Rotundus.com

Forbes: String Theory Skeptic

A great description of science: "Lay people tend to regard science, especially physics, as a lofty temple inhabited by serene, Spock-like wise men. Working scientists, though, will tell you it's more like the stock market, full of fads and fashions, booms and busts."

If [Intellectual Property] Is Property, Where Is the Property Tax?

An interesting way to phrase the gist of this LA Times article

Quality time suffers in tech-savvy families

"Technology helps Canadian families juggle busy schedules and stay in touch, but it's also leaving them time-crunched, over-stimulated and isolated even while under the same roof, according to a new report from the Vanier Institute of the Family."

Lutherans Offer Warm Welcome to Gay Pastors

The article seems to offer a great description of what happens when you separate "Christianity" from any concrete meaning. To quote one of the leaders putting on this event: "it's an invitation to join us in the pews every single Sunday, where not a single one of these pastors will care if you agree with us or if you think our families are appropriate. We’ll serve you communion, we’ll pray with you and we’ll visit you in the hospital."

A while back I read Dan Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, suggesting that typical opinions about what drives people to achieve are wrong. Essentially he argues that the use of carrots and sticks to attempt to drive people to complete tasks are less effective than intrinsic motivation - finding the achievement gained from completing the work itself to be sufficient to drive a person forward. The clip above is a brief, 11-minute summary of the book.

As mentioned, I'll probably be trying to phase out this style of posts, but I've got a bit of a backlog of already collected info beforehand.

Arrested for bibles, North Korean dies in prison

A bit about missionaries operating in and around North Korea. "Like most North Koreans, Son Jong Nam knew next to nothing about Christianity when he fled to neighboring China in 1998. Eleven years later, he died back in North Korea in prison, reportedly tortured to death for trying to spread the Gospel in his native land"

Pascal on Our Addiction to Distraction

A little elaboration on that fairly well-known saying from Pascal: "I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

Economists who did their homework (800 years of it)

The intro: "The advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th-century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. "How different the position of the investor today!" the ad enthuses. It ran in The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 14, 1929. A month later, the stock market crashed. "Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors," says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. "They’re wrong. And we can prove it."

Study: Radio sports can distract drivers

"... listening to sports on the radio while driving can be as dangerous as drunken driving" - The sample size of the study seems a bit too small to draw any particularly solid conclusions, but it's still an interesting question to ponder.

One of the things that I've been giving some fairly serious thought to lately is what should become of this site, and what sort of changes it might be wise to make. I'm not really sure how many even read this site these days - primarily I've been trying to maintain it as a place for me to think aloud rather than concentrating on trying hard to attract an audience. I'm pretty sure that the site won't disappear - in fact I'm even thinking of upgrading to more flexible hosting to give me more flexibility in some of the non-blog parts of the site that I make a lot of use of. However, what I've been wondering is whether I should be trying to change the structure and style of posts on here.

I came across a post earlier today, arguing that for Christians...

... it might be helpful if we limit the distance between us and the world in a lot of other ways. We don’t have to flaunt our lack of a TV and be weird and preachy about grinding your own grain. That only serves to put unnecessary distance between us and the people we’re trying to reach. Instead, we should try to engage the world around us, know what our neighbors care about, and try to inhabit the same universe they do.

It's pretty hard to be in a higher-tech environment that I'm in now - doing a Ph.D. in Computer Science - but I wonder if the above criticism is misguided, at least in my circumstances. I think that a higher percentage of non-Christians that I know are TV-less than Christians. It's been reported that education and TV viewing are inversely correlated, which might do a lot to explain that.

I cancelled my cable subscription last summer, and haven't regretted it all that much, and now I'm debating how much internet access at home it's worthwhile having. What I've been speculating about lately - a la Nicholas Carr and his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? - is the effect of constant access on my thinking habits. Essentially, it seems to be becoming more difficult to think in a non-fragmented fashion - i.e. I seem to be becoming more scatter-brained as time wears on. Strangely enough the largest source of support for this argument that I've seen seems to be those in the high-tech sector, perhaps because they've been exposed to this more often and likely for longer than their counterparts and may thus have become more aware of the downsides of this style of communication.

Basically I'm thinking that I may try to minimize the number of random link posts - although I may have quite a few to get through prior to having purged the assortment of links that I've got kicking around. A corollary of this might be a decreased frequency of posts on this site at some point in the future. It's a lot easier to make a few brief comments about a number of links than to put together longer, more coherent thoughts.