Apr
12
2012
Thirty Three Things (v. 3)
. The Power of Music
2. The Arts & Faith Top 25 Road Films
3. C. S. Lewis's Advice to Children on Three Kinds of Things Anyone Need Ever Do
In a letter to a girl named Sarah, dated April 3, 1949, Lewis writes:
Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we've got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don't like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one's school work or being nice to people. Things one has got to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing --- but of course I don't know what you like. Perhaps you'll write and tell me one day.
4. The Bookshelf as Memory Theater
What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects---the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives---is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters. . . .
So far, for all the wonders they offer, the digital alternatives to a bookshelf fail to serve its basic purposes. The space of memory and thinking must not be an essentially controlled, homogenous one. Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad are noxious ruses that must be creatively resisted---not simply because they are electronic but because they propose to commandeer our bookshelves. I will defend the spirit of mine tooth and nail.
5. Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark
Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname "Angel's Glow."
In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom - a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil - about it.
"So you know, he comes home and, 'Mom, you're working with a glowing bacteria. Could that have caused the glowing wounds?'" Martin told Science Netlinks. "And so, being a scientist, of course I said, 'Well, you can do an experiment to find out.'"
And that's just what Bill did.
6. What Does Your State Do Best?
7. Weird News of the Week: British child hunting for Easter eggs finds hand grenade
A child on an Easter egg hunt organized by a pre-school group in an English village stumbled upon an unexpected surprise -- a hand grenade.
The hunt was taking place in a field near the town of Holford, Somerset, on Saturday, This Is Somerset reported.
The area was cordoned off and the bomb disposal squad destroyed the grenade in a controlled explosion, police said. It also resulted in the closure of a highway for a few of hours.
(Via: Neatorama)
8. The Top 4 Drugs That Can Land You in the Emergency Room
9. The Dumb Ideas of Transhumanists
While transhumanists like to pretend that the real reason we don't live in the science fiction fantasy land they pine for is because there are sinister forces abroad in the land who worship disease or are terrified of the idea of living for centuries in sexy model bodies wallowing around in piles of treasure, the truth is that almost nobody on earth doesn't think it would be swell, caeteris paribus, to live in paradise but few people are idiotic enough to pretend that if they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into spontaneous existence, or, I must add, idiotic enough to join a Robot Cult and pretend that indulging in this kind of wish fulfillment fantasizing but then calling it Science! is somehow not idiotic anymore. Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, then they like to paint themselves as progressive activists for pretending this daydreaming constitutes some kind of efficacious force for making daydreams real, then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic. Not to put too fine [a point] on it, all of this is quite palpably stupid.
Of course, there is plenty of greed and intolerance and superstition and fear holding back progress and there is plenty of work to be done solving our shared problems through scientific research and democratic reform, but none of that has anything to do with the magical thinking the Robot Cultists are peddling.
10. Social networking 101 for parents
11. Study of the Week: Women Are Much Happier When Men Feel Their Pain
Men like to know when their wife or girlfriend is happy while women really want the man in their life to know when they are not. Cohen explains in a statement: "It could be that for women, seeing that their male partner is upset reflects some degree of the man's investment and emotional engagement in the relationship, even during difficult times."
12. Image of the Week: Breathtaking Photos of Gothic Cathedral Vaults
Everyone knows that the best part of any cathedral is the ceiling, a point driven home by Heavenly Vaults, a book that features photographer David Stephenson's beautiful shots of Europe's Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals and churches. Flattened out by Stephenson's worm's-eye view perspective, these kaleidoscopic images allow you to appreciate the pleasing symmetry created by the repeating geometric patterns.
13. Going to Prison? Hire a Prison Consultant.
Mr. Levine is a prison consultant. The business --- which entails advising people who are facing jail time on how to prepare for life on the inside, deal with medical issues, transfer to other prisons and even reduce their sentences --- has been around for decades. It enjoys a burst of publicity when a boldface name like Bernie Madoff or Michael Vick hires a consultant.
But the business is changing. Behind the scenes, the profession is attracting a new crop of ex-cons who believe they can put their experience to work, rather than have it burden them in a tough job market.
14. The Best of Military Photography
15. Television as an Opportunity for Christians
Here's a thought: try treating television characters as if. Treat them as if they really were people you actually knew. Treat them as if they were someone you saw every day at work. Treat them as if they were members of your family. Treat them as if they were human beings - because that's what they're modeled after. No matter what ulterior motives the writers might have, I will guarantee you that the number one intention of a good television writer is to make their characters out to be human beings first.
Television presents us with an opportunity: to experience discomfort, frustration and repulsion to a character and keep watching. We have an opportunity to experience knee-jerk irrational fear, but to grow to empathize with those characters, and then to embrace them, not because of what they do, but because of who they are. We get to stare, consider and internalize the motivations behind these characters and their choices to a degree that we simply can't do in real life. And because it's a regular television show, we also get the luxury of analyzing them, considering them carefully over a span of weeks and months. We can practice care for our fellow human being.
16. Animal of the Week: Henri The Existential Cat
17. Wal-Mart and Church Planting
As a general rule, I try and avoid making trips to Wal-Mart. If I have to go, however, besides the pure entertainment value in people watching there, I inevitably end up getting frustrated at the check-out counter due to combination of a long line and my short attention span. We have a Super Wal-Mart near our home, so when I go to check out, there are about sixteen lanes at the front of the store to make the process as efficient as possible.
The problem is, that for whatever reason, nearly every time I go there are only two of them open. Sure, there are those self-service lanes, but no one ever uses those because they know that they don't work. Instead, there usually are about twelve of us (somehow it always works out that everyone finishes at the same time) that end up waiting in those two lanes and we're all thinking the same thing. "Open up some lanes!"
All too often I feel that same frustration when I look at the state of church planting today.
(Via: Take Your Vitamin Z)
19. Kidnap Victim Saved by Twitter Followers
A South African man, whose name has not been published, was carjacked, robbed, and stuffed into the trunk of his car near Johannesburg on Sunday. The robbers, however, had overlooked his mobile phone, which he used to text his girlfriend, Lynn Peters. From there, Twitter took over.
Two armed men grabbed the driver and his Volkswagen Golf in the Honeydew area northwest of Johannesburg at about 9:00pm local time. Carjacking is a crime that is common in the country---over 10,000 such incidents occurred last year.
Peters immediately tweeted, "Be on the look for DSS041GP my boyufriend [sic] has just been hijacked and is in the boot please RT."
RT they did, including Peters' friend, Tanisha Reddy. From her it was picked up by well-known SA Twitterer, @pigspotter, who retweeted it to his 100,000-plus followers. @pigspotter specializes in identifying and sharing the location of police roadblocks. The police forces in South Africa have frequently been accused of graft and violence, so it does not seem to be criminals alone who make a point of avoiding roadblocks.
(Via: Neatorama)
20. What does a music conductor do?
21. The World's Quietest Place
They say silence is golden - but there's a room in the U.S that's so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time.
The longest that anyone has survived in the 'anechoic chamber' at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes.
It's 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world's quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating.
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. Why it is so difficult to have meaningful Muslim-Christian interreligious dialogue
Christians, especially in countries like the United States where the ideal of religious liberty has been an important element of Christian teaching for centuries, believe that the rise of religious tolerance in the Christian world is one of the signs that Christianity is true: believers are becoming more like Christ in his infinite compassion and profound respect and love of every human soul despite error and sin. Moreover they see the spread of tolerance and the repudiation of false ideals like "holy wars" (such as the Crusades, fought not only against Muslims but against heretics inside the Christian world) as signs that God is working in human history to bring us to a greater light and deeper understanding.
For many Muslims, however, the rise of tolerance in Christianity looks less like maturity and self confidence than like the senescence of a religion in decline. Christianity, these critics say, is losing its hold on the western mind. The rise in religious tolerance is the result of necessity --- the churches are weak, the believers indifferent, and so Christians no longer have the inner conviction to stand up for their faith. Just as Christian countries tolerate a range of vices and practices that in the past, when their faith was stronger, they opposed (homosexuality, abortion, sexual immorality of all kinds, blasphemy and obscenity), so now they also don't care very much about what religion people profess because their own faith doesn't mean all that much to the shrinking minority that still has one.
(Via: Rod Dreher)
24. How Do You Buy a Company for $1 Billion?
25. What The Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting feed their kids in one typical day
3 dozen eggs
5 lbs turkey bacon
20 biscuits
10 oranges
4 lbs. grapes
3 loaves whole wheat bread
4 lbs sloppy joe meat
3 lbs. green beans
3 lbs. potatoes
2 watermelons
2 family size bags lettuce
4 lbs. spaghetti noodles
3 loaves french bread
2 pans brownies
1 gallon vanilla ice cream
26. Five Titanic myths spread by films
27. Why Bruce Springsteen uses a teleprompter
Last E Street tour, ("Working On A Dream") we played 192 different songs on that tour alone. Dozens of those songs were from audience-request signs Bruce would collect and dump in front of the drum riser. He would then rifle through them, sailing them around him until he found a song to attempt --- much like the college kid rummaging through the pile of dirty laundry in search of one clean shirt.
Many songs were covers we had never performed live. EVER! He would show us the sign and then immediately "frisbee" it down the stairs to the teleprompter crew to surf the net and find the lyrics while we all talked up a quick arrangement at his microphone, knowing he'd be counting it off in 20 seconds.
Many of those audibles were Bruce songs unrehearsed or played in years or decades. With our collective musical memory, hand signals and teleprompter, it allows for those ambitious, ad lib moments and an inspired, musical recklessness I believe is unique to our shows. These points might have brought some additional perspective to your article. In our case, the teleprompter has a much more ambitious use and purpose than your article indicates.
(Via: Gene Veith)
28. How-To of the Week: Top 10 Essential DIY Skills That Aren't as Hard as You Think
29. Almost 20% of 3rd Graders Have Cell Phones
Kids in the third grade are, on average, eight years old. Nowadays, 20 percent of third-grade boys and 18 percent of third-grade girls already have a cell phone, according to a 2011 study of 20,766 Massachusetts elementary, middle, and high school students. By the time the kids reach fifth grade, 39% of the kids have cell phones, and phone saturation is nearly complete by middle school, when more than 83% of the students have a device.
30. The Strange Stories Behind Famous Writers' Pen Names
31. When you travel the world, bring along some oranges
I started bringing a bag of oranges with me for long bus rides, primarily because they quench thirst and smell delicious. I quickly learned that many Thai and Burmese busgoers sniff the peels to stave off nausea, and that kids love oranges. Really: kids LOVE oranges. So for those who want to bring something for the bus ride but rightfully worry about giving sweets to kids, oranges are your friend. You will win over the parents, make the kids happy, occupy your hours and eventually get fed by everyone on the bus. Trust me. You should always have a bag of oranges on hand, the smaller the orange the better.
(Via: Kottke)
32. Mother's Helper: A Shocking Thing I Learned After Giving Up My Eggs
33. Caine's Arcade