on fairytales

Cenk Uygur:

We live in a twisted world, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It is a chilling fact that most of the world’s leaders believe in nonsensical fairytales about the nature of reality. They believe in Gods that do not exist, and religions that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease madmen who believe in gory mythologies.

The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard…

Business Week writes about The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard…. I’m not sure they gave an answer, but I wanted to highlight this:

That helps explain why time pressures seem to be getting worse. Globalization and the Internet create great new opportunities, but they also ratchet up the intensity of competition and generate more work — especially with the existing corporate structure still hanging on tightly. “Nobody wants to give up their territory or their control,” says Shoshana Zuboff, a former professor at Harvard Business School. Adds Lowell Bryan, a McKinsey & Co. director: “Professionals are still being managed as if they were in factories, in organizations designed to keep everybody siloed. At less well-run companies, you’re struck by how frustrated people are. They work like dogs and are wasting time.”

malcolm gladwell explains college admissions

Like Malcolm, I, too, went to university in Ontario. I, too, filled out the tanking sheet. He describes my school and program kindly:

There were several good ones and several better ones and a number of programs—like computer science at the University of Waterloo—that were world-class.

And I, too, find the US school admissions process very strange:

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the Colleg Entrance Examination Board tests as th principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had straightforward shot at attending.
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[T]hat meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising.
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Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
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If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day.

notes from the scopes monkey trial

I really hope no one can take this guy seriously:

Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.

Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology.