All Things Bubba

Well, there goes my pick in the office Super Bowl pool. One of them, anyway. I have two tickets, one with Dallas going all the way, one with Indy going all the way. Guess I can rip up the Indy one. Hopefully (at least for my football pool chances), we'll have a Manning-free playoffs by later tonight. Though everyone's picking the Cowboys to win, which makes me kind of nervous.

I was reading the (virtual) NY Times this morning, and came across this article. It was the illustration that caught my eye:


Very cute. Though the article is actually not about sports at all. It's about the biological underpinnings of human morality. Fascinating stuff. Turns out, morality has little basis in rationality. It's hard-wired in the human brain; our moral reactions are visceral. Basically, there are five elements of morality: harm, fairness, community/loyalty, authority and purity. When people disagree about moral issues, it's because they rank those elements differently. So, for example, people who rank respect for authority over not causing harm may well decide that naming a teddy bear "Mohammed" is a death-penalty offense.

And I guess that Yankee fan in the picture better hope that the Red Sox fans that surround him value not causing harm over loyalty to the group. ;-)