The most idiotic reason that single mothers give for not marrying is: “I’m too poor to get married!” Evidently these women believe they’re not too poor to educate, house, feed, clothe, and provide a stable home and an enriching moral and cultural environment for a child on their own. The “I’m too poor” defense, documented by researchers such as Kathryn Edin, refers not simply to the cost of a wedding (which of course is avoidable through a City Hall ceremony), but to the day-to-day institution of marriage itself.

…Well, yes, “well-educated Americans” can offer “more” financial support to their spouses than less affluent Americans. But a married spouse at whatever income level is almost always going to improve the economy of a household over a lifetime, whether that spouse is adding the proceeds of a minimum-wage job or the inestimable value of being a stay-at-home parent while the other one works. But the notion that being a married parent requires more financial resources than being a single one is wrong not just as a matter of economic arithmetic but, more importantly, in terms of what married biological parents bring to their child — not money, but a 24/7 partnership in the extraordinarily difficult task of child-rearing. Household wealth is the least important reason to form a two-parent family; the idea that raising children as a single mother is on average in any sense easier than doing so as a couple, even in the stormiest of marital relationships, is absurd, and ignores the enormous strains of being both the sole bread-winner (or even welfare-collector) and the sole source of authority for your child. A second parent in the home provides back-up support in discipline when the other is at the breaking point, and a doubling of the emotional, intellectual, and moral resources that a child can draw on. You don’t need to be wealthy to offer that complementarity; poor married parents have raised stable, successful children for millennia.

Visit This Link →

In Japan, street are simply an empty space in between blocks, they don’t have an identity. However you can identify buildings following a 3 digit system: the first one indicates the district, the second one the block and the third one the building or house inside the block. It is a completely different, but perfectly valid, system of structuring and organizing cities. You have to change your whole mindset.

This difference from American street addresses has some big impacts. Japan now has more geolocalized information than any other country in the world. As a result, Japanese smartphones can offer you more information about where you are, what’s around you, and how to get there.

Visit This Link →

“If we believe that convenience reading is moving at light speed over to e,” Mr. Schnittman said, using the industry shorthand for e-books, “then we need to think about what the physical qualities of a book might be that makes someone stop and say, ‘well there’s convenience reading, and then there’s book owning and reading.’ We realized what we wanted to create was a value package that would last.”

Martha K. Levin, the executive vice president and publisher of Free Press, the imprint of Simon & Schuster that published “The Iliad,” said the presentation sent “the message that even if you’re buying 90 percent of your books on your e-reader, this is the one that you want to have on your bookshelf.”

Exactly. There are books that I just want to read—and then there are books that I want to treasure and display.

Visit This Link →

I do not love the ambience of Walmarts; by my standards they’re loud, cheerless, and tacky – and that describes a lot of their merchandise and their shoppers, too.

But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don’t suck.

That’s why I love the idea of Walmart, and will defend it against its enemies.

This is my reason too. Even though I rarely shop at Walmart, I’m glad that it exists.

Visit This Link →

We all have lots and lots of stuff. We like to think that it’s valuable because we’ll use it one day. It’s not. It’s worthless.

What I didn’t understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn’t the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.

Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.

After reading this, I’m ready to go through the house and to start tossing “stuff”.

Visit This Link →

One of the running themes of the economist Robin Hanson’s excellent blog is that arguments like the ones found in these books are actually an elite-status proxy war. They denigrate the one measure of high-visibility achievement—income—that public intellectuals don’t do very well on. Reading “Shiny Objects,” you get the feeling that he is onto something.

Consider the matter of status competition. Mr. Roberts, like so many before him, argues that conspicuous consumption is an unhappy zero-sum game. But this is of course true of most forms of competition: Most academics I know can rank-order everyone in the room at a professional conference with the speed and precision of a courtier at Versailles. Any competition, from looks to money to academic credentialing, both consumes a lot of resources and makes many of the participants feel bad about themselves. Why, then, does the literature on status competition always tell us that we should redistribute capital gains or inheritances and never tell us that we should redistribute academic chairs or book contracts?

Fantastic.

Visit This Link →

TARDIS Eruditorum – A Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell by Philip Sandifer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: Loads of Fun

I started watching Doctor Who about 2 years ago. It was a vivid awakening for me. I had been very dimly aware that the show existed but had never been exposed to it. Once I started watching it, I loved it but I always wanted to know more about it. It is a story with a rich and complex history. One that I knew nothing about it.

One can, of course, try using Google to do research. With something as complex as Doctor Who, the results are rather … confusing. So, I just suffered in ignorance, merely enjoying what was on TV in front of me.

Last week, randomly, I became aware that a new book had just been published through Amazon. It was a collection of essays from the blog TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue. Up until this point, I hadn’t even known that the blog existed. But, I clicked over and decided to take a look.

This is the story of a story that can never end. This is the story of how a daft idea from the bowels of the BBC in the 1960s changed everything. This is the story of an impossible man, and his magic box, and everything that happened after.

Because there’s something you’d better understand about me. Because it’s important, and one day, your life may depend on it.

I am definitely a mad man with a blog.

Okay, so Philip Sandifer (“a hopeless geek with a PhD in English focusing on media studies”) is an entertaining writer. After a few hours of reading through blog entries, I was also convinced that he knew Doctor Who, he knew British culture, and he knew literary criticism. So I bought the book.

From the book’s description:

TARDIS Eruditorum is a sprawling and very possibly completely mad critical history of Doctor Who from its first episode in 1963 to the present. In this first volume, we look at topics like how acid-fueled occultism influenced the development of the Cybermen, whether The Celestial Toymaker is irredeemably racist, and whether Barbara Wright was the greatest companion of all time. This book aims to be the most staggeringly thorough look at the evolution of Doctor Who, Great Britain, and the world from 1963 to 1966 ever published.

Revised and expanded versions of every entry from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum from the start to finish of William Hartnell’s tenure as the Doctor.

It was utterly fascinating and has already given me a lot of insight into the show and how it works. I’m eagerly awaiting the publication of future volumes and have every intention of purchasing them as they’re released. Why not? I’m a sucker for really good literary criticism and a sucker for Doctor Who.

I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.

There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?

(Ecclesiastes 2:18-25 ESV)

Steve was richly blessed by God and we were all richly blessed by what he did, here on the Earth.

My daughters routinely watch Pixar films. Every night, they sleep in sleeping bags decorated for Pixar characters. Tonight, my daughter took a Cowboy Woody doll to bed with her. They both clamor to play games and watch movies on our iPad.

My life has been enriched by my iPod touch and everything that it allows me to do. I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro and I’m eagerly awaiting the day I can upgrade my phone to an iPhone 4S.

All of these products have been personally overseen by Steve Jobs and have been built according to his vision and his values. And they are all that there is. Apple will live on and will continue creating great products. But Steve’s personal vision and creativity ends here. It seems sudden and too soon. I had no idea he was this sick and this close to the end.

He will be missed.

I’ve learned over the years that the simplest way to judge gray areas in the Christian life like movies, television, and music is to ask one simple question: can I thank God for this? (We are to give thanks in all circumstances, right? )Not too long ago my wife and I went to the movie theater to watch one of the summer blockbusters. It was a fun PG-13 movie, and you’d probably say it didn’t really have any bad parts. But it was very sensual and suggestive in several places. I got done with the movie (yes, I watched the whole thing) and thought, “Can I really thank God for this?” Now, I’m not a total kill-joy. I like to laugh and enjoy life. I can thank God for the Chicago Bears, Hot N’ Readys, and Brian Regan. But I wonder if after most of our entertainment we could sincerely get down on our knees and say, “Thank you God for this good gift.” Something to think about.

Visit This Link →

(When time has given us perspective to write really good cultural histories of the 20th century, Heinlein is going to look implausibly gigantic. His achievements didn’t stop with co-inventing science fiction and all its consequences, framing post-1960s libertarianism, energizing the firearms-rights movement, or even merely inspiring me to become the kind of person who not only could write The Cathedral and the Bazaar but had to. No. Heinlein also invented much of zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture through his novel Stranger In A Strange Land; it has been aptly noted that he was the only human being ever to become a culture hero both to the hippies of Woodstock and the U.S. Marine Corps. I am told that to this day most Marine noncoms carry a well-thumbed copy of Starship Troopers in their rucksacks.)

Visit This Link →