The US Census Bureau, due to issues related to the separation of church and state, does not ask questions related to faith or religion on the decennial census. Accordingly, there are few sources of comprehensive data on church membership and religious affiliation for the United States. Perhaps the leading organization to address this gap is the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000. The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource. The maps are in GIF format.

Map Gallery of Religion in the United States

This essay earns at least a silver star.

Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death figures in the answer.

What we see animals do an awful lot of is die, very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don't give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this animal's or not?

The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us — but unprovable.

Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we're trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.

While it bears certain resemblances to "Climbing the Redwoods" -- it is a reflective tale of one man's adventure in the outdoors -- the story told here comes "full circle" in a way that the New Yorker piece does not.

The Modern Hunter-Gatherer

In contrast to the use of agendas and restrictive structures, dialogue mapping is a facilitation technique that allows the intelligence and learning of the group to emerge naturally. Each participant can see how their comments contribute (or don't) to the coherence and order of the group's thinking. The first full-length book to bring dialogue mapping to a wider audience, Dialogue Mapping provides an exciting new conceptual framework that will change the way readers view projects and project management.

Dialogue Mapping : Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems

"Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that have not wit enough to be honest," wrote Benjamin Franklin. This volume explores ways in which the honest establish trust and enjoy good fortune, even without policing. The central mechanism at work is "reputation. To work, information about the individual's conduct must be observed, interpreted, recorded, stored, and transmitted. Different forms of "seals of approval" develop to communicate the quality of an individual's reputation to others.

The studies in this volume reveal how vast information systems like Dun & Bradstreet and TRW generate reputation and beneficial exchange, and how brand names, middlemen, and dealers give their own sort of seal of approval. One chapter describes the origins of Underwriters' Laboratories, an organization that sells its inspection services and mark of approval for product safety. Another argues that J. P. Morgan's investment banking service was in large part applying astute judgment in granting the Morgan seal of approval to firms in need of capital. Other, less formal, reputational mechanisms such as gossip, customary law, and written correspondence are also explored. Contexts range from trust among merchants in Medieval Europe, social control in small communities, and good conduct in a vast anonymous society such as our own.

Throughout these broad-ranging studies, the central theme of the volume emerges: in an open, competitive environment, honesty can recruit cleverness to assert itself and to drive out the dishonest.

A review by the Cato Institute is available.

Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct

Asia has too many boys. They can’t find wives, but they just might find extreme nationalism instead. It’s a dangerous imbalance for a region already on edge.

The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration

A new book on cunning hails the attribute as our greatest means of self-preservation, a starting point for human ingenuity and a very useful tool for selling plastic food containers.

Erudition, knavery & tupperware

Care for some advice inspired by Larry Summers?

Recognize the smartest person in the room rather than act like the smartest person in the room.

See also:

If you look around the table and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.

Case Study: A Shake-Up at Harvard

Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles. We analyzed a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations and attributes. We found that network evolution is dominated by a combination of effects arising from network topology itself and the organizational structure in which the network is embedded. In the absence of global perturbations, average network properties appear to approach an equilibrium state, whereas individual properties are unstable.

Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network

At root, we define ourselves with reference to our families and closest kin and work outward from there. But we can learn a great deal more of our own humanity by comparing ourselves with something closely related but still Other. And this, in the final analysis, is the lesson of both books. Tribal allegiance means nothing unless there are other tribes out there against which we can get our measure.

Tricky, Turbulent, Tribal

Muslims riot in protest, cartoons of The Great Prophet. We shake our heads in wonder, disbelief. This is not "radical Islam", many are run-of-the-mill Muslims. What are they thinking? Why so upset over sketches? This is no great puzzle should all those spinning and stuttering "analysis" perform a simple task. Read the Koran. Read it as Jacques Barzun suggests: with pencil in hand; underline and circle; with marginalia of surprise, sympathy, outrage, confusion. Annotate - make it your Koran - absorb and comprehend.

Jacques Barzun says, Annotate Your Koran