Prog Rock. One of my favorites from the past couple weeks of Prom Night Fist Fight.

"The deal is simple. Sit in front of the camera, and shake your head from side to side with a loose face. Take the picture when your head is at the far side of either side, and voila: You've been Ghost Punched." See also shake face.

A few weeks ago, China's anti-satellite missile test generated at least 517 pieces of debris big enough to be tracked. Those images are wild. We are being orbited by enormous amounts of our own crap. Tragedy of the commons, I guess.

Speaking of empathetic apes, here's the Wikipedia entry for Binti Jua, the ape who rescued the little boy who fell 20 feet into the ape cage.

An interview with anthropologist Barbara King.

I think we have evolved to believe in transcendent realities. What we're about as a group of humans on this earth is believing that there's something more than us. It takes many different forms. I don't know that I'd focus on a single transcendent reality. I would say that because we're made to relate, we think and feel that we're in relationship with something bigger.

King is exploring the evolutionary roots of religion by studying our sister species like apes and bonobos and chimps. Her research is looking into the "embodied" aspects of religion, rather than doctrine, per se. She's all about this sense of spiritual awe, of empathy, and of self-awareness as a species—"because we're made to relate, we think and feel that we're in relationship with something bigger." [via rebecca blood]

Fans of the Hipster PDA will hail the introduction of the Hipster Shuffle. I love the Apple Dancing. [via 43 Folders]

iRed Lite lets you control all kinds of software on your Mac with the Apple Remote, not only Front Row.

The Breakthrough Ideas for 2007, freshly selected by the Harvard Business Review.

I saw this one coming! Rebecca Blood adds to her awesome Bloggers on Blogging series with an interview with security expert Bruce Schneier.

I don't know how Chuck Klosterman can get away with it. In his recent book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, he presents some of the most scattered, whimsical, subjective, and infuriatingly delightful musings on pop culture. The collected essays cover the gamut, jumping from the Lakers/Celtics rivalry, Pamela Anderson, the life of a Van Halen tribute band, and one on the classic afternoon television show of my generation, Saved by the Bell, and more. So we've got 200 pages of chatty memoir and Gen X riffing. It's such a good balance of over-the-top opinion and declaration (e.g. "The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued" or, "Clearly, video technology cages imagination") that doesn't so much convince but overwhelms with torrential amusement. Despite the thorough, detailed pop culture analyses, what Klosterman really does well is the personal side of things. Maybe that's my human-ness speaking, but his writing about his own experiences is when his stories really pick up, whether it's being fired from coaching Little League or discovering a bit of Life's Meaning from playing the Sims videogame. If only there were more of it.

Ah, nothing like a comforting spray of clam chowder. [via blankenship]

Ellen Lupton and her students wrote a little handbook all about indie publishing.

Leah Peterson is asking you to mail her things to put in her next painting. Yes, you. Look at her other paintings.

The BBC has a four-part podcast series on our increasingly noisy world.

A guy won a trip to Space... and then had to cancel because the IRS wants $25,000 in taxes for the winnings. [via mises]

Michael Pollan has an extensive article on what to eat and why. [via justin blanton]

Edward Stringham has compiled a new anthology, Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice. Folks, that's 700 pages of radical libertarian goodness:

Anarchy and the Law assembles for the first time in one volume the most important classic and contemporary studies exploring and debating non-state legal and political systems, especially involving the tradition of natural law and private contracts.

Should markets and contracts provide law, and can the rule of law itself be understood as a private institution? Are the state and its police powers benign societal forces, or are they a system of conquest, authoritarianism, occupation, and exploitation?

From the early works of Gustave de Molinari, Edmund Burke, Voltairine de Cleyre, Benjamin Tucker, David Lipscomb, and Lysander Spooner to the contemporary thinking of Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Anthony De Jasay and Bruce Benson, Anarchy and the Law features the key studies exploring and debating the efficacy of individual choice and markets versus the shortfalls of coercive government power and bureaucracy. In so doing, the book also features debates involving Roderick Long’s argument against a nationalized military and Robert Nozick’s critique of stateless legal systems, as well as the work of such scholars as Nobel Laureate economist Douglass North, Tyler Cowen, Robert Ellickson, Randall Holcombe, Randy Barnett, Barry Weingast, Terry Anderson, Andrew Rutten, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, and others.

Whereas liberals and conservatives argue in favor of political constraints, Anarchy and the Law examines whether to check against abuse, government power must be replaced by a social order of self-government based on contracts.

Atheism seems to have caught a little buzz in recent years, I'm not sure how. There was that unfortunate survey, and books by Dawkins and others made a little splash, and there's the cover story on a recent issue of Wired magazine, in particular. Sam Harris' extended essay, Letter to a Christian Nation, joins the crowd with a missive to "demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms." Harris has some really great moments in this book, and it's a pretty compelling read. He starts with a heavy does of scripture, analyzing the Christian moral paradigm, delighting in the Bible's weaknesses and cherry-picking the incriminating and contradictory parts. I'm certainly (absolutely) not a Bible scholar, but I think he's a bit too reliant on quoting from the Old Testament, where Big Bad God and the harshness and shortcomings of ancient civilizational mores are far too easy to pick on. You have to keep in mind that he's targeting the literalists more so than religious liberals and moderates. But there's also some interesting sociological examination of religion: "Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/ out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments."

I think he's effective when he's talking about the practical, day-to-day implications of religion more so than his examination of the particulars of doctrine. He has a nice section on the ethics of life, discussing abortion, cloning, and biomedical research. And of course, there's an obligatory passage on evolution and intelligent design. Here's one line that really got me: "The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it's intellectual honesty."

The last section is a gloomy look to mankind's future on an increasingly religious, conflict-ridden planet.

It is easy, of course, for the representatives of the major religions to occasionally meet and agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the common thread that unites all the world's faiths. But there is no escaping the fact that a person's religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like "compassion."

Practically, is there really room for tolerance? He wraps up with a big, brilliant question, "How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision?" The stakes are indeed very high.

The Mises Institute published a video called Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Must see.

Oooh. I really like this tie. And this one.