Maybe it should’ve been the Scientists, Engineers, and Computer Programmers for America.
(Check out the letters you have to type in to join. Compare them to the web address. Read this if you want to know what captcha means.)
Fury as Berlin Opera Cancels Performance
The German government accused a Berlin opera house of “self-censorship” on Tuesday for cancelling performances of a Mozart opera because it was concerned about attacks by Islamists.The Deutsche Oper, one of Berlin’s three opera houses, was due to show a controversial production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” by director Hans Neuenfels in which the severed heads of the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha are placed on four chairs.
This sort of thing is exactly how the Islamic fanatics are trying to spread their nuttiness.
It is true that it’s difficult to think about how to deal with delusional nutcases, though: the fanatics see a performance like this as an attack on Islam (though anyone sane can see that it’s treating all religions equally), and that confirms what they see is a clash of civilizations. But self-censoring is playing into their hands and validating their notion that any sort of criticism of Islam is an attack.
That said, I think the point is that when you’re dealing with someone who isn’t rational, while you should of course be prepared for their likely responses, you probably don’t want to be making decisions based on their delusions.
[Disclaimer: My title is unfair; all the governmental officials quoted disapproved of the cancellation, which is good. And I don’t have a problem with France. I just couldn’t resist a surrender-monkey reference.]
Friday evening Tim and I went to see The Pillowman at the St. Louis Rep. From the description on the site:
In a totalitarian state, a young man—butcher by day, aspiring writer by night—is detained and faces an interrogation by a cruel, corrupt detective about the gruesome content of his lurid fairy tales, the plots of which bear striking similarities to a number of horrific child murders happening in his town.
Based on that description, I was a little worried that the play would be too disturbing for me, but I decided to go because it was supposed to be really good. It turned out to be excellent.
The play is really about storytelling - it turns out that the main character filters his life through his stories, and gains courage from telling them. As the play unfolds, we discover that all the characters are storytellers in some way or another.
The set design reflects the themes of the play. The “real life” scenes are set in an interrogation room, which is completely utilitarian, featuring only a table, chairs, and filing cabinet on an essentially bare stage. But these scenes are interspersed with scenes of the main character telling his stories. The rear of the stage becomes another stage, framed with what looks like a decoration on a storybook. The sets for the stories are colorful and stylized, with bold lines and exaggerated angles. The actors are also dressed colorfully, and act out the stories with exaggerated motions as the writer tells them. The contrast works very well.
Quite a bit of meta is to be expected with a story about storytelling. One bit in particular made me laugh. The main character is telling a story to his mentally-handicapped brother, who interrupts to ask what aggravated means. The storyteller says it means annoyed or irritated and goes on. While I can’t be totally sure, I think this is a dig at overly-prescriptive editors, who insist (based on questionable etymology) that aggravate should only be used to mean worsen, with irritate reserved to mean annoy. (Note that the first page of Google results for “aggravate irritate” consists almost entirely of style guides making this prescription, with only one link referring to the actual etymology and supporting the use of aggravate for annoy. Linguists agree.)
The only criticism I had also involves the use of language; while I generally have no issue with the appropriate usage of Anglo-Saxon profanity, I don’t understand why fuck had to be used in what often seemed like every sentence, frequently many times per sentence. I can only assume that this was also some sort of statement, as no other words were overused to that extent, but I don’t get it.
Overall, it was a great production, and if anybody in St. Louis has a chance to check it out I’d recommend it.
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen asks why we usually read books in chunks and rarely do the same with movies. I think the explanation is partially that books are longer, and partially habit - we frequently see people with bookmarks, and rarely see people pause movies for longer than it takes to go to the bathroom.
I’ve found, however, that breaking this habit is quite freeing. I’ve only done so recently, following a conversation about Netflix utilization. I remarked that I used Netflix mostly to watch TV shows on DVD, because an hour-long TV show is exactly the length of time I usually want to spend sitting on the couch watching TV (42-55 minutes without commercial breaks). I find it difficult to sit still for longer than that*, plus I am rarely willing to block out two hours of my evening for media consumption. (When I’d first moved to DC and didn’t know anyone, I watched a lot of movies, but when I have a social network and other stuff to do, I don’t have that kind of time in the evenings.)
The person I was talking to pointed out that there’s nothing stopping me from watching movies in hour-long chunks. I don’t think I’d ever considered this before, but it sounded like a good idea. So far the only movie I’ve watched this way is Kinsey, which was very good. I don’t think it suffered from being split down the middle - it was engaging enough that I remembered what had happened in the first part, but not so much that it was hard to stop watching in the middle. I think I’ll continue doing this with other dramas that aren’t super heavy, as well as comedies and documentaries. Thrillers or psychological dramas probably won’t work. And the movies have to be ones Tim doesn’t want to see, because we share the Netflix subscription.
I’m really glad my friend suggested doing this, because it should let me see many more movies than I would be able to if I stuck to watching them all at once. In particular, movies that I’m not sure I want to devote a whole evening to, but can easily watch 45 minutes of as a study break.
*Actually, I can easily sit and read for longer than an hour. Movies usually make me either squirmy or sleepy, either of which interferes with watching. A good novel can hold my attention for much longer, but even though I’m a fast reader, I still can rarely finish an adult-length book at one sitting.
I’ve seen discussions of this study (PDF) a few places, most recently Agoraphilia. It shows that social drinkers earn more money than non-drinkers.
Drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more money at their jobs than nondrinkers and men who drink socially, visiting a bar at least once a month, bring home an additional 7 percent in pay, according to a new Reason Foundation report by economists Bethany Peters, Ph.D., and Edward Stringham, Ph.D.
“Social drinking builds social capital,” said Stringham, an economics professor at San Jose State University. “Social drinkers are networking, building relationships, and adding contacts to their Blackberries that result in bigger paychecks.”
The study finds that men who drink earn 10 percent more than abstainers and women drinkers earn 14 percent more than nondrinkers. However, unlike men, who get an additional income boost from drinking in bars, women who frequent bars at least once per month do not show higher earnings than women who do not visit bars.
The authors suggest that social drinking allows people to build social capital, which pays off career-wise.
While I find this explanation plausible, and suspect that it’s at work at least to some degree, I’ve read the study and still can’t figure out why they’re sure that social drinking causes you to have more money, as opposed to the explanation that people who already have more money drink more (because they can afford it). They did control for a bunch of things like age, education, region of the country, etc., but I don’t see how any of those apply to this particular causality question.
For example, I currently drink less in bars than I did two years ago. While I’m older and living in another region of the country, those aren’t the reasons why - the reason I visit bars less is, in fact, because I can no longer afford it now that I’m a full-time student. It seems logical that most people in my situation would make similar decisions. (Compare also the collegiate practice of “pregaming”, or drinking at home to get buzzed before going out to the bar, where it costs more.) And of course, drinking alcohol at home, while cheaper than drinking it at bars, is still more expensive than drinking iced tea or soda.
The finding that drinking in bars helps men more than it helps women would seem to support this theory as well - men need more money to drink in bars, both because they drink more and because women don’t always pay for all their own drinks.
But maybe I’m missing something; nothing I’ve read so far has speculated on this. Can anybody explain to me why it seems to be clear to everyone else that the causation goes in the direction the study claims it does?
I’ve been tagged by Adrienne. This is going to be kind of embarrassing.
1. One book that changed your life?
I had a really hard time thinking of an answer to this question. Several books have contributed to my belief system, and some have been very important to me, but most of the time I seek out books that have to do with something I’m already interested in; they rarely blindside me.
But there is one that I could honestly say changed my life, and it’s not at all in the way it was supposed to. Sometime when I was a teenager, I read one of those execrable Chicken Soup for the Soul books that featured people’s encounters with angels. All of the people felt very touched by their experiences and strongly believed that they had met angels. But they were from various religious (and nonreligious) backgrounds, many of their beliefs conflicted, and a lot of the stories didn’t make much sense. It was like reading ghost stories. Clearly not all of these people could actually have encountered angels, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought all of the experiences were probably unreflective of objective reality. It sounds strange, but I think that was the first time I realized that people can strongly believe they have experiences that aren’t actually real. It was the start of a fine life as a skeptic.
2. One book you have read more than once?
I have four shelves of fiction in my living room, and I’ve read about half those books more than once. I’m a comfort reader. To pick one: Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. I thought about trying to pick a longer or more substantive one, but I already know that this book makes a good companion. I first read it when I was spending a month in Munich, staying with a host family and studying with a class including hardly anyone I knew. I was lonely and homesick, and reading it took me away and kept me sane.
4. One book that made you cry?
Oh man, there are so many. I’ll say Watership Down. Animals get me every time.
5. One book that made you laugh?
Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. It’s really not at all similar to the stupid Steve Martin movie by the same name; it’s a memoir and it’s hilarious. I highly recommend looking for it.
6. One book you wish had been written?
How about a well-edited medical review book, free of typos and mistakes? Any subject, I’m not picky. I’m currently trying to study from the most popular pharmacology review (which I won’t name) and I am not impressed.
7. One book you wish had never been written?
Hm… Robin Cook should have stopped writing books a decade or so ago (or hired a better editor). Though the last one I read did provide fodder for mocking.
8. One book you are currently reading?
I’m partway through Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Not loving it, but what kind of geek would I be without reading it? Also Queen’s Ransom, by Fiona Buckley, third in a series of mysteries set in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Good cozy historical mystery; not demanding in any way, but well-written and with interesting period details.
9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Pride and Prejudice. And I really am going to finally read it now - I got a copy for my birthday (thanks sisters)! I’ll start it once I finish my mystery. And, uh, Robbins’s Pathology. We’ll see how that one goes.
I know I’m supposed to tag people but I don’t know who to pick. Sisters, you interested?
I really don’t understand why people care so much about retail-store holiday greetings. Here’s the thing: Christmas, to a retail corporation, is not a holiday so much as an opportunity to make the year’s profit. They don’t care what the holiday celebrates; they care that people come in to buy things. Any instructions to their employees as to what to wish customers are not statements about whose holidays are more important; they’re motivated by whatever makes corporations think forcing their employees to have scripted interactions with customers is a good idea.
Personally, I don’t care what the Walmart employee tells me. If somebody wants to make a sincere expression of goodwill, it doesn’t matter whether it’s “Have a nice day” or “Merry Christmas” or “Goddess bless” - I appreciate the thought. And if the employee is just following a script, I still don’t care what it says; I want to move through as quickly as possible to get to the part where I’m handed my receipt and change so I can get out of there.
But I guess it really matters to some people whether the insincere and scripted greeting corresponds to their preferred holiday. I suppose I’m a grinch, but that just makes me want to go around wishing everybody a merry winter solstice.