Author: Andrew Sullivan

It's like something by Michael Bay:

Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba has acquired more than 50 para-gliding equipment from Europe, setting off alarm bells in the government that these could be used to carry out air-borne suicide attacks in the country.

The intelligence input which came barely days ahead of Republic Day celebrations has prompted authorities to ensure a tight air security around all vital installations, official sources said here on Friday.The input about movement of overground workers, owing allegiance to LeT, in Europe led the sleuths to find out that they were on a shopping spree for para-gliding equipment, the sources said. 

This kind of attack has happened before in Israel, but fifty at once? 

Alan Jacobs wonders about information addiction:

Consider an analogy to restaurant dining: Americans in the past twenty years have spent far, far more on eating out than any of their ancestors did, and that's a significant development even if you point out that huge portions of fat-laden food mean that they're not paying all that much per calorie. In fact, that analogy may work on more than one level: are we unhealthily addicted to information (of any kind, and regardless of quality) in the same way that we're addicted to fatty foods?

Kottke points to a passage in Richard Dawkins' book, "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution":

We can imagine wild wolves scavenging on a rubbish tip on the edge of a village. Most of them, fearful of men throwing stones and spears, have a very long flight distance. They sprint for the safety of the forest as soon as a human appears in the distance. But a few individuals, by genetic chance, happen to have a slightly shorter flight distance than the average. Their readiness to take slight risks — they are brave, shall we say, but not foolhardy — gains them more food than their more risk-averse rivals. As the generations go by, natural selection favours a shorter and shorter flight distance, until just before it reaches the point where the wolves really are endangered by stonethrowing humans. The optimum flight distance has shifted because of the newly available food source.

Photo taken from a new tumblr, "wolf! not wolf".

Jonah Lehrer considers chess:

Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of facts, experts are actually profoundly intuitive. When experts evaluate a situation, they don’t systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information. Carlsen, for instance, doesn’t compute the probabilities of winning if he moves his rook to the left rather than the right. Instead, experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience. Their prediction errors – all those mistakes they made in the past – have been translated into useful knowledge, which allows them to tap into a set of accurate feelings they can’t begin to explain. Neils Bohr said it best: an expert is “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely right.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry explores the New Testament:

The Gospels often show how, in the context of a patriarchal society, women played a very important role in the early Church. It is Mary who initiates Jesus’ miracle, and when she brings it up he dismisses her, calling her “woman”. Throughout the Gospels, whenever the men dismiss the women, it is later found out that the women were, in fact, right. After Jesus is resurrected, it is women who first find the empty tomb and, when they report this to the Apostles, they are first dismissed. In a matter of days, the Apostles, the leaders of the Church, have forgotten Jesus’ words about rebuilding the Temple, but the women remember, and accept the revelation. And it is the women, of course, who are right.

And this, of course, makes the modern Catholic church's refusal to grant women the full equality Jesus did all the more pernicious and un-Christian.

(Painting: El Greco's imagined Mother of God.)

The human race almost went extinct:

With 6.8 billion people alive today, it's hard to fathom that humans were ever imperiled. But 1.2 million years ago, only 18,500 early humans were breeding on the planet–evidence that there was a real risk of extinction for our early ancestors, according to a new study.

Coralville, Iowa, 8.35 am

Adam Kirsch reviews Walter Homolka's and Hans Küng's How to Do Good and Avoid Evil:

[A]fter listing the debts of Christianity to Judaism, [Küng] names three things that Judaism owes to Christianity. First is “universality of belief in God”: Christianity, we learn, rescued Judaism from “Pharisaism” and its “anxious and zealous fixation on the letter of the Torah,” thus making monotheism palatable to the whole Roman world. Then comes “the Jewish Enlightenment”: one might have thought that the Enlightenment was a secular movement, opposed to traditional Christianity as well as traditional Judaism, but Küng implies that somehow Christianity is responsible for “leading Jews out of their medieval ghetto … and into modern culture.” Finally comes “the Jewish Reform”: here the gift of Christianity was that “Judaism was now understood as a prophetic-ethical religion—a religion of justice, mercy, and unconditional love of humankind.”

Without Christianity, in other words, Judaism would be a pharisaical, provincial, benighted, and unmerciful faith; and classical German Reform Judaism represents the best form of Judaism because it is the least unregenerate, the least stiff-necked. In this way, it becomes clear how even well-meant ecumenicism can end up reinforcing the oldest stereotypes—and how the invitation to sign up for a global ethic can turn into pressure to disavow everything that separates a minority faith from the majority. There must be better ways to do good and avoid evil than this.

Nope:

Nobody was considered "old" at 30 in prehistory, just as 30 year-olds aren't considered "old" among modern day hunter-gatherers, or in the Old Testament, where humans were allotted 70 years (three score and ten). People who lived beyond childhood often–even typically–lived into their 60s and 70s in prehistory. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and well known to specialists in anthropology, primatology, and archaeology.