What if Google existed in the 1960’s? Those of us who remember punchcards and line printers will enjoy this.

(h/t to Eolake Stobblehouse.)

I’d like to direct your attention to two blog posts by Sarah Hoyt. In the first, Sarah takes about being “an odd”, a person who never quite fits in, or at least never quite feels they fit in. On the way she talks about why it might be that men like Karl Marx created ideologies that idealized particular groups while being nasty to individual members of those groups. It’s an interesting hypothesis.

In the second, she talks about the importance of manners, and shares some intriguing memories. Her remembrance of the women who tried to teach her manners is an illustration of what happens when you forget the parenting maxim, “Never attribute to willfulness what can be adequately explained by ignorance.”

What, you’ve never heard that maxim before? Not surprisingly, as I just made it up—it’s a riff on the old line, “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But it’s a maxim I’ve sometimes failed to heed, and as Sarah’s tale shows, that’s a Bad Thing.

Today was a good day around the blogosphere; so here are some links for you.

Ed Feser on the four cardinal virtues and their modern counterfeits.

Mike Flynn on Aquinas’ “Fourth Way” of proving the existence of God, and why Richard Dawkins doesn’t get it. Mike writes very clearly about complicated stuff.

Tom McDonald on St. Augustine’s medicine for doubt, which one might subtitle “Learn from the mistakes of others.” I need to spend more time with St. Augustine.

Via Instapundit, here’s an article about Lillian Gilbreth and the invention of the modern kitchen. If you’ve read Cheaper by the Dozen, the Gilbreth name will be familiar to you. (If you haven’t, go do so now.) Gilbreth was the wife of Frank Gilbreth; she and her husband were pioneers in the area of motion study and eliminating needless motions from different kinds of industrial work. After his death, she began to revise the kitchen along the same lines; the modern kitchen “work triangle” comes directly from her work.

According to the lore of Jane’s family, they’ve got a mild Gilbreth connection. In Cheaper by the Dozen, there’s a scene where Frank is left to manage the children (they had twelve) while Lillian is away for the day. When she returns, he says something like, “They were no trouble, except for that red-haired kid. Him I had to speak to several times.” And Lillian said, “But Frank, he’s not ours. He lives next door.” Jane’s Uncle Dudley always claimed to be the red-haired kid.

Gosh, I love Dr. Boli. Here he talks about how governments arrange to stay in power:

The creation of public works on a massive scale was one of the expedients that occurred to early governments. Usually some problem could be found whose solution required organizing people into enormous groups of laborers, thus justifying the existence of the government that kept them organized. For example, there was the problem of disposing of dead kings. This problem alone could consume most of the resources of even a fairly advanced civilization. Since kings were divine, they could not simply be tossed in the garbage when they died; and since they were useless, they could not be recycled either. It was necessary to send the departed king off to his apotheosis with sufficient dignity that the other gods would not spend the rest of eternity mocking him. With any luck, the king might pass his entire reign supervising the construction of his own tomb, and then die just as it was completed, leaving his successor to begin an entirely new tomb, and keeping the government in business indefinitely.