Category: The Dish

Discuss. Ron Bailey writes about Stephen Pinker’s unmentionable questions. Among them:

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

I find all those questions fascinating and well worth airing. Pinker is not so sure.

More Japanese "crop-art" here.

Why am I not surprised?

Fifteen of ’em. Enjoy.

A history of spin.

A Tibetan woman feeds her baby in her tent during the Horse Racing Festival on July 20, 2007 in Chengduo County of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, northwest China. The Horse Racing Festival of Tibetan nomads in Yushu Prefecture falls in late July and early August on the Tibetan calendar. During the festival, various of equestrian skills will be performed along with singing, dancing and costume shows. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

The computers finally win. More here:

What do you call a game with 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible play positions? Checkers, of course. That’s according to computer scientists who have succeeded in "solving" the well-known game for every possible smart move.

They found that in a perfectly played game, checkers is a draw.

The feat was accomplished by running checkers games on dozens of computers for 18 years, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Baghdad, Iraq, 11.30 am.

For another military reader’s Baghdad window view from the ground, click here.

Hilzoy lists them. These two strike very close to home in my case:

(4) When the rest of the world thinks you’re crazy, it’s worth entertaining the possibility that they might be right. We should not defer to their judgment mindlessly, but we should have what Jefferson called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

(5) Beware of movements built on contempt. Many of the people who pushed for war had spent decades expressing their contempt for what you might call standard foreign policy — the kind in which diplomacy is taken to be a useful instrument, not a snare for the weak-minded, and force is a last resort, not an all-purpose tool. Their own views had never been seriously tested (and no, Reagan doesn’t count), and many of their spokesmen lacked any serious experience conducting foreign policy. Sometimes, groups of people who spend years muttering about how different things would be if they were in charge are right. Often, however, they are not. Absent a real track record on which to evaluate them, they should be approached with caution.

"Get away from her, you bitch." Aliens.