Skip to main content

What I Learned Today

Here are a few things I learned today:

1. Kaiser Permanente no longer uses triclosan, an antibacterial agent found in many soaps, because it is believed to have encouraged the development of resistant bacteria

2. The Industrial Revolution changed the way we trust one another. Before the shift from an economy that depended on individual artisans who often worked near home to one of large businesses, men knew their neighbors and could more easily trust one another. Not so after this shift. There came need for legal--rather than social--protections to prevent buyers and sellers from defrauding one another. Banking and insurance came into being, and regulations dictating how those institutions could operate provided the security once held through social accountability.

3. In the late 1600s, Jamaica's coastal Port Royal experienced an earthquake so severe that a section of the city sank into the sea. At least 2,000 people died via drowning or as buildings collapsed on them, and another 2,000 died thereafter from disease and injury. The sand on unpaved roads was said to have undulated in waves, and a section of the land that connected the city to the island collapsed into the sea so that Port Royal now became its own island. Before this event, the city was known as a popular venue for pirates, who both sold the goods they had gained through raids on Spanish towns and ships and who there squandered their wealth lavishly in taverns and elsewhere. After this earthquake, however, Port Royal became the site of many pirate executions.

4. Major League Baseball's all-star game and the home run derby take place just one day apart. This may be trivial, but I did not know this!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on Academic Purpose

If I could tell my students how to choose a path of employment, I would emphasize that no effective writer, historian, athlete, musician, or scientist became such without dedicating themselves to some goal. For that to have taken place, however, the respective expert must have had a firm idea about why they were doing what they were doing. In other words, they must have had purpose. Karl Marx spent countless hours in English libraries, I would share, to understand the functioning of society in order to improve it; while Isaac Newton often went without food to gain a firmer grasp of the science of motion, and eventually revised that science. They did this because they had a clear purpose, a real reason for doing what they were doing that would affect others around them. I would communicate that whatever passion students tap into, it should be embarked upon with that kind of clear goal in mind. While they may not know which passions they have yet, I would emphasize that school is a time ...
Post a Comment
Read more