Nathaniel

Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site. Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children. In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.

The Most Quoted Man In News

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2013-09-14 Greg Packer

The New Yorker has an incredible little video about Greg Packer, an otherwise completely ordinary American who has managed to become the most quoted individual with almost 1,000 individual media quotations:

Since his name first appeared on newsprint, in 1995, he’s spoken to reporters on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the release of the first iPhone. Greg’s campaign to be the most quoted man in news has been so successful that the Associated Press sent its staff a memo that essentially banned interviews with him. That hasn’t stopped Greg’s “career.” Individually, his quotes are utterly unremarkable, but, considered as a whole, they add up to a rather stunning body of work.

Follow the link to watch the 5-minute video.

Dog Saves Baby from Abusive Babysitter

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2013-09-13 Good Dog

From ABC News in Kentucky:

The parents of 7-month-old Finn Jordan suspected something was wrong last year when their dog began to growl and snarl at the babysitter, Alexis Khan, 22.

“We noticed the dog was getting very defensive when Alexis was around. He would growl and stand between her and our son. His hair would stand up on the back of his neck and we knew something was up,” Benjamin Jordan said.

The parents stashed an iPhone under a cushion to get a recording, expecting to hear the babysitter mistreating their dog. Instead they heard her swearing at the baby, along with the sounds of slapping and shaking. Police weren’t sure it would be enough for a conviction, but the babysitter confessed when interrogated and was sentenced to 3 years, the maximum, and had her name put on a list of child abusers to prevent her from ever working with children again.

Thankfully the little boy, who the parents rushed to a hospital right away, checked out just fine.

Good dog.

The Modesty Wars

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I initially wrote this post as an irate response to this post from By Common Consent, but I decided to let it simmer for a few days. I knew that Angela C, who wrote that BCC post, didn’t really deserve to be singled out as the target for my ire when she was really just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So, instead of tackling her post point-by-point, I want to get to what really fundamentally bothers me about the modesty wars. I guess I should start by defining the modest wars.

If you’ve never heard of the phrase that’s OK because, as far as I know, I just made it up. It refers to the odd feminist-vs-feminist battle between social conservatives and social liberals that centers primarily on modest dress. The conservative view is that immodest clothing is intrinsically sexually objectifying and therefore disempowers women. Probably the best proponent of this view comes from Caroline Heldman’s TEDxYouth talk.

The liberal response is basically that an emphasis on modest dress is the problem, not the solution, because it teaches both boys and girls to objectify their female bodies in the first place. Apparently liberals believe that, without specific training, no man would ever objectify women by ogling their bodies and that no woman would ever notice this and respond to it by intentionally inviting such objectification in exchange for leverage. Nope: that dysfunctional co-dependency is all thanks to capped-sleeves.

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Love, Marriage, and the Mundane

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2013-09-13 Love, Marriage, and the Mundane

I’ve seen this post making the rounds, and I like it quite a lot so I’m sharing it. The general message is that love isn’t an emotion (e.g. Disney, every rom-com ever) but rather it’s about choices we make. And that’s a good message.

But there’s one line in the post that really stuck out to me in particular, which is this:

Through giving, through doing things for my wife, the emotion that I had been so desperately seeking naturally came about.  It wasn’t something I could force, just something that would come about as a result of my giving. In other words, it was in the practicality that I found the love I was looking for. (emphasis original)

This resonates with what I’ve written in the past about the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, and also with what Walker has written with his co-author (and DR commenter) Allen. It’s a beautiful message that’s easy to understand but hard to live by. Beauty, love, and all the ideals that we care about are there around us in the world, but we have to reach out and seize them through mundane actions rather than wait around for a non-existent life soundtrack to inform us that meaning is being rained down upon us by some cosmic director of our lives.

 

 

Phonebloks

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I’m not sure how feasible this idea really is, but it feels like sci-fi, so I’m in.

If you can’t watch the video (or want the Cliff Notes version), Phonebloks is the idea of making cell phones fully modular by turning the individual components (battery, camera, CPU, storage, etc.) into little blocks that you can easily swap out and rearrange on your phone. The primary purpose is to make phones upgradeable to cut down on ewaste, but it has the added benefit of making phones highly customizable.

The campaign behind the idea–and at this stage it’s just an idea–is almost as interesting as the idea itself. They’re using a platform called Thunderclap to try and attract attention to the idea. Thunderclap is basically like Kickstarter except that instead of contributing cash you commit to automatically update your FB status, sent out a Tweet, whatever to support an idea. So if you like the Phonebloks idea you can visit the website and join the supporters. Then, on October 29, you and everyone else who has signed up will automatically post an FB status (Tweet, whatever you sign up for) and it will hopefully signal that this is an idea people care about.

A Game Theoretic View of the Atonement

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2013-09-09 John Forbes NashWant to know one way to guarantee no comments on Times And Seasons? I decided to try “use lots of game theory” and see how that works. So far? Success. But if you think seeing the world as one giant, iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma sounds interesting, then maybe you should give it a read anyway.

I know I had fun writing it, and if I ever had the time, I’d love to actually formalize the model and try it out. Shifting from traditional economic models to complex systems was a major interest for me when I was studying at Michigan, and it would be great to scratch that itch again.

The Administration’s Case for a Strike on Syria

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The Washington Post has video of a speech by US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power which, I presume, represents that Obama Administration’s official position on Syria.

What I like about the argument:

In arguing for limited military action .. we are reaffirming what the world has already made plain in laying down its collective judgment on chemical weapons. There is something different about chemical warfare that raises the stakes for the United States and raises the stakes for the world.

I support that rationale and limited, symbolic strikes based on it. Strikes that do not have the intent of changing the balance of the conflict or of disarming Assad, because such goals beyond what is required to sustain the convention against use of chemical weapons, and would incur an open-ended use of American power leading, potentially, into another quagmire.

Samantha Power Discusses Use Of Chemical Weapons In Syria

What I do not like about her argument, however, is the fact that it is irrationally manipulative and basically an extension of the Bush Doctrine. First, she describes a father’s grief at the loss of this two little girls. Personal tragedy is no basis for foreign policy, and the inclusion of this rationale is not merely spurious. It’s an affront to common sense and an insult to the intelligence of her audience. 

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The Ultimate Stairway to Heaven

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The Vancouver Sun is right on all counts:

There have been some mighty horrible renditions of Led Zeppelin‘s Stairway To Heaven, but when Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart performed the song in front of the three remaining members of the legendary British rock band at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony on Dec. 2, it made Robert Plant cry tears of joy.

(The band was being honoured by President Barack Obama alongside David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman.)

Watch it and understand why. When the choir kicks in and Ann Wilson wails Plant’s famous “And as we wind on down the road…” you might shed a tear or two yourself.

 

Buzzfeed, Pro-Lifers, and the Streisand Effect

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The Streisand Effect is named after an episode where Barbara Streisand attempted to suppress photos of her Malibu house in 2003 and accidentally triggered much more interest in the story than there otherwise would have been. It now refers to any “phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.”

So a couple of weeks ago Personhood USA, which is a somewhat radical, upstart pro-life organization, put up a list on Buzzfeed on 8 Outrageous Things Planned Parenthood Was Caught Doing.

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