Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Why Design Matters

Microsoft redesigns the iPod package. Hey, it’s funny, so it must be true, right? (Actually in this case that’s correct.) Via John Gruber.

Well Thank Christ for That

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Via Pharyngula. I have to say that having “None of the Above” as the second option out of four on Q7 caused me some concern.

Nearly Doing the Right Thing

Raw material for a short paper in moral philosophy, to be written by someone who is actually a moral philosopher.

Case 1. A woman loses her expensive camera while on holiday in Hawaii. Some time later:
I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that “a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your […]

Giant Book of the Month Club

The phenomenon of Biblically Correct Tours is much in the news recently. (P.Z. Myers has a summary). Essentially, a creationist named Rusty Carter leads people on tours around museums chatting away about how dinosaurs and people lived together, how the world was created in seven days, and how the earth is only six thousand […]

How a Stupid Bill becomes a Law

A bill presently working its way through the state legislature here in Arizona proposes that universities and colleges be required to “provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive,” that is, where “a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the […]

An Unlikely Peon

Observed in the wild, from a book I was reading this morning:

Adam Smith … opens The Wealth of Nations with an unlikely peon to a pin factory.

Sounds like the first few scenes in a Dickensian novel—the unlikely peon (because, as will be revealed later, he is really the heir to a large fortune) is sent […]