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Weekly Meanderings

Weekly Meanderings

Last updated on: November 5, 2011 at 1:06 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 2011-11-04T05:40:28-05:00 Scot McKnight

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

To adapt an old song, If you can’t play where you want, play where you are!

Jim Wallis and Al Mohler discussed the gospel at Trinity last week and here’s the report at Sojo. And this report, by Matthew Lee Anderson, proves that two different people can attend the same event and come away with similar reports.

Nine words the media/food industry have destroyed of accuracy.

Derek discusses learning to read the Bible realistically.

The Occupy movement is feasting on inequality, and the Big City protests appear to be one kind of inequality. David Brooks calls the Big City stuff “Blue Inequality” [“In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth.”] while he calls a more pervasive inequality, that between the college educated and those who have not graduated from college, Red Inequality [“It’s between those with a college degree and those without.”]. Worth your read.

I’m asked at times where I get these links: I find them, Kris finds some and sends them to me, my kids find stuff, and others send me items considered worthy. I get enough that I can’t possibly use all of it, and of late I think my links have been a bit too numerous, but… here you do… grab a cup of coffee and your computer and read a bit.

Meanderings in the News

On painting your roof white as an eco-act, by Ben Schiller: “Painting roofs white has been–like changing lightbulbs–one of the well-cited easy ways out of climate change. By reflecting more light and heat back to the atmosphere, a white roof should act like a natural anti-warming device, while also reducing your energy costs by keeping your house cool in the summer. Turns out, painting your roof white would be simply a massive waste of white paint.”

Occupy Wall Street: Lower tier New Class vs. upper tier New Class?

Germany as a country of immigrants: “Although by the mid-1990s 2 million people of Turkish origin lived in Germany, the question of whether this was a country of immigration was still a hot topic of discussion. Klaus Bade, chairman of the Advisory Council of the Foundations for Integration and Migration, believes it took until the end of 1990s for the issue of integration to make it onto the political agenda. Bade argues that the center-left coalition of Social Democrats and Greens was the first government to make a serious effort at shaping integration policy in the country. The current government, under Chancellor Angela Merkel, continued down this path, according to Bade. But at the same time, more restrictions were placed on foreigners. Dual citizenship was no longer tolerated and those wanting to move to Germany were expected to learn the language. Bringing family members to the country and gaining German citizenship through naturalization was made more difficult. Since then, though, dialogue with immigrants has taken on a more prominent role. Integration summits under Merkel are an example of such efforts. Migration and integration have become topics of sometimes heated debate.”

Lots of folks are observing the demise of writing and intelligence, and other things too, because of social media. but Mark Liberman did some numbers on one recent accusation that Twitter makes us use shorter words. Not so, he finds: “Since I’m the old-fashioned sort of person who clings to the belief that words, whatever their length, ought to mean something, I thought I’d check whether it’s really true that “words are getting shortened” by the constraints of the Twitterverse. So I grabbed the text of Hamlet, the text of a number of P.G. Wodehouse stories(Leave it to Jeeves, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg, Absent Treatment, Helping Freddie, Rallying Round Old George, Doing Clarence a Bit of Good, and The Aunt and the Sluggard), and the 100 most recent tweets from theDaily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student newspaper. I figured that the DPought to count as a good representative of the Kids Today who are responsible for the alleged word-shortening trend. I wrote a little program to adjust these texts in appropriate ways (removing the character attributions and stage directions from Hamlet, removing the Gutenberg boilerplate from P.G. Wodehouse, removing the @’s and #’s and URLs from the DPtweets, etc.), and then to count the letters in each word. The result? The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP‘s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters.”

Scientific Blogging about the Permian Extinction: “252 million years ago there was a watershed moment in the history of life on Earth – namely that there was almost no life left on Earth. As much as 90 percent of ocean organisms were extinguished, ushering in a new order of marine species, some of which we still see today and land dwellers also sustained major losses.”

David Cameron is among others who are threatening to block financial aid to poor countries if they don’t change anti-homosexuality laws: “David Cameron has threatened to withhold UK aid from governments that do not reform legislation banning homosexuality. The UK prime minister said he raised the issue with some of the states involved at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, Australia. Human rights reform in the Commonwealth was one issue that leaders failed to reach agreement on at the summit.Mr Cameron says those receiving UK aid should “adhere to proper human rights”. From Uganda, Charles Odongpho: “Reacting to the news, Uganda Radio Network journalist, Charles Odongpho, said he was puzzled by the move.”I welcome any move to pressure our government to be respectful of democratic values and human rights but speaking as a Ugandan I think we have much more important issues to deal with than the rights of homosexuals. “This is your money and you know where you want to put it but we face very serious issues of corruption, poverty, education and hunger. These are the most critical issues for us, not homosexual rights.”

Seth Freedman tells it like it is, and yet … : “For all the passion of the Vatican’s call to arms against international capitalism, those at the helm of big business will barely bat an eyelid at the brickbats hurled their way. That the Catholic church demands a more ethical approach to institutional investing is neither here nor there in the grander scheme of the money markets, the Vatican’s influence having centuries ago waned into insignificance in the world of high finance.”

If I were in England: “Unlocking the secret private lives and public personae of royals throughout the Middle Ages, around 150 illustrated manuscripts, many of them on display for the first time, will be shown for the Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination exhibition. The Royal Collection’s 2,000 manuscripts were donated to the nation by George II in 1757, having been built up since the 9th century. Delicate and priceless, they are usually stored in the highest security room at the British Library. Considered among the finest examples of royal decorative and figurative painting surviving from the era, many of the colours are still as vibrant as when they were first painted.”

David Eagleman on the brain: “Only a tiny fraction of the brain is dedicated to conscious behavior. The rest works feverishly behind the scenes regulating everything from breathing to mate selection. In fact, neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine argues that the unconscious workings of the brain are so crucial to everyday functioning that their influence often trumps conscious thought. To prove it, he explores little-known historical episodes, the latest psychological research, and enduring medical mysteries, revealing the bizarre and often inexplicable mechanisms underlying daily life. Eagleman’s theory is epitomized by the deathbed confession of the 19th-century mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who developed fundamental equations unifying electricity and magnetism. Maxwell declared that “something within him” had made the discoveries; he actually had no idea how he’d achieved his great insights. It is easy to take credit after an idea strikes you, but in fact, neurons in your brain secretly perform an enormous amount of work before inspiration hits. The brain, Eagleman argues, runs its show incognito. Or, as Pink Floyd put it, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

Oh my, Dino Grandoni: “The walls of the Capital building do a pretty good job of sheltering members of Congress, who on average have a net worth of $3.8 million, from the stormy economy outside. The collective wealth of members of both houses of Congress rose 23.6 percent between 2008 and 2010, according to an analysis conducted by Roll Call. The newspaper calculated “minimum net worth” of each congressman and senator based on financial disclosure forms each fills out. It found that Congress’s collective wealth jumped from an estimated minimum of $1.65 billion in 2008 to $2.04 billion in 2010. “Minimum net worth,” as the name suggests, doesn’t included every source of wealth for members of Congress (such as home values), meaning it’s a big underestimation.”

Meanderings in Sports

Jay Cutler, the Bears QB, did not help himself in those first two years but there is a new kind of Jay Cutler now.

Alarm: MRI’s, so say specialists, are overused: “Dr. James Andrews, a widely known sports medicine orthopedist in Gulf Breeze, Fla., wanted to test his suspicion that M.R.I.’s, the scans given to almost every injured athlete or casual exerciser, might be a bit misleading. So he scanned the shoulders of 31 perfectly healthy professional baseball pitchers. The pitchers were not injured and had no pain. But the M.R.I.’s found abnormal shoulder cartilage in 90 percent of them and abnormal rotator cuff tendons in 87 percent. “If you want an excuse to operate on a pitcher’s throwing shoulder, just get an M.R.I.,” Dr. Andrews says. He and other eminent sports medicine specialists are taking a stand against what they see as the vast overuse of magnetic resonance imaging in their specialty.”

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