John Thorn on the history of baseball’s strike zone.
It is perhaps not an accident, then, that at the same time distraction poses an existential and spiritual threat to the fullness of being human, so many forms of modern religion have become an engine for domesticating the divine. Overly confident in their conception of the divine, for example, public forms of Christianity seem to eviscerate mystery. A God that can be conceptually encompassed and comprehended is invoked to carve up the world into a culture war of “us” vs. “them.”
In the face of such distraction and domestication of the divine, we can hear afresh Karl Rahner’s prescient insight: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.”
My dear mother-in-law, Margaret Hall Collins, is 102 years old today!
And still sharp as a tack, prayerful, attentive to the needs of others. She’s a very special lady.Thomas Pynchon, from liner notes for an album of Spike Jones music (1994):
Nowadays, when everybody knows everything and nobody takes any text seriously, it’s hard to remember how it felt once to share a public world not as contaminated by the terminally wised-up irony that has come to pervade our own lives.
Even more true today.
How ‘Tiny Shortcuts’ Are Poisoning Science:
By itself, failure to replicate does not necessarily indicate, and certainly not prove, scientific fraud. Empirical results can vary for many reasons. However, replication analyses usually show that replicated effect sizes are, on average, systematically smaller and often statistically insignificant. If 90 percent of replications deviate from the original article in one direction that is less favorable to what the authors wanted to demonstrate, then these deviations are not innocent random errors or acts of nature. If the deviations were random, they would cancel each other out, and their mean would be close to zero. Instead, these deviations indicate that many published results were likely tweaked, manipulated, or fabricated.
Tweaking is potentially more damaging to science in the long run than data manipulation and fabrication. That might be hard to believe, since tweaked empirical results are likely to have smaller effects on the fabric of science than cases of data fabrication and manipulation. But the cumulative effect of tweaking can still be larger than that of data fabrication and manipulation because these strategies are rare, whereas tweaking is common.
I wrote about my two essays in the new issue of the Hedgehog Review, both of which are about human obligations.
I do not need these books. I do not need these books. I do not need these books.
The dek here is exactly right: “Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours.” They’ll protect their own IP with every resource available to them and steal ours without a moment’s hesitation.
Today I was dicing a ham steak for risotto and dropped a few pieces on the floor, which Angus vacuumed up. Here he is a minute later, looking for all the world like Oliver Twist in the workhouse: “Please, sir, may I have more?”