Building an atheist church.

Happy Earth Day.

Should you hand wash or use the dishwasher? Dishwasher, probably.

How do we get people to drive less? Charge by the mile for insurance.

How do we satisfy the energy needs of a growing population without destroying the environment? Nuclear power.

I'm really glad that Sholto Byrnes, in his profile of Bishop N.T. Wright, helped us poor helpless readers see that Wright is a far right-wing neoconservative nut, by pointing out that he "declares war on militant atheists and liberals", that he "would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics", that his "views come across as hardline, explicit and specific, verging on the fundamentalist". I especially needed the unsourced assessment from "a senior lay Catholic" saying "He is mad, you know". If some random Catholic said it, it must be true.

You see, if Byrnes hadn't pointed all that out in his commentary, Wright's words and actions from the article might have given me a different impression. Things like this:

A year and a half ago a group of evangelical leaders threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with a revolt unless he created a parallel structure so their churches could bypass the authority of liberal bishops. The rebels included the pugnacious Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, but not Tom Wright. He condemned their demands as "arrogant and self-serving", "unbiblical" and "a covenant with chaos".

And this:

When we continue to talk about the Eighties and I suggest the left-wing view of Margaret Thatcher's policies was not just that they were wrong, but that they were immoral, he cuts in. "They were wicked. Yup."

And this:

Wright identifies global debt as "the dirty enormous scandal of glitzy, glossy western capitalism" that must be corrected. To those who think that "taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically", he says: "The truth is very different."

And this:

Wright's belief in the Resurrection also provides an injunction to be green; it is this earth, after all, that is going to be remade. "If it is true that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced," he writes. "This is not an 'extra' to the Church's mission. It is central."

And finally, this:

"Public discourse needs to catch up with the fact," he sighs, "that doing God in public is not about someone kneeling down and saying their prayers, and God saying, 'Go and bomb Iraq.'"

Seriously, did Byrnes even read his own article?

More on biofuels, from Popular Science. A while ago they were going to save the world, yesterday they were a terrible evil that would make the world starve, now they're maybe good again. I'm so confused.

Nick Paumgarten on elevators:

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.

This is one of those articles that you look at and think, "No way I have time to read this," and then you start it, and then an hour of your life is gone forever. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Lenore Skenazy gives her nine-year-old twenty bucks and a subway ticket. Then she leaves him:

We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.

Discipline in one area is discipline everywhere:

People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework.

If you're poor, you don't try to get a job because a job actually won't help you that much. You've got so many problems that fixing one of them doesn't help:

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before.

The solution is to just give the poor cash, instead of all this job training and drug counseling and education.

Vaccinate your kids:

The unvaccinated 7-year-old boy, who had rash onset 12 days after returning to the United States, infected at least 11 additional children ranging in age from 10 months to 9 years. Four were infected in the pediatrician's office that the child had visited the day before he was taken to a hospital emergency department for high fever and generalized rash. Another two cases were the boy's siblings, while five attended his school.

The 2008 Abel Prize winners are John Griggs Thompson and Jacques Tits. Apparently they were involved (Thompson more so) in the classification of finite simple groups. I'd never heard of them, since I don't know anything about group theory, but it's still my duty to spread the news of mathematical accomplishments as widely as possible.

Microloans miss the middle.

I just finished reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, in which he pleads for a more careful scientific study of religion. An article in the Economist looks at just that. The brain scan studies are completely worthless, but I like the game theory approach that looks at group cooperation:

The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

A writeup of a related study, on the ever-present problem of cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma, is here.

I'm going to do the same thing I did last year and stop reading blogs for Lent. It will be good for me, and I'm sure my audience will survive. Check back in about 40 days.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. It's not about talent, it's about hard work:

Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process.

Lots of creative people report going to bed thinking about something and waking up with an insight. I make a point of not thinking about stuff for an hour or so before bed. I'm sure this decreases my stress and improves my quality of life, but does it make me less creative?

Eliminate cafeteria trays to reduce waste. It's a little bit of a hassle, I suppose, but it beats eating dirt.

Walter Kirn on multitasking:

“Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”? Did anyone boldly ask, “What business is it of yours?” Was anyone brave enough to say, “Frankly, I want to go back to bed”?

This article is quite entertaining. I would make more witty comments about it, but I just got a text message.

The perils of good intentions:

The highest level of assurance that a property owner will not face an E.S.A. issue is to maintain the property in a condition such that protected species cannot occupy the property.