Rotundus.com

As Good as Dead

"Is there really such a thing as brain death?"

Yotam Ottolenghi Goes Inside the Gaza Kitchen, Part One

"The whole business of women cooking home food at home and men cooking the official street food in restaurants or other sorts of eateries really struck a chord. I think this is something that actually happens across the Middle East--men cooking in restaurants and women cooking at home. When I did a program about Jerusalem for the BBC a couple years ago, I went to visit a Palestinian home. The cousin of the family was working in a hotel, and the women of the house showed me a few Palestinian dishes, but they said, "Let's do it quickly before our cousin arrives, because then it's going to be all sorts of fancy food." They wanted to get everything out of the way because they knew he can't cook their food and they can't cook his food, and it's almost like there's actually no dialogue."

Bacon Mistakes To Avoid: How To Cook Bacon

Ways to make bacon better ...

The NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5

DSM-5 is the latest version of the American Psychological Association's manual of mental disorders. What did the director of the US National Institute of Mental Health have to say? "Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure." What else does the article describe it? "That consensus is now clearly missing. Whether it ever really existed remains in doubt. As one consultant for DSM-III conceded to the New Yorker magazine about the amount of horsetrading that drove that supposedly "evidenced-based" edition from 1980: 'There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, ambiguous.'"

From Here's to the Misfits:

You discover two things pretty quickly when scouting stories in this part of the world. First, how many Christians there are. This is not the Bible Belt by a long stretch—pastors, church planters, and ordinary Christians describe the kind of cosmopolitan secularity that's familiar to residents of London or New York. But in the past decade the San Francisco Bay Area has seen a resurgence of vital churches, such as Reality SF, the church Sonny and his wife, Christy, attend with 1,200 others. Ask about Christians at the top of major Bay Area companies, and you get a far longer list than you would in, say, New York City.
The second thing you discover is how few of these Christians want to be identified by name in a story for Christianity Today, all the more so the younger and the more recently successful they are. In no other place we've reported for This Is Our City, even the far more secular city of Portland, Oregon, did we encounter such diffidence about being publicly identified as a Christian.

FBI surrounds house of Saudi student following sightings of him with pressure cooker pot, only to find he was cooking rice

In related news another Saudi guy was arrested at an airport with a pressure cooker - seems like he may have lied about a few things, but this one also didn't seem to be rigged as a bomb.

Canada to lift moratorium on parent, grandparent immigration

It'd be difficult to justify not doing this. Unfortunately, it's also a reason why immigration doesn't really seem to be a solution to the population aging problem.

Young Adults With Autism Can Thrive In High-Tech Jobs

To quote neurologist Patricia Evans: "They may really flourish at engineering-type tasks or computer design, where their interaction with people is somewhat limited." Here by autism they seem to mean Aspergers Syndrome. This seems a somewhat more reasonable characterization of much engineering-type work than insisting that such employment involves as much face-to-face communications as any other job - i.e. what I typically see from organizations trying to get more women interested in the field (where I'd argue emphasizing flex-time would probably be a much better approach).

People with disabilities are more likely to get divorced

This might not be what you want to hear, but does indeed seem to be true. (I alternately find this blog interesting, providing evidence that I haven't found elsewhere, and at other times extremely annoying and more than a little biased).

Here's how retirement is defined by one guy who was able to do so at age 30 (emphasis mine):

According to me, retirement means you no longer have to work for money. You then proceed to do whatever you like, without regard for whether or not it earns you money.

I try to promote the idea that rewarding, meaningful work is an important part of retirement for many of us. If you don’t allow work as part of “retirement,” many people say, “I’m never going to retire, because I like working.” And they use that as an excuse to always spend everything they earn, which leaves them job-dependent and addicted to high consumption for life.

Seems like a secular version of John Piper's views on retirement.