Rotundus.com

An open letter to college admissions committees

"At one time, I suppose, grades might have been an objective and reasonably accurate measure of competence in a given subject. Not anymore. Today, they primarily measure how well a student can game the system. It is quite easy for savvy high school students to pass a course, and in some cases even to receive an A or B, without actually knowing or understanding any of the course content. Here’s how ..." Reminds me of why I tend to mistrust most online instructor views - in general I assume that to be a good instructor it's almost necessary to have a fair-sized fraction of negative ratings.

The New Globalist Is Homesick

"The global desire to leave home arises from poverty and necessity, but it also grows out of a conviction that such mobility is possible. ... This outlook was once a strange and threatening product of the Enlightenment but is now accepted as central to a globalized economy. It leads to opportunity and profits, but it also has high psychological costs."

What can you do with supercomputers?

A response to an article mentioning the horror that you can't really play video games on them. "What’s been done with supercomputers? They’ve made my car lighter, safer, and more fuel-efficient. They’ve optimized small-scale wind energy devices, hopefully one day cutting my power bill. They’ve quantified cradle-to-grave lifecycle responsibility for products, allowing cheap consumer goods with minimal environmental footprint. They were instrumental in developing new packaging that saves several hundred tons of plastic a year. And, yes, okay, a supercomputer did learn all about tornadoes so when one wandered through the city I live in the other day, the local weather people could talk about it for two breathless hours."

Foodie Underground: It's not all food snobbery

"Good food doesn’t have to be pretentious." This New York Times piece on what those in the food industry actually eat is worth reading alongside.

I got tossed a copy of this film and finally wound up watching it tonight. I wasn't quite sure what to expect - other than that I probably wouldn't agree too much with the conclusions it tried to draw. I thought it might draw attention to the history of infanticide in quite a few cultures around the world, yet didn't really find much if any of that. Just a lot of talk of the oppressive patriarchy.

By and large what still seems to be the crux of the issue is whether or not a blob of tissue growing in a uterus is human and worthy of protection. The whole issue seems to turn on that.

Some of the film's criticisms I'd agree with - there is a lot of hypersexualization of youth. I'm not sure that the point was particularly well argued though. I don't quite get how some of the activities - e.g. "purity balls" (which I've never come across a church organizing) - sexualize girls at a younger age. Having young girls not around their (biological) fathers on the other hand does have a measurable effect - think of the family structures that have become more prevalent in recent years as a consequence of the sexual revolution and advent of no fault divorce. I'm also not quite sure how Jessica's Valenti's film does anything to counteract this sexualization.

I would tend to agree with the film's argument that abstinence-only education and things like "purity pledges" haven't been all that successful in keeping people from engaging in sex outside marriage. Here's a blurb from a review of such programs:

Add Health data suggest that many teens who intend to be abstinent fail to do so, and that when abstainers do initiate intercourse, many fail to protect themselves by using contraception. Bearman and colleagues have examined the virginity pledge movement; they estimate that over 2.5 million adolescents have taken public “virginity pledges.” They found that pledgers were more likely to delay initiation of intercourse, 18 months on average for adolescents aged 12–18 years. However, those pledgers who failed at abstinence were less likely to use contraception after they did initiate sexual intercourse. At six-year follow-up, the prevalence of STIs (chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis, and human papillomavirus [HPV]) was similar among those taking the abstinence pledge and nonpledgers. Although pledgers tended to marry earlier than non-pledgers, if married, most pledgers had vaginal intercourse before marriage (88%). Virtually all non-pledgers who had married had sex before marriage (99%).

I'm still not sure that "you'll probably fail" is a good argument for never trying to achieve a particular goal. You do need a plan for dealing with failure though.

One thing that I found a bit silly was that the film spends time talking about Lolita (which I wouldn't endorse) but then at another point mentioned horrifyingly the thought of The Vagina Monologues being shut down. Yet what do you find in the Vagina Monologues?

... the original performances of the play and the published book eulogize lesbian "rape" of a 13-year-old girl by a 24-year-old woman who plies her with alcohol. The pedophile section is entitled "The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could" — Coochi Snorcher being the nickname of the little girl's genitalia. Her vagina's tale of seduction begins, "She gently and slowly lays me out on the bed..."

After becoming more graphic, the little girl gratefully concludes, "I'll never need to rely on a man."

Both by statute and by feminist definition, the "seduction" scene is rape. Nevertheless, the Coochi Snorcher declares, "...if it was rape, it was a good rape." (source)

I'm also opposed to the US Violence against Women Act. Other than violations of basic civil liberties and that it ignores half the problem of domestic violence another good reason to oppose the act: some of the policies it suggests actually appear to increase the likelihood of women being killed by their partners. Of course that's just the start of the act's problems.

Consumer Budgeting Around the World

I was most interested in the food portion of this - comparing the US and Canada as I knew that Canadian food costs are higher than American. It seems as though Canadians must like to eat at home - a good thing - total fraction of spending on food in Canada and the US was quite similar, just that a much larger portion of the Canadian spending seemed to be in the "food at home" category.

Copyright stagnation

Just look at the falloff on the number of books entering the public domain each year once copyright laws started to change around the time of Mickey Mouse's introduction (1920s). Reading further it looks like being in the public domain does a lot to keep a book accessible to later generations.

The Song Machine: The hitmakers behind Rihanna.

It's a bit depressing if you ask me.

The Best Birth Control In The World Is For Men

It seems to be in Phase III clinical trials in India now - the slightly overstated description: "no babies, no latex, no daily pill to remember, no hormones to interfere with mood or sex drive, no negative health effects whatsoever, and 100 percent effectiveness". The female birth control pill in the 1960s brought about pretty big changes; I'm curious as to what effect adding something like this to the mix might have.

From Real Gardening vs. American Lawncare:

Two weeks ago, I was watching my neighbor meticulously patch his lawn after spending a half hour edging the sidewalk.

I thought, “If he spent that much time and care on a vegetable garden, he could feed his family all summer long.”

Then last week on my son’s preschool field trip, the instructor showed the kids a photo of a lawnmower and asked what tool did that job 100 years ago on the farm. The scythe was the answer, and I thought, “That wasn’t for cutting grass, it was for field work.” I was struck by the fact that farmers 100 years ago didn’t have lawns. They didn’t have time for them, nor did they probably see the point.

Moving from lawns to flower, flowers can be beautiful but I personally generally prefer those growing wild and have never cared much for the garden variety.