@Randem

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

The capabilities of handheld gadgets have really come a long way. As a sort of experiment to really see how far technology has come, I have made my BBQ Iguana web site to be entirely fed by mobile content from my iPhone.

Currently, I’m incorporating Flickr and Twitter with mobile blogging, but I can’t help thinking there’s more I could do.

Are there any ultra-cool, technology evangelists out there reading my blog who know of any more cool web apps I could be incorporating into my site to provide content from my mobile life?

Drop some comments!

The Mental Floss blog offers a few ideas on how to add some testosterone to your holiday meal, including the manliest of all Thanksgiving turkeys: the bacon-wrapped turkey.

Check out this chilling opinion from Donald Kerr, the US Principal Deputy Director of Intelligence:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Orwell was warning about when he wrote 1984.

Sorry, but I can not accept the idea that we have no privacy and must simply trust the eavesdroppers to safeguard my private communications. It’s been known for years that secret wiretapping tools like Echelon, Carnivore, and Magic Lantern have been available, for a price, to steal corporate secrets even before the threat of terrorism became hip and trendy.

And worse, while we know we can’t always trust the government, we still understand that we should be able to. But nobody is fooling themselves into believing that businesses have our best interest in mind. Putting the power of secret surveillance into the hands of certain businesses (the telecom industry, for instance) runs the risk of turning the key players into high-power information brokers. Does anyone need to be reminded of Ma Bell? Or more recently, Enron?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only acceptable answer is not to give that power in the first place.

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.

I had the pleasure of working with a very pleasant first-time model this weekend, and made some nice photos in the process.

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.