Weekly Meanderings

One thing the Brits get is Ceremony!

(But what to say about those hats?)

This has been a hard month to keep our Weekly Meanderings going, and this week the hardest. We are down in Florida visiting Aksel (Lukas and Annika) and when we leave mid week it is harder to get much time on the internet. But here goes…

Bill Donahue has a cool, cool blog. Add it to your list.

Fr. Rob has a cool blog, too; this post on sleep is special. (And scroll down to see all his wildlife shots.)

A bi-lateral reading of Acts 15.

And another one on Acts 15, but this one by Chad Holtz, who is relentless in his progressivism about gays. He asks, “Should gays be circumcised?” What do you think of his analogy?

Throw Mountains found something innovative at a church.

Ted Gossard reviews Karen’s new book.

George Orwell’s writing rules:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Meanderings in the News

1. Noam Chomsky finally takes a break.

2. What women make compared to men: astounding. “In a country where women make up 47 percent of the workforce, women make up just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEO’s. In addition, women who worked full time earned an average of just 80 percent of what men earned in the same positions in 2008.”

3. Indeed, one of the most picturesque regions
in Tuscany and great wines and ristorantes.

4. Who’s in your Top Ten Dropouts?

5. Good article about the Q conference.

6. Facebook under fire. “Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.”

7. How about this one? “If you’ve been saying for years that long hours at work are killing you, forward this article to your boss–it might literally be true. According to a new study, people who work more than 10 hours a day are about 60 percent more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than people who clock just seven hours a day.”

8. Yikes, this piece by Zachary Pincus-Roth: “To measure our attitudes toward inequality, researchers conduct “ultimatum games,” a form of experimental economics frequently cited by journalists and pop psychologists to debunk the idea that we always act rationally. In an ultimatum game, the first test subject is given money that he must divide between himself and a second subject. The second subject then gets the opportunity to take the deal or to reject it–leaving both subjects with nothing. It turns out that people are inclined to reject the deal when the split is very unequal, even though they’d be better off taking what they can. The conclusion: People are willing to sacrifice their own income to punish those who don’t distribute incomes equally.”

9. On Kagan: “One reason the rumors won’t die, in Kagan’s case as in others before it, is that they further the agendas of those who cling to them.”

10. Brooks on UK politics: “But, occasionally, there’s a ray of hope. Occasionally, a country stumbles into a political arrangement that may help it avert a crisis. And that’s what’s happened in Britain.”

Meanderings in the News

Is this news, or sports, or personal? You tell me!