Catching up on links saved over the past week or so.
Vox: Radiohead and sadness: a data analysis. Fascinating.
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Vox: Judicial originalism as myth
It’s always struck me that Judicial originalism — the idea that nothing can be inferred from the Constitution than anything the founders who wrote it might have thought or imagined — is rather like Biblical literalism. It defies the idea that since then, whichever then, circumstances changed, and we’ve learned. Key passage:
What the words of the document meant to the people living at the time is just one of many different factors judges use to decide constitutional cases. So-called original meaning almost never drives the results in litigated cases but instead is used by judges to justify results they reached on other grounds.
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An example of the point I made in this blog post, Science v Religion: New v Old.
Slate: Is Newton’s Principia Still Relevant?
Principia was no doubt a key work in the history of science, but there’s no reason to read it now, except as an exercise in the study of that.
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It’s not that I care so much about dissing Trump — I wish he would go away — as that his presence is bringing to light all the mental biases, the cognitive dissonances, that psychologists and self-aware people have been recognizing for years.
The article’s five points:
- An epidemic of lies
- An assault on logic
- The blustering bully
- The society of the spectacle
- The endless barrage
Each point’s discussion with many links to supporting evidence.
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More evidence that home-schooling is about shielding children from the modern world. Washington Post: These activists want greater home-school monitoring. Parent groups say no way.
For decades, such concerns have led some parents to turn their homes into redoubts of Christian values, home-schooling their children not only to instill those values but to shield them from what they see as a godless, overly secular world.
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Religion Dispatches: Can Art Save Us From Fundamentalism?
The beauty and awe that religion likes to claim for itself might as well be available through art [which, channeling EO Wilson, signifies a deep relationship with the natural world humans evolved within].
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Enough for today. I have more for tomorrow, and drafts of longer discussions I may or may not ever post.
