The Dish

Created by Vancouver sculptor Jamie Salmon. See many more hyper-realistic pieces by him and five other sculptors here.

Jessa Crispin reviews Time by Eva Hoffman:

It's no longer just fast food restaurants and "democracy" that the United States is exporting — it's also our anxiety about time. From how business is conducted to the fight to slow the aging process, our unhealthy attitudes are becoming the common thread that ties our flattening world together. As Hoffman writes in her new book Time — an overview of the way humans experience, fight with, warp, and understand the concept — Americans' insecurity with the ticking clock was in some ways born out of the opportunities for growth and expansion that did not exist in other parts of the world. We worked harder and competed with one another because there was a chance for upward mobility. Other nations are now taking our lead — there are still cliches about the striking French and the siestaing Spanish, but citizens of other countries are taking on the longer work hours and the obsession with youth that has plagued the U.S. for generations.

Americans have always been a work-focused people. And despite the fact that this stresses us out immensely (Americans report feeling more stressed than citizens of other nations, and we also suffer from more heart disease and other stress-related health problems than others), we report feeling happiest when at work. In fact, if we had more free time, surveys suggest that the majority of us would fill it with more work. We have a very difficult time unplugging, and many of our technological advances have ensured that we don't have to. Cell phones, e-mail, laptops, jet travel, and hotels wired with wi-fi all allow the capability to be at work all the time, even on vacation. Part of it might be what Hoffman refers to as our quest for "big promotions, big money, big homes" and that fear that came with knowing that "if you didn't succeed in 'making it,' as the colloquial phrase had it, you had only yourself to blame."

New York, New York, 3 am

DiA compares the outer bounds of science to religion:

One source of strength for the scientific side, in the centuries-long clash of scientific and theistic worldviews, has always been that science didn't involve anything supernatural or untestable. But string theorists have been going around for decades talking about an 11-dimensional universe where we can only directly perceive four of the dimensions, and the multiverse hypothesis seems to involve positing an infinite variety of universes that no one could ever perceive, even in theory.

It's not always readily apparent to non-physicists why this kind of talk is less supernatural than a belief in the persistence of the soul after death. During the course of the Reformation, much of Christianity abandoned its belief in miracles, in favour of a vision of a purely moral and spiritual God who did not physically influence events. Science and church could be reconciled through such a worldview; but atheists might still ask, if you believe in a deity that has no physical impact on or presence in our universe, in what sense does that entity exist? These days, it seems to the average non-scientist that the same question could be posed to a lot of physicists.

Obviously, there's a huge difference between hypothesising extra dimensions which might only be testable through prohibitively expensive high-energy experiments in order to potentially arrive at a mathematically complete version of quantum physics, and hypothesising a vague supernatural being in order to solve a host of unrelated "problems" so fuzzily described that it's not clear whether they are problems at all. But strictly in terms of how the argument between theists and atheists plays out in the public domain, there is a different quality to the tenets that are emerging on the atheistic, particle-physics side of things these days.

Patrick Moberg has seven more.

Rachel Kramer Bussel highlights eight new sex trends on the Internet. Here's her description of a new site called I Just Made Love:

With just shy of 60,000 entries, this site lets you record each of your individual sexploits like a notch on a virtual bedpost. A map of the earth on the homepage tracks where each entry is coming from so you can see where, when, and how other people are getting off all over the world. The map even has a filter option that allows you to view, say, just lesbians, or couples who recently did it outdoors, providing a fascinating, almost anthropological real-time survey of global sex patterns. As of this writing, a gay male couple had just made love in Greenland, the Spaniards were using condoms the most often, Portugal was having the most sex per capita, and someone named Foi Otimo was getting laid on a minuscule South Atlantic island called Edinburgh.

Matt Sigl sends George Lucas a cease-and-desist letter:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the production of the films Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode 3: Return of the Sith (hereafter referred to as “Star Bores”) as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter referred to as “Grandpa Jones”) infringes upon the rights of millions of moviegoers to preserve their childhood memories unscathed. This is a clear violation of your contract with the public to create films worthy of the legacy that you, yourself, began in 1977. Your recent actions have been grossly negligent, displaying a complete lack of regard for taste and artistic merit. Star Bores and Grandpa Jones represent a failure to satisfy the duty of care mandated for a filmmaker of your status. A partial list of the infringing acts are enumerated herein:

View Sigl’s list here. Trey and Matt’s admonition of Lucas was a little less subtle:

A reader writes:

I think there is a case to be made for Palin's take on the "hoarding" of Qs and Ks.  Hoarding has more than one meaning and one of those is too keep as to one's self.  I think good Scrabble players know you don't just use those letters willy-nilly. You may be able to spell "quit" upon drawing a Q, but may not be able to place that word on a good scoring square, only giving you 13 points.  If you drop "quit" on the right squares and rack up double or even triple word/letter bonuses, that can really turn the game around. You may even be able to place "quitter" on the board and get the 50 point bonus for using all your tiles. Pain me as this may, I tend to go with the Palin take on this one.
 
And to anyone who suggests any sort of pun by using Scrabble letters to spell "quit" or "quitter" in regards to Palin, I loudly protest my innocence.

Speaking of which …

Shake those tail feathers:

(Hat tip: Reddit)

But clearly outmatched.