A soccer player scores a goal with a header from inside his own half.

What is surprising is why the goalkeeper was so far out of position. You can see him in lime green right at the beginning near the opponent’s goal and could not get back in time to guard his own goal.

On Friday, September 23, I will be leading a discussion on these ideas, especially the work of Frans de Waal, Paul Bloom, and Peter Singer on the implications of the theory of evolution.

It will take place from 12:30- 2:00 pm in Nord 310B on the CWRU campus.

The event is free and open to all. Drinks will be provided and you are encouraged to bring your own brown bag lunch.

At least as far as internet speeds go, just behind Romania.

If it seems extraordinary to you that the country that pioneered the internet should lag so far behind now, Tim Karr explains that the prime cause is the lack of competition here, thanks to the ability of the telecommunications giants to pressure regulators.

In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.
…
While the U.S. blindly followed a path of “deregulation,” other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.
…
The lack of competition has turned America into a broadband backwater. In the aftermath of the FCC’s decisions, powerful phone and cable companies legislated and lobbied their way to controlling 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market — leaving the vast majority of consumers with two or fewer choices of land-based providers in any given market.
The absence of true consumer choice has driven prices up and services down.

For reasons that are not clear to me, the Plain Dealer wasted a huge amount of the limited space in its front section to a story about a fancy lakefront property that was on sale for nearly $20 million. The item read like a huge, free, real estate advertisement and fell into the category of what is known as ‘real estate porn’, that showcases the absurdly extravagant homes of the wealthy.

But what struck me was that the 38,000 square foot house built on 160 acres consisted of five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and seven half bathrooms.

Why would you need sixteen bathrooms for a private home that has just five bedrooms? Do rich people need to go to the bathroom a lot and so must have one handy at any moment?

I see from the news today that yesterday was the Emmy awards show. I do not understand the appeal of such shows for viewers and am curious as to why people watch them at all. Surely it can’t be to see the stars since we see them all the time in their performances themselves. The shows apparently have some moments of comedy and some music and dance but most of the time seems to be spent announcing the nominees, showing clips from their performances, and the acceptance remarks of category winners. Surely this must get stale about fifteen minutes into the proceedings?

It is true that I do not watch TV or go to many plays much, which may explain my lack of interest in the Emmys and the Tonys. But I do watch films a lot and my disinterest extends to the Oscar awards show as well.

Do viewers of these shows see it as a quasi-sporting event and root for particular people to win, thus enjoying the suspense of seeing if their ‘team’ won?

I am genuinely curious.

The Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry is having its 2011 Humanism Award banquet on Friday, September 30th 2011 at 7:00 pm at the Crowne Plaza Independence, 5300 Rockside Road, Independence, OH 44131.

The award is being given to Page Stephens, PhD, “who, as cofounder and seventeen year president of the now-disbanded South Shore Skeptics, was instrumental in cultivating a burgeoning skeptics community on the southern banks of Lake Erie and proved himself a staunch defender of science over pseudoscience.”

The featured speaker is the well-known biologist blogger P. Z. Myers.

More details can be found here.

One of the odd features of life in the US is the boasting (either overt or subtle) by professional people about how much they work. They seem to seek bragging rights about who puts in the most hours, as if the more hours you work the more important you must be. My daughter worked for a couple of years in the financial sector and sent me this article that illustrates the mindset of many of the people she encountered in that world. The author highlights a trap that young professionals especially can fall into.

Because fulfilling and engrossing work – the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience – often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.

Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don’t contain enough hours.

Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: “Isn’t this great? This is when I really love my job.” What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. “It’s as though he was validated, or making his life important by this,” she says.

Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself – and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked – people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.
…
Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could “do anything”, “be anything”. It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.

The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.

Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.

I grew up at a time and in a country where this mindset was not present, so I did not fall prey to this kind of thinking. Also academia is an area where people do work long hours but because the research involves largely self-motivated learning, it does not seem like work, and since there is already a consensus that the work is worthwhile, academics tend not to brag to each other about the hours they put in.

Now of course, I am in the twilight of my work life, approaching the age when retirement becomes a factor to consider. Getting old is no picnic, mainly because your body starts to fall apart. But one of the benefits, if one is able to recognize it as such, is that you realize that because time is running out, many of the options that you once considered are no longer open to you, and so you begin to think of how best to maximize the benefits of the life you have rather than constantly seeking new fields to conquer.

It is not that one has become resigned to one’s lot in life. It is that one sees more clearly what options are realistically available and can then focus on making the most of them.

A recent news report says that football players in Division 1A colleges average about 44.8 hours on that sport and less than 40 on academics.

This is crazy. A full time student is expected to spend a minimum of about 50 hours per week on academics (attending classes and doing out of class work). Assuming they sleep 8 hours per day, that means that they have 17 hours per week, or 2.5 hours per day, for everything else in life. It is ridiculous to think that these athletes are sacrificing all the other things and living the ascetic life of a hermit in order to completely meet their athletic and academic demands.

The NCAA, the governing body, is pretending that this shows the commitment of these students to living up to the ‘student-athlete’ ideal. An NCAA spokesperson Myles brand says, “These young people are very competitive. It’s in their fiber… and they will do everything they can to succeed… Frankly, I’d rather have that student go to sleep early, wake up in the morning and do an extra run than I would (him or her) staying up late and going to the bars… The fact that they choose to balance athletics and academics as a primary activity, I think that’s fine.”

Yeah, right. What is obviously happening is that these student athletes are cutting back on their studies at these big sports schools, which are notorious for finding ways to circumvent academic requirements.

What these students really are are professional athletes masquerading as students, providing income for the schools in return for the small chance of making it in professional sports after they graduate with a worthless degree. Some undoubtedly feel that they are being exploited, hence the periodic scandals involving ‘secret’ benefits and payments to players, with coaches and school administrators pretending not to notice. Ohio State University is the latest school to be found guilty of such infractions and its football coach resigned but he will merely move on to another position and the cycle goes on.