Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2556

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. Country first, then city
and/or state. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. 
Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@theatlantic.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, courtesy of Blurb. Have at it.

Country music - Web Design and Development - View From Your Window - Operating Systems - Web design

Experimenting With Yourself

Bradley Voytek has a highly amusing post on the glories of scientific self-experimentation. None of the examples hold a candle to the story of a certain Sir Henry Head dunking his penis in warm water, to test nerve damage and touch:

In the case of [Head:], the tip happens to be devoid of heat-spots but is sensitive to cold and to pain. When... it was dipped into water at 40° C, no sensation of heat was produced, but [Head:] experienced an unusually disagreeable sensation of pain... But, as soon...

"Shopping Is A Feeling"

Molly Young marvels at a Hollister store and its innovative, if unnerving, retail model:

Immersive retail is ... a way to counter the allure of
shopping, which boils down to its convenience ... IBM describes the goals of
retail the way a party planner might envision a successful bar
aiming for a "memorable, interactive and emotional" experience full
"personalized dialogues."

The paper explains that immersive retail "ismore about involving the customer than it is...

A Language Myth?

Pace Guy Deutscher, John McWhorter argues that as "cool as it would be if grammar were thought, the idea is a myth":

Deutcher's favorite evidence is people who sense direction not as amatter of front and back but as north, south, east and west. In theirlanguages you say not "in front of me" but "west of me" and so on --meaning that where if we were turned around after saying something wasin front of us we'd say that it was now in back of us, speakers ofthese languages would still say that it...

Bird's Eye View

panoptICONS Utrecht 2010 from Helden on Vimeo.

Artists Thomas voor 't Hekke and Bas van Oerle's latest project:

'panoptICONS' addresses the fact that you are constantly being watched
by surveillance cameras in city centres. The surveillance camera seems
to have become a real pest that feeds on our privacy. To represent this,
camera birds - city birds with cameras instead of heads - were placed
throughout the city centre of Utrecht where they feed on our presence.

Photography...

YouTube Time Machine

A clever website that lets you pick a date and travel there via video.

(Hat Tip: Kottke)

Jason Kottke - YouTube - Website - Travel - Recreation

Knowing Grief

Alissa Torres, wife of a 9/11 victim, speaks out:

What did I think about the decision to construct a "mosque" this close to ground zero? I thought it was a no-brainer. Of course it should be built there. I sometimes wonder if those people fighting so passionately against Park51 can fathom the diversity of those who died at ground zero. Do we think no Muslims died in the towers? My husband, Eddie Torres, killed on his second day of work at Cantor Fitzgerald while I was pregnant with our first...

The Weekly Wrap

Today on the Dish, we assessed why the Koran burning was only suspended. Obama responded; Republicans laid claim to 9/11; and in general burning things appealed to lizard brains. Christianism threatened Christianity; Islamism threatened Islam and Terry Jones was as crazy in Germany as he is in the U.S. The war machine chugged along, throwing beacons of freedom under its wheels of torture, while a humane interrogation technique already exists.

We talked tax cuts; Schwarzenegger couldn't see

The Lizard Brain

Leonard Pitts Jr, writing earlier this week:

There is in the act of burning something primitive and tribalistic, something that appeals to the lizard brain which has no ability or desire to reason, no comprehension of ideals and abstract concepts, that knows only that it lives in fear of a world it cannot understand and will do anything to send the fear away.

The process of becoming a truly human being is the process of conquering that lizard brain. Unfortunately, some people never do.

On...

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

I think you are being a little more than disingenuous when you claim that the Obama administration is to the right of some conservatives with respect to DADT and marriage equality.  Like a law or not, it is the duty and constitutional obligations of the executive branch to defend every law.  While I disagree with DADT and believe DOMA to be unconstitutional, I still want the executive branch to litigate to uphold the legality of these laws.  Once you set a precedent that an...