Yes.

What evidence do I have to prove this? I give you this picture:

Why would the cat choose to sit on the laptop? It offers no cover or concealment, is not elevated enough to provide a better view, and is not a comfortable seat. Clearly the only reason is that she values it as a square.

Don’t believe me? I give you this picture:

Add another laptop to the arrangement and the cat moves to the open space. Why? Because that space is now the clearly defined square.

And, finally, to complete the case:

There can be no reason for the cat to sit on the iPad rather than on the comfortable bed other than its squareness.

So, yes, cats have a sense of aesthetics. At least for squares.

My Bible for this conversion was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I purchased it on a whim after reading a blog post singing it’s praises. Meticulously researched and skillfully written, it’s less a persuasive essay than an inner dialogue shared with the world. In the end it serves as a sobering presentation of modern meat eating.

Did you know that:

• Over 99% of animal products come from factory farms.
• We’ve modified the turkeys and  chickens we eat so much that they are incapable of living to adulthood.
• The average chicken whose eggs you eat lives in 67 square inches of space. That’s smaller than the computer monitor you’re reading this on.*
• Free range? It just means there’s a door somewhere that leads outdoors.
• It’s not uncommon for animals (chicken, pig, cow, take your pick) to be alive during the butchering process because the stunning method fails.

I’ll stop there. There are more facts to present than I have space for. I’d highly recommend that you read Eating Animals or do your own research.

In the end it’s hard to argue with the facts. Modern meat comes from factory farms. Factory farms are almost inevitably cruel and inhumane. Shall I complete the logic?

Bacon is good. Bacon is really good. There’s no denying that. There’s also no denying that the pig you eat the bacon from probably never saw outdoors. It was fed a completely unnatural diet replete with antibiotics to keep it alive. There’s a good chance it was born in a gestation crate not even big enough for its mother to turn around in.

How good is that bacon now?

And this doesn’t even get into the public health, environmental, climate change, or nutrition aspects of eating meat. Not to mention the ethics of eating meat. But let’s leave all that aside.

Knowing that you can eat a perfectly healthy diet without meat, is the cruelty worth it to you? Can you justify it?

One of my favorite passages from Eating Animals is Foer’s response to the accusation that vegetarians are sentimentalists. He politely points out that people who eat meat do so because of tradition and people who don’t because they know the facts of animal welfare. Who’s the sentimentalist here?

Some would say that real men eat meat. I say that real men look at the facts and decide if their actions are worth it. I’ve decided mine aren’t. Are yours?

I’ve asked a lot of rhetorical questions. So does Foer. But there’s a reason for that. No one is going to force you or I to change our diets. There’s no law against eating meat. It comes down to personal choice. A judgment call, if you will. You have to ask questions, of the meat industry, and of yourself. You may not be comfortable with the answers.

I challenge you to give it a go. Ask the questions. Read a book. Do the research. Maybe you’ll have a conversion like me. Maybe not. But at least you’ll know what it means for us to be eating animals.

* If you’re on your iPhone, imagine a space about 6.5 times the size of your phone. Yes, it’s that small.

You get the impression in the beginning of Mark that Jesus’ way is entirely foreign to the people of that time. So many questions!

The really sad part is that there are certain questions that should be so easy—”Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” Does it even have to be the Sabbath to know the answer to that question? It’s apparent!

It makes you wonder what easy decisions we’re missing in our own lives.

They seem to have fit more whitespace in, which I think I like. But there’s still a heavy use of flash. Boo. Can an iPad user get some love?

When one lives in Washington, DC, it is an unfortunately common occurrence to find oneself in a political, philosophical, or otherwise worldview-oriented conversations. While I generally find these interesting and (if I may flatter myself) am able to in some small way hold my own, I have realized that I need a firmer grounding in the means of understanding.

I could, like Descartes, choose to lock myself in a room until I suddenly comprehend the world around me. Or I could not reinvent the wheel. I would also like a solution that involves you, dear reader.Thus, I propose to undertake the following endeavor: to read one Great book a month and report back to you. The rules are to be as follows:

1. I will purchase each book and do something I rarely do: mark in it as I read it.
2. Unless otherwise noted, I will have one month to read each book.
3. Upon completing the book, I will post a reflection of some variety on the blog. Exact content will be flexible.

Further guidelines will be:

• I will rotate through four main categories of books: Science, Economics or Philosophy, Literature, and Theology.
• Suggestions for future books will be solicited on the blog. (Please reply in the comments rather than directly to me, for the benefit of other readers.)

To begin, I shall finish The Origin of Species this month. After that, I will be moving to the next category. Contenders for the second book include:

• The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• Capital by Marx
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

Please leave further suggestions below. I will need particular help when it comes to the Literature section. I have been careful to specifically include it, as I would tend not to read it. Beginning with one of Shakespeare’s plays that I have not yet read seems a good idea to me, but I am open to ideas.

In this means I hope to accomplish in some small fashion my tweet tonight (incidentally, Twitter is a wonderful way to learn to be concise in one’s writing): “The world must by synthesized.”

What is needed is neither the overweening rationalist atheism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engagcd atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, onlya semitone from fuith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity. It could give a brother’s account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative. It would be unafraid to credit the immense allure of religious tradition, but at the same time it would be ready to argue that the abstract God of the philosophers and the theologians is no more probable than the idolatrous God of the fundamentalists, makes no better sense ofthe fallen world, and is certainly no more likable or worthy of our worshipful respect—alas.

If you have a chance (and a subscription), read the rest of the article.

Rather than explaining further, I’ll redirect you to Bryant, who nails the issue.

Opening files is just about the only thing that still takes a double click.  It used to be all over the place: to open the program, then to open the file, then to do something in the program.  So much so that double clicking is still a part of our mouse “vocabulary.”  Watch a user when something isn’t responding to their input; they will click, click again, right click, double click, click, double click.  It’s as if double clicking is expected to do something that single clicking doesn’t.

In today’s computer interfaces, that’s almost a laughable idea.  Why would anyone create something that you had to click on twice?  But in the past, the whole point of double clicking was to expand our vocabulary.  You would click on the icon once to select it, click and drag to move it, and double click to open it.

My first answer to Anna’s question didn’t take long to think of: the Internet.  The rise of the internet is probably the biggest single factor in the death of the double click.  But, as I realized upon further reflection, it’s not the only factor.  The double click was doomed from the moment it was created because it is an inherently artificial interaction.  This artificiality causes several major problems.

1. It’s unintuitive. The ideal computer interactions mimic “real life.”  Say you walk up to a table with an object on it that you want to manipulate.  You might touch the object.  You might touch and push the object.  Or you might pick it up and examine it.  Touching is like clicking it, and pushing like clicking and dragging.  But there is no way to “pick up” an object on the computer—so double clicking was invented to translate that portion of our physical vocabulary into a digital action.

The problem is that double clicking feels odd to us.  Because you would never double click on a physical object—the equivalent of tapping it twice in rapid succession and expecting something to happen—it does not make sense to our brains to double click on the computer.  Thus, from the very beginning, the double click had limited applicability.

2. It’s hard to use. I have most frequently observed this problem when watching elderly people use computers.  Even when they have been trained to double click instead of single click (see point one), they often simply cannot double click fast enough because of arthritis or other hand problems.  This isn’t limited to old people, though.  It’s not uncommon for me to find myself wondering whether my double click “caught” or whether I should do it again.  Single clicking is easy—as long as you know your mouse is in the right place you can hear the click of the button and rest assured that you have performed an action.  But with the double click you have to not only hear two clicks, but also judge the time between them to make sure you didn’t click too slowly.

Which brings us to the Internet. Double clicking has never been a part of the Internet vocabulary, but the Internet has become a huge part of our computer vocabulary—probably the dominant portion for many of us.  The World Wide Web is undoubtedly far different from what Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned it would be.  But some ideas have persisted from nearly the very beginning; among them, the idea of clicking on a link.

Hyperlinks were designed to get you from one page on the Internet to another with as little fuss as possible.  For many years they were the primary method of interacting with web pages.  Even the advent of HTML forms didn’t change much until AJAX came around.  With hyperlinks there is no need for a double click, a single click suffices.  So the primary user interaction of the Internet finds double clicking unnesecary.

This legacy has carried over into the Web 2.0, but websites also do much more these days than simply let you click on links.  Take any of the major websites Web 2.0—GMail, Flickr, Google Maps—and think about your interactions.  There’s a lot of dragging, scrolling, and sliding going on.  These motions all avoid the two problems mentioned above; they are fairly intuitive, all being based on actual actions in life, and they are relatively easy to do.

Web applications are now, for most people, the primary applications we use our computers for.  Email, RSS feeds, blog posting, online finances, maps: all through websites.  Now that the most common computer tasks are in a medium that doesn’t require the double click, the double click is no longer common.

Thus, in a certain way the Internet did “kill” the double click.  But it is more the inherent artificiality of the interaction that is the real “killer.”   The double click would have gone away eventually, maybe not entirely, but mostly.  The process was sped up considerably, however, by the fact that the Internet, which had no history of double clicking to hold it back, took over our computer lives at the same time that alternative interactions were being invented.

Exasperated by the number of “tags” I had received, one afternoon I mentioned the phenomena to my mom, who instantly recognized it from her childhood. Not wanting to subject herself to any unnecessary bad luck, she would recopy, using pen and paper, the chain letters she received as a kid.

Underneath the amusing ideas of perpetuation and superstition that these chain letters represent lies a deeper, and perhaps more revealing, insight into our human nature. Most of us have felt some pressure, superstitious or otherwise, to pass on the letter, and at least a little hesitation in breaking the chain. But where does this pressure come from; why do we still feel it in the face of something which is so obviously and utterly ridiculous?

Explaining the entirety of the phenomena is, of course, outside of my meager abilities, as it is undoubtedly fed by numerous factors and psychological considerations. Rather, I’ll stick with a few observations on the many characteristics of chain letters, which occur with a fair amount of frequency on the Internet.

52,000 applications exist on Facebook which serve to amuse half of the users (and annoy the other half), yet simple 25 Things outstrips them all. Something about how simple the person to person interaction of 25 Things is makes it a very appealing means of communicating between friends and acquaintances.  Qualitatively speaking, most of the information shared is fairly useless, but what it lacks in this area it easily makes up for in sheer quantity.

Unfortunately our modern mindset has been conditioned by the instant information technological world to demand a constant flow of random trivia, whether pertinent or not.  As 25 Things unites simple interaction with nearly unlimited information, it provides a means for people to endlessly entertain themselves with almost no external costs.

Reinforcing this instant entertainment desire is the human need to act as a social creature, which the artificial interaction of a 25 Things “discussion” provides.  Enter the Facebook “friend” paradox: the electronic interaction of friendship requests and subsequent activities such 25 Things create an alternate social universe to retreat to.  Despite the lack of real connections, the sharing of personal information via the chain letter establishes a form of kinship with the unknown electronic masses.

Effective as both entertainment and a form of cheap social therapy, the chain letter thrives in an environment where a few clicks passes it on.  Questioning it generates pressure to continue it, not because of superstition, but because of the herd mentality that defines the rapid growth of electronic media. Unconscious interaction becomes the norm, with each subsequent post generating a very high rate of return due to the low cost nature of electronic communication.

At some point I have to get over my exasperation at being constantly poked to participate and wonder at the sheer genius of the system.  Lasting interaction it is not, but as an example of what the combination of millions of people and modern technology produces, it is absolutely fascinating.  Something about its “perfect storm” of interaction prompts respect, even from those of us who never intend to respond to a tag from a friend.

25 Things deserves recognition, and even homage in the form of a blog post specially constructed to pay tribute to the phenomena and its number.  50 years ago chain letters passed from kid to kid in schools, now they encompass millions of adults across every continent, which is absolutely amazing.