The Inside Channel is one of the best soccer blogs I know. Jake Meador writes especially clearly, vividly, and informatively about tactics. If you are a soccer fan, and especially if you want to become a more knowledgable one, you should definotely check it out. This post is rather longer than most, but taught me a lot.
Martese Johnson and other UVa black students are in effect complaining about racial profiling, about singling out black students and treating them differently because of their race. It sounds like a principled argument, but it is not. It is wrong for the state to distribute either benefits (such as preferential admission) or burdens (such as racial profiling by police, stopping or arresting blacks disproportionately for the same offenses committed by others) on the basis of race. If treating black applicants to UVa differently because of their race violates no principle, why does it become a violation once they arrive?
Racial Profiling at the University of Virginia | National Review Online. Maybe because one mode of “treating differently” is legal and the other isn’t? Can Rosenberg really believe that if someone’s race is a factor in his or her admission to a university, then that person has somehow waived the right to protest against unprovoked and unjustified assault by law-enforcement officials? I don’t remember the last time I saw an argument more ridiculous than this.
The batter has to estimate the necessary position by doing an impressive amount of computation. All a batter has to go on is a view of the unfolding pitch, which you can think of as a series of pictures giving the position of the ball. From the change in position between successive pictures, the batter can estimate the speed and direction of the ball’s motion. That estimate gets refined and updated over the third of a second or so in which the batter gets to track the ball before the swing needs to start.
It’s nearly impossible to overstate how difficult a problem this is– just being able to reliably pick the baseball out of a complicated visual field is an impressive achievement. Human brains are highly optimized for this sort of task, though, which is why so many “citizen science” projects revolve around identifying patterns in images. We’re also programmed to make the necessary on-the-fly calculations to estimate the current velocity and future position of the approaching ball. While professional baseball players have honed this skill to just about the highest level possible, the basic ability seems to be wired into our brains at a pretty deep level– my three-year-old son can catch a gently tossed ball more often than not, and his failures are more a matter of imperfect coordination of his motion than a failure to correctly predict where the ball will be.
I’ve had a few snarky things to say on Twitter about the Douthat Kerfuffle, and I’d like to say more, but I’m struggling with the evasiveness of some of the key participants. Consider the letter of protest that some … well, wait: Is “protest” the right word? Look at the letter and see if you can tell what it’s asking for. Some of the signatories have denied that they’re asking the Times to discipline or silence Douthat, but if they’re not asking for that what are they asking for? “We just want to inform you that this is not what we expect of the Times but we’re not asking you to do anything about that”? It’s impossible to tell, when you give the letter some scrutiny, what its actual purpose is.
Cloudy evasineness seems to be characteristic of the Douthat critics. For instance, Katie Grimes says, “I signed the letter because I believe he has uttered several factual errors” — but she doesn’t say what any of those errors are. (Nor does the letter.) Similarly, Brian Flanagan claims that Douthat misuses the term “doctrine,” but gives no examples, so it’s impossible to tell which statements by Douthat he believes to be erroneous, or how they might be corrected.
Most troubling of all, in the screed that I called attention to yesterday, Fr. James Martin says that “Mr. Douthat can rightly be held accountable” for inciting hatred, without ever distinguishing between the points Douthat makes that he deems illegitimate and those he thinks are within bounds. (Surely he thinks that some of Douthat’s criticisms are acceptable.) But the questions I have here are: “held accountable” by whom? In what way? Martin doesn’t say simply that Douthat should be criticized; being “held accountable” is clearly more substantial — but because of the lack of specificity, also a little ominous. What would count as being held accountable in this context? Having his salary cut? Being forbidden to write for the Times about theology? Assigned penance by his confessor? What?
It’s hard for me not to see this incessant vagueness as endemic to post-Vatican II liberal theology, a tradition in which so many priests and theologians can’t simply reject magisterial teaching but don’t really want to endorse it either, and so take refuge in a cloudy verbal world which they claim to be working within the “spirit” if not the actual “letter” of Church teaching. But maybe the current vagueness has other causes that I’m not aware of. In any case, I think Douthat’s critics owe it to him and to their readers to make an effort to say what they mean.
After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside the relationship itself. One of the findings from Langan’s ‘friendship rules’ study was that 'adults feel the need to be more polite in their friendships,’ she says. 'We don’t feel like, in adulthood, we can demand very much of our friends. It’s unfair, they’ve got other stuff going on. So we stop expecting as much, which to me is kind of a sad thing, that we walk away from that.’ For the sake of being polite.
How Friendships Change Over Time - The Atlantic. That’s my former colleague Emily Langan talking, and I think she’s right. Doesn’t make things especially easy for someone like me, who in his mid-fifties leaves a bunch of old and strong friends behind for a new job in a far-away state. (Not that those people aren’t still friends, but like all relationships, friendship thrives on proximity.) People have been wonderful to me here at Baylor, but the “rules of friendship” for people my age influence us all — even when we try to ignore or bypass them. One of the recurrent themes in the rich writings on friendship by (my friend!) Wesley Hill is the fear of being, or being perceived as, “needy.” As long as that fear is in play, deep friendships will be hard to cultivate and sustain.
Frontispiece to Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904), a book all about the “tesseract” – a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Find out more in our latest essay “Notes on the Fourth Dimension” - [bit.ly/1Revr2B](http://bit.ly/1Revr2B)
Metalpoint was a major part of artistic
practice across northern Europe by about 1400. The fame of Netherlandish
artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Gerard David spread
quickly, and many young German artists travelled down the Rhine to learn in
their workshops. Metalpoint was used for recording facial types, figure
compositions and ornament designs until the mid-16th century. Albrecht Dürer’s
delicate silverpoints, made when he travelled in the Netherlands from 1520 to
1521, are among the most sensational ever produced.
The ultimate draughtsman of the German
Renaissance, Dürer experimented throughout his career with every type of
technique. His earliest recorded drawing is in metalpoint – a self-portrait
made at the age of 13 (now in the Albertina,
Vienna). Inspired by the Italian ideal of classical beauty from his visit
to Italy between 1505 and 1507, this sheet demonstrates a highly colouristic
use of the technique, achieved with white bodycolour brushed over silverpoint
to emphasise the sculptural quality of the face. The strong tone of the
prepared paper is reminiscent of the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi. In
later life, Dürer employed the sensitive restraint of metalpoint to make
portrait drawings, especially of his brothers Hanns and Endres, his wife Agnes,
and his close friend Willibald Pirckheimer.
