“Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.”
—via clusterflock
October 2008
28 posts
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“Do I like Obama, personally? I do. Do I think he’s got good policies? Look, I’m like everyone else, I hope so. They sound good. They sound like something I believe in, so I think based on his performance and the way that he has run his campaign, I feel that it is reasonable to feel confident that he is going to take the same discipline and smarts and lack of drama and apply them to the very serious issues today and I think that makes him a good choice for President. Do I think that his candidacy is historic? Sure, that’s exciting too, but what I think it’s really amazing that he exists in the same world that I also inhabit and no other political candidate lives in that world right now. They live in a made-up world that is not reality. I think that that’s why you see Obama surging right now. It’s that the people like the fact that Obama lives in the world that they live in,” - John Hodgman.”
—via Andrew Sullivan
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I don’t think this is strictly true. Obama might get Colorado and North Carolina and McCain might take Azerbaijan, Albania, or Yemen.
Too ugly to get a job (yes, there’s a pic):
“I’m not tall. I’m not good-looking. I’m not rich. But people shouldn’t discriminate against me for that.”
A FATHER-OF-TWO who is desperate to find work claims he is being discriminated against by employers because he is “too ugly to be on show.”
Tom Friedman Explains a Bar Fight →
yankeepotroast.org
Brilliant work by Yankee Pot Roast. It’s so good it’s hard even to pull an excerpt, but here goes:
It was then that I realized all power came from the Sun. As I stumbled from my car to a roadside saloon a PowerPoint graph slid into my head of what organisms need to do to achieve PhotoSynthesis. I call them the PhotoSynthesis Superchargers:
- Be a living organism: Sitting on the fence between “dead” and “not dead” won’t cut it any more.
- Maximize your access to carbon dioxide and water investment.
- Be willing to absorb solar energy and change.
In the post 9/11-world, there are what I call Plants and Animals. Animals can’t make Glucose and Oxygen from the Sun. But a Plant can. I was thinking about this as I ordered a drink from the bar, when I ran—literally—into German finance minister Peer Steinbrück. Mr. Steinbrück demanded an apology.
“It doesn’t look like the Thai baht is going to recover any time soon,” I said, slamming the business end of my Zima bottle into his head.
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