I’ve been thinking about how modern society explains various phenomena, everything from simple everyday questions to the grand complexities that vex the lay thinker’s ability to make sense of a confusing world. More and more, it’s become clear that we’re relying on Fuckem’s Razor, the little-known Medieval principle of implausibility. I’d like to take a moment to explain this theory for those who haven’t encountered it before.

Wait, you say – don’t you mean Occam’s Razor?

No, but thanks for raising that. Occam’s Razor, in Newton’s formulation, says that ”We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Put more directly, this means that when trying to understand things, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Occam’s Razor is credited to 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Full story »

by Lindsay Hayes

A recent study conducted at University of California, San Diego revealed that people enjoyed short stories more when they had been given a spoiler about the ending. That’s nice, but as far as I’m concerned spoilers are still the revelation of the damned.

While some have taken this study to mean spoilers aren’t so bad after all, I have a different take. Uses and Gratifications theory tells us that people use media for whatever purpose suits them at the time. Enjoyment is far from the only use of media consumption. It’s worth noting that the participants in this study were just that – participants in a study. They were not at the local Barnes & Noble seeking the gratification of a good read after a hectic work week. Full story »

by Hannah Frantz

So far I haven’t mentioned the events of 1994, but I feel like I need to bring it up sometime, and now is as good a time as any.

Yesterday we visited the memorials at Ntarama, Nyamata, and the Kigali Memorial Centre, which serves partly as a museum. The group I was in visited the churches (Ntarama and Nyamata) first. Nothing prepares you for what you see there.

I went to Dachau with my parents a few years ago, and that was a starling experience. Full story »

Full story »

Last Friday, Wolfgang Wagner of the journal Remote Sensing resigned as editor-in-chief. He took this extraordinary step because he felt that it was his responsibility that Remote Sensing published a “fundamentally flawed” climate paper by Roy Spencer and William D. Braswell, both of the University of Alabama – Huntsville (UAH). In response, Spencer wrote on his blog: “If some scientists would like to demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication.” The first published response appeared this morning in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, and Dessler’s response points out multiple severe deficiencies in Spencer and Braswell’s paper titled “On the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in Earth’s radiant energy balance” (hereafter SB2011). Full story »

I live and breathe travel. I love to see new things, but more importantly I travel to learn. To me, exploring the world firsthand has proven the most effective way to learn about the depths of people, culture and myself. Our trip from Chicago to New Orleans included a drive through seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Of these seven states, I had only been to three before making this trip, which proved a unique and exciting opportunity to learn more about the hidden beauties and truths of America. Full story »

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While our country has in recent times engaged in a relentless policy war against the working class I grew up in, there was a time when honest labor was a thing to be celebrated. America became the greatest nation on the planet for a period of time thanks to its workers, not its CEOs or its bankers. Our character is defined by our Main Streets, not Wall St. And you never heard of a Protestant management ethic, did you?

Today S&R honors the worker, and we begin with Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.”

I HEAR America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics—each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work; Full story »

by Hannah Frantz

Muzungu: noun. Foreign person, derived from a word literally meaning “confused person.” 

Sometimes when I walk through the streets people shout “Muzungu, Muzungu” at me. It’s not an offensive term by any means, just a statement. But it always makes me hyperaware of my skin color, which is definitely an experience I needed to have. In fact, I think it’s an experience most white people should have.

Anyway, so much has happened since my last post. I hope I can catch you up.

A few days ago we did what is called our “drop off” project. However, it’s more of a “let loose” project than anything. Our program staff put us into pairs and assigned each pair a mission and then literally set us loose. Full story »

by Hannah Frantz

Muraho, everyone!

Today we actually all sat down and talked together about the program, what we’re doing, what are acceptable cultural habits, etc., etc. And let me tell you – that was helpful. We were told that men and women alike who are friends will frequently walk hand in hand simple to show friendship, not necessarily romance. I though this was so interesting! In the United States if you see two men walking around, holding hands, you automatically assume that they are a gay couple, but here it is just friendly men showing affection for one another.

We also learned about a “holiday” called Umuganda (I actually arrived on this holiday on Saturday). Full story »

by Samantha Berkhead

Sarah’s Key (Elle s’appelait Sarah)
US release: 2011
Director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner

In the earliest moments of Sarah’s Key, lead actress Kristin Scott Thomas declares that “when a story is told, it is not forgotten.” This statement rings as a challenge both to the film’s viewers and the film itself, but it’s a challenge the film doesn’t quite overcome.

The widely unknown deportation of 13,000 French Jews to concentration camps in 1942 catalyzes the dual narrative film that spans 60 years. The young Sarah Starzynski and her parents are among the Jews forced from their homes and each other by their own government. In a desperate attempt to save her younger brother from a similar fate, Sarah locks him in a closet, taking the key with her and making him swear to stay hidden. Full story »

Six days, 1,500 miles and seven states later, we made it to our final destination of New Orleans, Louisiana. This city will be my new home for at least the next 16 months and will mark the birthplace of a new life journey while I pursue my Master’s Degree at Tulane University.

Since Dan only had limited time in the city (he’s embarking on his own adventure with a one-way ticket to Nepal and plan to climb Mount Everest) and I could not move into my apartment for a few more days, we decided to explore New Orleans as we have every city on our road trip – as tourists. We kicked off our time with a stop at Plum Street Snoball, one of the oldest and most popular snoball stands in the city. Snoballs compare best to “snow cones” only with more finely shaved ice, more flavor options and a sturdier cup to hold the refreshing treat together.

Sweet hell – can you believe they’re going to let Chaz Bono compete on Dancing With the Stars? What a travesty.

Oh, no. Not because of that. We’re perfectly down with a transgender competitor. That couldn’t bother us less. No, the issue is more essential: since when did Chaz Bono become a star? His Wikipedia entry calls him a “transgender advocate, writer, actor, and musician.” Yeah, he has earned a profile for the advocacy work, which is great, but if we’re being honest here, we have to admit that Chaz’s main claim to fame was being born to famous parents.

I mean, this show is about dancing with, you know, the stars. Full story »

The solution will not be televised…

With 36.1% of the civilian labor force unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy in neutral since 2007, and the national debt threatening to swallow us all in a spiraling vortex of compound interest, do we really need to talk about global warming right now? That depends on whether we want life to exist on this planet’s surface in 100 years. Full story »

One fifth of humanity was marching into Portugal.
It was bringing with it
large barrels of its family’s familiar salt.
It tried to place one of the barrels
at one end
of a seesaw that was no longer capable of being fixed.
I knew, because I was at the other end of the seesaw.
I was asking the wind why it didn’t want my signature included.
I was passing out chocolate to anyone who could speak. Full story »

My fascination with the Congo began, I think, with Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” Through sixty-six and seven, Roland fought the Congo wars with his finger on the trigger, knee deep in gore.

Or perhaps it was a Time-Life book I read at about that time, part of a series about unexplained phenomena like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, that featured tales of the mokele-mbembe, the dinosaur that lurked in the Congo’s dark swamps and jungles. The idea of such a thing captivated me; any landscape where such a beast could live had to be equally fantastic.

There’s been Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo”…Henry Morton Stanley and “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” In 2000, there was Jeffrey Tayler’s beautifully descriptive Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Little surprise, then, when I saw Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and jumped on it. Full story »