I'm gonna take a break from blogging for the next 40 days or so. See you around April 8.

The foiling of the Air Mauritania hijacker is a great story. The lesson is, if you're going to hijack a plane, make sure you can understand French. Or something like that.

Until now I haven't been two impressed with the dialogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan that I linked earlier. That is, I wasn't impressed until I read Sullivan's latest piece, which is phenomenal. I had trouble picking an excerpt that did it justice; we'll start here:

No civilization has ever been atheist at its core. No polity has ever been constructed in the absence of faith, or in the absence of a tradition of faith that makes belief in the present possible at all. Earth to Sam: Does this not tell you something? Or is it plausible that human beings tomorrow will become something that in all of human history and pre-history they have never, ever been?

Read the whole thing. It's long, but I'm serious. Go read it.

In defense of toll roads:

Historically, we've spent billions on roads and provided them for free. This approach has given us endless traffic jams, because as any former Soviet commissar can tell you, if prices are too low, endless queues follow. Our free roads end up being anything but free, as massive congestion causes us to pay with time instead of cash.

Don't tell your kid she's smart. Tell her to work hard:

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

I've always thought wind chill measurements were bogus. Now I have support.

The first Carnival of Mathematics is up. I am just a tiny bit disappointed, but I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting that would have been better.

Severely restricting calorie intake may make you live longer. But maybe it's better to just stop worrying about food.

Alan Jacobs points out how some of those who attack Christianity - including Sam Harris and Stephen Pinker - are very ill-informed about their subject.

Keith Devlin makes the obvious point that math has an ethical dimension:

If ever there was a time when physicists could stand aloof from the messy everyday world, that era came to an end when the first atomic bomb was detonated. It may have been an illusion that we mathematicians were able to remain pure for a few decades longer, but illusion or not, we can no longer maintain such an attitude.

This is one of the reasons I'm on the applied rather than theoretical side; applied mathematicians are explicit in considering the consequences of their work. Which doesn't mean we won't mess things up, but at least we have our eyes open.

Lab-grown meat. It's coming.

Socially responsible gasoline:

These days, any purchase is fair game for an ideological battle. Since I'm headed to buy cruelty-free chicken weighted down with an entire food philosophy, why not put some thought into the implications of my gas purchase?