There is an excellent guest blog on the equally impressive Freakonomics blog today. Joe Lindsey argues that simply making doping legal and an accepted part of sports would not work for a few reasons, among them: financial capacities, international export laws, and the dangers of using drugs not meant for human consumption.
He concludes:
Finally, none of that addresses the moral problems involved in legalizing doping. Doping in sports isn’t inherently wrong; it’s wrong by the value system with which we judge sports. Sports themselves are by their nature civilized: everyone agrees to follow a certain set of rules. If you don’t, that’s cheating. Legalizing doping doesn’t change those rules as much as remove them altogether, and then it’s no longer a sport, but merely entertainment. Right or wrong, we look to sports and to athletes for an inspiration that mere entertainment cannot provide – there is an implicit contract that the sweat and effort we see before us is real and natural. Do you want to see who’s the best athlete, or just who had the best access to pharmaceutical enhancement?
| Read more at Freakonomics, Picture courtesy of kwc |
If you’ve read my tale of the Ultimate Ramen Bowl and noticed my custom titanium chopsticks, you know why the following would pique my interest. A bronze winner of this year’s IDEA awards for best product design is a student from Shih Chien University in Taiwan named Tungchih Wu. His conceptual idea is a pair of metal chopsticks that would roll up and curl into a ring for maximum portability and transportability. Personally, I hate the chopsticks at restaurants. You either get the flat sided ones that are hard to perfectly split or you get the fancier round ones which are easy to snap apart but often have a very strong chemical smell. If it wasn’t so awkward, I’d bring my titanium chopsticks when I dined out. I really hope these folding ones make it to market!
| via Businessweek. Thanks for the tip Mike! |
Published on
July 26, 2007 in
Movies.
Cashback – 4.5 of 5 stars
I can’t say when it started but I know it’s been at least a few years. Maybe I should have started to notice the trend with The Good Girl in in 2002, but it wasn’t until this year when I saw Employee of the Month and 10 Items Or Less did I notice a strange phenonemon in films whose plots take place in a supermarket. Perhaps it has to do with some study on the little world, the microcosm, of the supermarket that is so interesting for audiences to watch and compelling enough for filmmakers to document.
The other night I saw Cashback, a film which was built on top (around actually) a 10 minute award-winning short with the same name. It’s a British film that starts off with a college student named Ben who has a rather nasty breakup with his girlfriend. Somehow this triggers insufferable insomnia and rather than continue spending his times reading and re-reading his favorite novels and riding the subways, he decides take a job during the night shift at the local supermarket. There, as you’d expect, he meets a cast of very unusual characters who deal with the dark and often uneventful late night hours in their own special ways.
Attending art academy, Ben’s lifelong goal is to become a famous painter. This suits him quite well because from an early age he has grown to appreciate the female form. Luckily for Ben, he has a special ability which helps him be providing subjects for long sessions of sketching naked girls. The film is half acted (like a normal film) and half narrated by Ben. He has a very comfortable rhythm to his voice and just a slight British accent to make it appealing but not annoyingly difficult to understand (Irish films anyone?). At it’s root, this movie is a love story and while there is nudity (you have to believe me, it’s tasteful), we get to see Ben’s journey from heartache and confusion to (hopefully) happiness.
Published on
July 22, 2007 in
Friends.
IMG_8301, originally uploaded by sygyzy.
IMG_8094, originally uploaded by sygyzy.
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