (2012-03-22): Ahmed Rashid: ‘Enormous Anti-Americanism’ Spreading in Afghanistan
PBS NewsHour had a nice segment yesterday a few days ago with journalist Ahmed Rashid on the complex relationship between the U.S., Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. This is how the interviewer Ray Suarez introduced what I found to be the most interesting tidbit:
In the book, you take us deep inside those negotiations begun quite clandestinely in Germany with go-betweens, safe passage for Taliban fighters to get from Central Asia to Western Europe. But then they’re scotched by Pakistan, Pakistan working at cross-purposes to the United States and Afghanistan.
I hadn’t even heard about these talks at all.
Henry Farrell’s Part in Stephen J. Dubner’s Upfall
Apparently in 2005 Crooked Timber held an online seminar discussing the book — the content in the seminar seems honest to me. But somewhere along the lines, something went wrong, and Farrell now regrets it:
But even if it seemed a good idea at the time, I should have known better. Yes – Levitt is an interesting and original economist, but the glib contrarianism and breezy confidence that silly econometric results would tell us something valuable about the world were baked into the cake from the beginning of the Freakonomics project, and perhaps before. D-squared’s perhaps never-to-be-published CT summation of his various posts on Freakonomics makes that clear. It’s a bit like one of those high-end fashion marques that begins with haute couture, and ends up over-extending its brand by using it on everything from cheap plastic novelties to toilet paper.
The whole thing is worth reading, including the comments. In particular, don’t miss the hilarious/brutal 1st paragraph and this witty riposte from “Daniel” in the comments.
Here’s a video of the cupcake vending machine at Sprinkles Cupcakes in Beverly Hills.
Israeli law eyes super-thin models as bad examples
Daniella Cheslow writing for the AP about a new Israeli law that regulates the thinness of models in advertisements:
The new law requires models to produce a medical report no older than three months at every shoot for the Israeli market, stating that they are not malnourished by World Health Organization standards.
The U.N. agency relies on the body mass index, calculated by factors of weight and height. WHO says a body mass index below 18.5 indicates malnutrition. According to that standard, a woman 1.72 meters tall (5-feet-8) should weigh no less than 119 pounds (54 kilograms).
But be sure to read the whole article, it has a lot of background about just how damaging this is to young girls and young models.
Mali troops declare coup, loot presidential palace
AP:
Drunken soldiers looted Mali’s presidential palace hours after they declared a coup on Thursday, suspending the constitution and dissolving the institutions of one of the few established democracies in this troubled corner of Africa.
Mali adopted a democratic constitution in August of 1991. The coup that lead to that constitution happened on March 26, almost twenty-one years ago exactly.