Sense and Nonsense

Dental Hygiene

Sharpshooter? You betcha!

Try your hand at protecting Alaska from Russian and the moose.  Aim and shoot (click).

What You Wear

23/6 provides essential instruction:                         

Must one sacrifice one's comfort just because a terrorist mastermind happens to have a similar fashion sense? At the intersection of style and Al Qaeda, many relaxed-fit enthusiasts find it difficult to give up on their personal clothing preference just to keep from ruffling a few feathers. Sometimes, appropriate reverence for the worst terrorist attack on US soil is just not as important as having cool shoulder blades.

You Turn Me Upside Down

¿sıɥʇ ʇnd ʇɥbıɯ noʎ sǝsn ʇɐɥʍ oʇ sʍouʞ oɥʍ

Really. Who knows?

Smackdown

You're no doubt nicer than I am.  So even if you read David Brooks's column in this morning's New York Times,  you probably didn't think, as I did: What a self-impressed twit Brooks is.   But, really, he is.  He imagines himself to be The Greatest Anthropologist of His Generation (TGAHG), explaining cultures and societies (whether Red and Blue states or Asian and Western societies) to the less enlightened.  I don't actually know whether he fancies himself an anthropologist or a social psychologist.  It doesn't matter.  He's a twit.

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

It's ALWAYS good to see the self-important get their comeuppance.  Hubris is a nasty little quality.

So, along comes Jim Fallows, who, writing from Beijing, provides this delightful smackdown of Brooks.  Ahhh.  Life doesn't get much better than this.

Your Inner Kaleidoscope

Bring out your inner artist here.   (And be sure to check out the link there to the newer, more complicated version.)

[According to one source, "The kaleidoscope was invented by Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, in 1816, and  patented by him in 1817. He named his invention after the Greek words, kalos or beautiful, eidos or form, and scopos or watcher. So kaleidoscope means the beautiful form watcher."]

Ain't America Great?

                            Take a look at this.

   And some say "the American Century" is over.