Fire and Knowledge

An unsanitised history of washing is more interesting than it sounds. I’ve never thought of cleanliness as being inherently cultural until now.

This is why I’m glad about our limitations, as frustrating as ignorance can sometimes be.

If we had a complete grip on reality, seeing every situation for exactly what it is, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. After all, the most realistic people in our society are the chronically depressed.

—Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007), p. 17.

If you’re nervous about investing in stocks directly, or you don’t know where to start in mutual funds, here is a nice overview of the “only 7 investments you need.”

Here’s an animated map of imperial history in the Middle East:

I like Obama’s balance and perspective here.

When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006), p. 21

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

—Charles Darwin, as quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 266.

I’m glad Ken Miller, a popular Christian scientist and author, has finally weighed in on the movie Expelled. His verdict? He didn’t like it, of course. That’s right, because he’s part of the godless Nazi-like free-speech-restricting racist scientific establishment.

Lots of great ideas on how to live greener, from turning off your computer at night to taking a shower with your spouse.

One thing they neglected to mention, which I’ve done for years now, is use handkerchiefs instead of tissues. I used to think handkerchiefs were gross. Now I think tissues are gross. Anyway, by my calculation, I’ve saved about 4,000 tissues from nose death in the last two years. That’s 30 fewer boxes of tissues.

For some reason that makes me happy.