Monthly Archives: July 2012

Guns and Politics

A gunman stood up at a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado and killed 12 people and injured 58 others–as many people as he could with the time he had and the arsenal he brought into the theater with him.  David Brooks’s … Continue reading

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Public Porn

The two most common responses I have heard to protests against pornography are these: a) it doesn’t hurt anybody and b) what they (the consumers of pornography) do in the privacy of their homes is nobody’s business. The New York … Continue reading

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Dangerous Architectural Innovations

Here’s what I learned today: “In architecture, the apse (Greek αψις (apsis), then Latin absis: “arch, vault”; sometimes written apsis; plural apses) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome.”  That’s from Wikipedia.  Here’s what one of them … Continue reading

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Boy-friendly Schools?

So let’s talk about accountability and cooperativeness.  They’re good, right?  So if you built a set of institutions to teach little boys and little girls to be accountable and cooperative, that would be a step in the right direction. This … Continue reading

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Building Abscission Layers

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve been thinking about abscission layers.  I have read meticulous accounts of those layers and the processes that reliably produce them in biology texts where, after several readings, I thought I got the … Continue reading

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