I just stumbled upon this list of 301 useless facts, including:

37. Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark’s stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.

56. The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.

81. Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.

122. Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations (implemented on July 16, 1969) makes it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles.

Have a look.

Here’s a great way to deal with that cable clutter at home, and do a little bit to help the environment, too: charge your phone or iPod on the go with a solar-powered messenger bag. Not only are they cool and gadgety, but they’re also rather stylish, not to mention green.

The only catch is this little bit on their product page that says “6 volt boost required for some cell phones“. It sure would be nice if they gave more information about what that means. If you have to carry additional hardware, or worse, a battery pack, it would just be defeating the whole purpose of buying this rather expensive bag.

Maybe I’ll have to pay a visit to Noon Solar and find out.

Last week I was talking to Matt Medlen about new Adobe products when he asked if I had heard of Lightroom. I had not.

We went to Adobe’s web site and watched the video demonstration, and I knew immediately that I had to have it. Photo editing software designed for photographers by photographers? They’re not kidding. It works exactly the way I do!

Where Photoshop can be thought of as a digital darkroom, offering all the tools you need to make a single photo great, it is unfortunately quite cumbersome for any task involving more than one photo, and its tools are extremely technical and powerful, but this comes at a major price of user-friendliness. Anything I want to do to a photo can be done in Photoshop, but it takes a great deal of time, and comes with a high learning curve.

Enter Lightroom. The first, and most important feature of Lightroom is that it is 100% nondestructive. You can edit a photo all day long without ever altering the original. This not only allows you to preserve the maximum original quality of the photo, but also makes possible some space-saving ideas like burning a session to CD, and then working with the photos right from the CD rather than having to use hard drive space.

Because the edits are non-destructive, they’re treated as a series of actions, and that brings to mind another killer feature of Lightroom: if you have a series of photos all shot in the same conditions (for example, low light), and you make the necessary edits to one photo, you can then highlight the rest of the photos and apply those actions to the entire session.

The cropping tool actually overlays a rule of thirds grid onto your photo to assist in finding the best crop. And better, if you have to correct the horizon, the crop is constrained to the boundaries of the photo, rather than having those triangle-shaped white (or black) strips of background color on each of the corners.

And another huge feature for me is that exporting the session as JPEGs does not force you to do a bunch of math in order to calculate dimensions. You choose a maximum width and a maximum height and click export, and it will resize your photos for you, to within your constraints, while maintaining your aspect ratio.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg, but it was enough to make me certain I had to have this software. So now I have it. Of course my iBook was running OS X 10.3.9, and Lightroom requires 10.4, so after it installed, it refused to run…

“A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence; which costs us nothing.” —John Tillotson

When I was young, the older people around me talked about how tough experiences “build character”. For most of my life I’ve had the impression that character defined what type of person you are.

Parents and churches and other sources of moral influence teach us to be loyal, responsible, courageous, clean, decisive, flexible, generous, and kind. Likewise, we’re taught that these things are “good”, and that disloyalty, irresponsibility, cowardice, untidiness, indecisiveness, inflexibility, miserliness, and unkindness are “bad”.

These are very black-and-white, very absolute terms that portray character as a duality, forcing us into roles of either good or bad. You’re kind? Oh then you’re a good character. You’re indecisive? Hmmm, you must have lousy character.

But a different view of the subject of character occurred to me as I was reading The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. While discussing a psychological phenomenon called Fundamental Attribution Error, Gladwell quotes the psychologist Walter Mischel, who refers to it as a sort of “releasing valve”:

When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually usually makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a facade of passivity — or perhaps she is a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment would depend on who she is with, when, how, and much, much more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.

Based on this type of thinking, a person is not a “good” character or a “bad” character. No one is purely honest or dishonest, decisive or indecisive, responsible or irresponsible, but rather they are sometimes honest, neat, reliable, or generous and other times dishonest, or messy, or unreliable, or miserly depending on situations or circumstances.

This makes much more sense. We all carry the genetic potential for loyalty and disloyalty, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. And moreover, we have circumstantial motive for exhibiting both sides of the duality, depending on a given context. So what is character?

My new thinking is that character describes a tendency for either sticking to, or straying from, the path of least resistance. It’s wrong to say that someone does or does not have character. A person is not honest or dishonest, responsible or irresponsible, neat or messy, but rather a combination of all of them.

For instance, if you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and mom has a soft spot for honesty, then honesty is the path of least resistance. But if dad doesn’t care about reasons, honesty isn’t going to get you anywhere and you might have a better motivation for a lie. Telling mom the truth means nothing, but telling dad the truth shows strong character. Likewise, depending on further context, taking the risk of lying to mom might show strong character too.

Trying to be any one side of the duality, and completely eschew the other, seems to yield disastrous results. For instance, people who become the definition of neatness, banishing any trace of mess, are not thought of as having strong character; they’re called obsessive-compulsive. Those who are always completely honest, are considered naive, and usually tactless. And those who are overly generous are (ironically) called needy.

So what is character? I think it describes a propensity to make choices that are in opposition to the natural path of least resistance. In essence, it is having power over your very nature.

Kinda like James Bond. Now there’s a guy with strong character.

By way of the Freakonomics Blog, I’ve found a remarkably well-written — dare I say, gripping? — story about field goal kickers in the NFL. The author, Michael Lewis, examines the records of “clutch” kickers and compares them to average kickers and finds there’s not much difference — just a few memorable kicks that cement a reputation.

The Freakonomics blog points out a tantalizing tidbit at Slate, which claims curvy women are more intelligent (a notion to which I am not averse):

A study says curvy women are smarter. Sample: 16,000 females. Result: Women with high ratios of hip to waist size “scored significantly higher on [cognitive] tests, as did their children.”

Wow. Not only were the curvy women smarter, but so were their kids. Sounds genetic to me. Could hip-to-waist ratio be a sexual ornament indicating intelligence?

Or, to play the devil’s advocate, is it the higher intelligence that causes these women to eat in a healthy way, resulting in a physical appearance that is considered more attractive?

I often find myself pointing out logical fallacies to people who use them. While unfortunately it is often in vain, I continue to hope that people will base their arguments on fact and logic rather than emotion, faith, or tradition.

This list of the Top 20 Logical Fallacies gives a good overview of the most common abuses of logic, such as:

4. Argument from final Consequences Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves. For example: God must exist, because otherwise life would have no meaning.

7. Confusing currently unexplained with unexplainable Because we do not currently have an adequate explanation for a phenomenon does not mean that it is forever unexplainable, or that it therefore defies the laws of nature or requires a paranormal explanation. An example of this is the “God of the Gapsâ” strategy of creationists that whatever we cannot currently explain is unexplainable and was therefore an act of god.

16. Straw Man Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.

An interesting detail I noticed as I was reading the list, is that a large number of the examples dealt with religion. I am not surprised, since the majority of my experience with logical fallacy has come in debates with religious people.

Let me clarify that I, personally, am not against a person believing whatever they choose to believe. And I’ll happily discuss the merits of any belief system. But the moment rules and beliefs and proofs start to be passed down under a logical fallacy, I’m done listening.

[Update]
How fitting that after I posted this, I would stumble onto John Scalzi’s Creation Museum Report, including over 100 photos from the Creation Museum, many of which are filled with logical fallacies, but none more obviously than this one, in which one commenter even called it by name, “Begging the Non-Sequitur”.

Have you ever sat and watched two people argue? You know, one of those really ignorant arguments where neither side is listening to what the other says? I’m talking about those really heated arguments, where a lot of things get said in really creative ways with a lot of beautifully poetic language but it’s all wasted on someone else who’s just doing the same thing.

Sure, when you’re in the argument, you’re totally in favor of taking up sides and fighting to the teeth for what you believe in… but if you’re not a part of that argument — if you’re just a spectator — it gets really boring, really quickly.

That’s how I felt about Lions For Lambs. I watched for 88 minutes as two sides of an argument were bantered back and forth, dishing out the same rhetoric I can get on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Hell, next year is election year, I can get this same script on every channel while Hillary and Rudy drone on and on with each other, talking all night but never saying anything.

There wasn’t even a plot. It’s just a pair of contrived situations designed to facilitate the argument, spliced together, with occasional war footage mixed in just to give the audience some token violence for buying their tickets.

Adding to this heaping helping of steaming film excrement is the low quality directing and producing work. A major portion of the movie centers around dialog between Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, but it’s obvious that the two were never in the same room together during the making of the movie! Both are acting to the camera, and they’re never in the same shot together except for a few short seconds.

Also, speaking of cheap film editing, every helicopter scene is so blatantly computer generated that I, as one of the 9 audience members in attendance at this suck-fest, was offended at the film maker’s low standards. But why should I be surprised? The film maker in question is also the third star of the film: Robert Redford. I can’t help thinking that the making of a movie was only a formality, nothing more than a tedious detail in getting toward his real goal of putting his face on a big screen and whining about politics to people who payed $10 in hopes of being entertained.

Don’t waste your money.

I’ve had enough of the pretentious stringing together of clauses and predicates. I think news people do it just to look smart. But they don’t look smart at all, they just alienate their readers.

Take this opening sentence from a story in the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance.

HARVEY — A man believed to be in his 20s who died after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, authorities said.

Are we clear? Did you understand that? Neither did I.

Let’s take a look at this sentence grammatically, bit by bit.

• subject:
  authorities
• verb:
  said
• object (noun clause):
  a man believed to be in his 20s who died after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey suffered a gunshot wound to the chest

Wow. That’s a really complicated object. Let’s break it down:

• subject:
  A man
• adjective (noun clause):
  believed to be in his 20s
• adjective (noun clause):
  who died after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey
• verb:
  suffered
• object:
  a gunshot wound to the chest

Okay, so on a simplified level, what the authorities said was that a man suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.; But that second noun clause is still too convoluted. Let’s dig deeper:

• subject:
  (still the man)
• verb:
  died
• subordinate clause:
  after he was shot by a Harvey police officer when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey

Holy cow. It’s like an onion. Let’s keep peeling:

• subordinate conjunction:
  after
• subject:
  he (the man)
• verb:
  was shot
• object:
  by a Harvey police officer
• subordinate clause:
  when he allegedly pointed a handgun at the officer Wednesday night in south suburban Harvey

You’re kidding me, right? This subordinate clause establishes that the man was dead, yet it was placed in the original sentence as an adjective of the man. To paraphrase, what they’re saying is that “the dead guy who got shot to death got shot in the chest.” Welcome to the Redundancy Department of Redundancy and Repetition.

What’s worse is that we could keep digging. There is another grammatical layer hidden in that subordinate clause above.

What I want to know is, how did this get past the editor? It should have been rewritten to make more sense, like so:

HARVEY — According to authorities, a man believed to be in his 20s was shot by a police officer in south suburban Harvey after allegedly pointing a handgun at the officer. The man died of a fatal gunshot wound to the chest.

Isn’t that much easier to read? I think so.