7 Quick Takes (11/12/10).

–1–

This post is up late, and a little less verbose than usual, since I had an exam this morning. To make it up, I promise that I’ll be posting this afternoon/evening to respond to Dom’s question posted last week during the John Loftus kerfuffle:

So I’ve got a question which I’d love to see you write a full-on post about, if you’ve the time or inclination, because it’s preventing a lot of the things you and Loftus have been tossing back and forth with each other from cohering in my head… The question is the following: to what extent is it actually meaningful to talk about an atheist “side” to this debate?

question continues at the link

–2–

If you’re interested in other, non-religion related things I do, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Yale Daily News earlier in the week arguing that we are dangerously biased toward ‘active’ solutions. Here’s a teaser quote from the article:

Americans are terrified of passivity, no matter how costly or destructive action may be. “Better not to take a chance” is the rallying cry of mammogram enthusiasts, the beachgoers fleeing a hypothetical Shark Week and TSA administrators banning water bottles. If bad things are going to happen to us, we want to make sure there’s no preventative measure we didn’t take and no way misfortune could possibly be our fault.

–3–

And now onto things completely different. I’m going to use the remainder of my Quick Takes to highlight some strange stories I read this week.

In England, a new popular game starts something like this: you go into a public area, lie down flat on your stomach, a friend takes a photo of you… and that’s the whole game.

Reading the article at WebUrbanist where I found this didn’t really make the game make more sense, but it did include a number of similarly amusing pictures.

–4–

OK Go continues their tradition of bizarre/hilarious/complex music videos with a new video for “Last Leaf” that is filmed in stop motion using burns in toast to create animations:

–5–

In an interesting project, one hundred sixty thousand residents of Sydney, Austrailia were photographed to produce a composite image of its residents.

Head to the original article at io9 to see variations when the photos were composited by neighborhood.

–6–

The New York Times has a fun feature on how caricaturists approach their work. They all start with the goal of drawing Picasso and end up with some wild impressions.

–7–

Finally, in a wholly self-indulgent Quick Take…

The Julie Taymor adaptation of The Tempest will feature NECK RUFFS made out of EXPOSED ZIPPERS!!!