6-14-14 Hodgepodge

Projection, Anyone?

A joke has become the latest excuse for feminists to spew bile online, in the form of a Twitter hashtag campaign to end Father's Day.

Apparently, Father's Day is just another way of perpetuating the patriarchal dominance that is so rampant in American society. Forget that Mother's Day is also a thing, that's not important. All that matters is that we end a day dedicated to the monsters among us, or something.

While we're surveying intellectual and psychological wreckage...

I find it absurd (and revealing) that so many such "outraged" people both emulate in deed their own stereotypes of non-leftists as "haters" and act as boorishly as they suppose "all" men do in a supposed show of "liberation".

Weekend Reading

"[B]ecause of its vital role, health care should be an industry in which success should be most praiseworthy, given that financial viability is essential for continued operations and the opportunity to purchase health care services." -- Amesh Adalja, in "In Defense of Jeffrey Romoff" at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Apparently, smiling can unleash the power to self-fulfill a happy prophecy." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Health Benefits of Smiling" at The Delaware Wave

"[T]here are things you can do to make transition a little less traumatic." -- Michael Hurd, in "Life Is Not Static" at The Delaware Coast Press

"If we really want to kill off the campaign finance monster, we need to drive a stake through the wrong-headed view of free speech at its heart." -- Steve Simpson, in "The Campaign Finance Monster that Refuses To Die" at Breitbart

In More Detail

The Simpson piece, through its historical survey of attempts to regulate spending on political campaigns, demonstrates just how close we are to completely losing government protection of freedom of speech.

The "Marriage Problem"

I enjoyed Robert Krulwich's explanation of a mathematical solution for quickly making an optimal choice from among a limited pool of options:

It works any time you have a list of potential wives, husbands, prom dates, job applicants, garage mechanics. The rules are simple: You start with a situation where you have a fixed number of options (if, say, you live in a small town and there aren't unlimited men to date, garages to go to), so you make a list -- that's your final list -- and you interview each candidate one by one. Again, what I'm about to describe doesn't always produce a happy result, but it does so more often than would occur randomly. For mathematicians, that's enough.

Read the whole thing for historical background and quick-and-dirty explanations of the strategy and why it often works.

--CAV