Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
Have you ever danced to make it rain? Wore garlic around your neck to stave off vampires? Sacrificed a virgin to persuade the sun to come up? I’d venture that you never did any such thing. But if you’re anything like me, when you’re a pedestrian in a city, you do press the crosswalk button to make the light turn green, which it eventually does. Every time that happens, you and I and almost everyone else are being conditioned, Pavlov’s-dog-style, to do it again the next time we cross the street. Now consider this: there’s a high likelihood — probably something like 8 or 9 out of 10 — that the button either never worked to begin with or has been disabled in recent years thanks to fully-automated traffic control systems taking over. Yet we press on (ha). The same is true for the “close the doors” button on today’s elevators. In most cases, these buttons do absolutely nothing but give us an illusion of control. As the doors eventually always do close, our brains necessarily receive a happy jolt of confirmation that our action was successful. That’s all the reward we need to keep pressing those almost certainly non-functional buttons in the future. Read more
This great: A suicide bomber disguised in a school uniform detonated explosives at a high school assembly in the northeastern Nigerian city of Potiskum on Monday, killing at least 48 students, according to survivors and a morgue attendant. The victims were as young as eleven. Soldiers rushed to the scene, grisly with body parts, in the capital of Yobe state, but they were chased away by a crowd throwing stones and shouting that they are angry at the military’s inability to halt a 5-year-old Islamic insurgency that has killed thousands and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes. Read more
The New York Times Magazine profiled 86-year-old super-skeptic James Randi yesterday. It’s a good read. Here are a dozen things I learned. 1. Randi started his career working Toronto nightclubs as Randall Zwinge (his real name), an entertainer who could predict the future. Soon, he began planning a very neat if somewhat morbid trick. Each night before he went to bed, he wrote the date on the back of a business card along with the words “I, Randall Zwinge, will die today.” Then he signed it and placed it in his wallet. That way, if he were knocked down in the street or killed by a freak accident, whoever went through his effects would discover the most shocking prophecy he ever made. Zwinge kept at it for years. Each night, he tore up one card and wrote out a new one for the next day. But nothing fatal befell him; in the end, having wasted hundreds of business cards, he gave up in frustration. “I never got lucky,” he told me. Read more
