Alan Jacobs, my undergrad English professor, makes fun of everyone's favorite linguist:

Stephen Pinker actually thinks that the dignity assumed by tyrants is the same thing that Kass et al. are writing about. What a shock Pinker will receive when, someday, he opens a dictionary and discovers that some words have more than one meaning.

I actually like Pinker, but he probably deserves this.

Your cartoon for the day.

Apparently my prestigious institution wants to hire a chair of "Conservative Thought and Policy":

The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile political conservatives to teach on the left-leaning Boulder campus.

My favorite response is from Colorado's own anti-immigration zealot Tom Tancredo, who is "proposing a 20-foot-high fence around the border of the university’s Boulder campus." Keep out the undocumented students, I guess. Slightly more serious commentary from Ilya Somin.

I have two thoughts.

One. Lack of political diversity is actually a problem for universities. There is a systematic bias in the academy; of course it's mostly self-selection, but self-selection also explains the lack of women in math, and that's certainly not a good thing. CU would be a better and richer institution if it had more conservative faculty.

Two. This way of addressing the problem is just silly.

Seth Stevenson on procrastination:

You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you'll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you're doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.

The fear tax is expensive:

The journal Tourism Economics gives the predictable answer: "The perception that U.S. visa and entry policies do not welcome international visitors is the largest factor in the decline of overseas travelers." Two-thirds of survey respondents worried about being detained for hours because of a misstatement to immigration officials. And here is the ultimate irony: "More respondents were worried about U.S. immigration officials (70 percent) than about crime or terrorism (54 percent) when considering a trip to the country."

And it doesn't make us safer. Vote Bruce Schneier for Secretary of Homeland Security.

The Boston Celtics are, so far, doing well against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Stephen Dubner explains, with this final paragraph:

But maybe, just maybe, some kid somewhere in America this morning has decided to spend a little less time working on his jump shot and a bit more time working on his math skills.

Wikipedia is a waste of time. But compare it to television:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Rising food prices could be helped by free trade. There's some debate about this, of course, so if you're interested start clicking on links here.

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.