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Weekly Meanderings, 19 September 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 19 September 2015

Last updated on: September 19, 2015 at 6:45 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 19 September 2015 2015-09-19T06:45:35-05:00 Scot McKnight

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It’s been a good week here in our village and this next week our school year at Northern gets underway officially — faculty retreat and then classes begin! I’m looking forward to meeting our new students (so many good and gifted students at Northern) and to teaching a course on Jesus and another on Paul.

Stephen Olemacher:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Owe the tax man $100 million or more? Your check is no good at the IRS.

Starting next year, the IRS says it will reject all checks for more than $99,999,999. That’s because check-processing equipment at the nation’s Federal Reserve banks can’t handle checks that big.

Checks of $100 million or more have to be processed by hand, increasing the risk of theft, fraud and errors, according to a pair of memos from the IRS and the Treasury Department.

As a result, the richest among us will have to wire their tax payments electronically. Or write multiple checks for less than $100 million apiece.

Conservatives have been complaining for years that President Barack Obama is trying to stick it to the rich, regularly proposing to raise their taxes. Now, they say, the Obama administration is making it harder for the super-rich to pay those taxes.

“If Obama really gets mean, he’s going to make them bring in pennies or nickels,” said anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Apparently, people sending huge checks to the federal government is a growing problem.

A stunning number: Momma, don’t let your boys grow up to be football players! Jason M. Breslow:

A total of 87 out of 91 former NFL players have tested positive for the brain disease at the center of the debate over concussions in football, according to new figures from the nation’s largest brain bank focused on the study of traumatic head injury.

Researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University have now identified the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in 96 percent of NFL players that they’ve examined and in 79 percent of all football players. The disease is widely believed to stem from repetitive trauma to the head, and can lead to conditions such as memory loss, depression and dementia.

In total, the lab has found CTE in the brain tissue in 131 out of 165 individuals who, before their deaths, played football either professionally, semi-professionally, in college or in high school.

Forty percent of those who tested positive were the offensive and defensive linemen who come into contact with one another on every play of a game, according to numbers shared by the brain bank with FRONTLINE. That finding supports past research suggesting that it’s the repeat, more minor head trauma that occurs regularly in football that may pose the greatest risk to players, as opposed to just the sometimes violent collisions that cause concussions.

A childhood friend.

David Bentley Hart, it must be noted is Orthodox, takes on Augustine:

But let me illustrate. Take, for example, Augustine’s magisterial reading of the Letter to the Romans, as unfolded in reams of his writings, and ever thereafter by his theological heirs: perhaps the most sublime “strong misreading” in the history of Christian thought, and one that comprises specimens of all four classes of misprision. Of the first, for instance: the notoriously misleading Latin rendering of Romans 5:12 that deceived Augustine into imagining Paul believed all human beings to have, in some mysterious manner, sinned “in” Adam, which obliged Augustine to think of original sin—bondage to death, mental and moral debility, estrangement from God—ever more insistently in terms of an inherited guilt (a concept as logically coherent as that of a square circle), and which prompted him to assert with such sinewy vigor the justly eternal torment of babes who died unbaptized. And of the second: the way, for instance, Augustine’s misunderstanding of Paul’s theology of election was abetted by the simple contingency of a verb as weak as the Greek proorizein(“sketching out beforehand,” “planning,” etc.) being rendered as praedestinare—etymologically defensible, but connotatively impossible. And of the third: Augustine’s frequent failure to appreciate the degree to which, for Paul, the “works” (erga, opera) he contradistinguishes from faith are works of the Mosaic law, “observances” (circumcision, kosher regulations, and so on). And of the fourth—well, the evidences abound: Augustine’s attempt to reverse the first two terms in the order of election laid out in Romans 8:29–30 (“Whom he foreknew he also marked out beforehand”); or his eagerness, when citing Romans 5:18, to quote the protasis (“Just as one man’s offence led to condemnation for all men”), but his reluctance to quote the (strictly isomorphic) apodosis (“so also one man’s righteousness led to justification unto life for all men”); or, of course, his entire reading of Romans 9–11 . . .

Sarah Kaplan and the sea otter using an inhaler:

One-year-old Mishka has spent nearly all her life in the water. But fires burning miles away are threatening her health.

The young sea otter, a resident of the Seattle Aquarium, was diagnosed with asthma after inhaling smoke from this summer’s vicious wildfires, according to the aquarium.

Like many people in Washington State and across the west, she has been having trouble breathing the air that’s suddenly full of dust and soot. So, like people, she’ll need to learn to use an inhaler.

Time for some old-fashioned reading, by Roberto Ferdman:

There’s an interesting thing happening in countries where kids are the most comfortable with computers: they aren’t reading all that well. In fact, the more children use computers at school, the more their reading abilities seem to suffer….

“Overall, the use of computers does not seem to confer a specific advantage in online reading,” the report says. “Even specific online reading skills do not benefit from high levels of computer use at school.”

Nor does it seem to help print reading. The best readers, as it happens, tend to be those who use computers slightly less than average. From there upwards—in terms of how often kids browse, email, chat, and learn on computers—computer use only seems to hurt reading skills (notice how the line dips in the chart above for both digital and print reading).

The negative relationship is particularly strong between the frequency with which students use computers to chat online and their reading abilities. But it’s also fairly pronounced for those who use computers to practice and drill. And all online activities—including browsing or emailing at school—seem to hurt students’ reading once they become more than once or twice weekly habits.

Time for some forest bathing, with Brigid Schulte:

SEATTLE – Before they were to find a “sit spot” in the forest, resisting the urge to check their phones and just pay attention to the nature around them, before they played games under soaring western red cedars like “blindfolded ninja” to sharpen their senses, a group of stressed-out, high-tech workers who spend most of their days inside, tethered to their devices, faced the toughest challenge of the day.

Turning those devices off.

The group of about a dozen had signed up for the first-ever “Unplug and Recharge in Nature” day organized by the Wilderness Awareness School on 40 acres of forested land just outside the high-tech corridor that is home to Microsoft, Amazon.com and a host of other high-tech companies. They’d come to the woods, many said, because after spending so much of their time in the addictive and information-loaded virtual world, they felt a need to reconnect with the real one.

One worker said he is barraged by 10,000 e-mails a day. Another said he routinely spends as much as 18 hours straight online. They’ve seen technology both make their lives easier and more difficult, they said, enabling them to connect and driving a wedge between them and those they love.

The group is part of a small but growing movement seeking to counter the noise, distraction and pull of the virtual world by learning to sit still and pay attention in the natural one. It’s called “forest bathing.”

A Human Library, McKinley Corbley — that is, check out a real human to talk to for 30 minutes:

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover… especially if they can talk.

The Human Library based out of Denmark lets people check out “interactive books” for half an hour–but the words are coming from humans that volunteer to tell their tales.

Readers peruse the library catalog and select an experience to hear about–Child Of The Holocaust Survivors, The Gypsy Tale, Iraq War Veteran, and Orphanage Boy, are examples of story titles offered.

With library card in hand, readers are led to a discussion area to meet their book and hear the tale, cover to cover.

My, this is serious, by John Bonifield:

Atlanta (CNN)Six-year-old Nhaijah Russell swallowed three or four squirts of seemingly innocuous liquid hand sanitizer at school. It tasted good, she said, like strawberry.

It also contained enough alcohol to make her dangerously drunk. She arrived at the emergency room slurring her words and unable to walk.

Since 2010, poison control center hotlines across the United States have seen a nearly 400% increase in calls related to children younger than 12 ingesting hand sanitizer, according to new analysis by the Georgia Poison Center.

“Kids are getting into these products more frequently, and unfortunately, there’s a percentage of them going to the emergency room,” said Dr. Gaylord Lopez, the center’s director.

The amount of alcohol in hand sanitizer ranges from 45% to 95%. Ingesting even small amounts — as little as two or three squirts in some cases — can cause alcohol poisoning. By comparison, wine and beer contain about 12% and 5% alcohol, Lopez said.

What some thieves will do to steal a diamond, and what can happen, by Fred Barbash:

This will not go down in history as one of your big jewel heists. There were no secret tunnels dug into safes or masked men with guns and carefully planned getaways. Maybe, actually, it’s as much a medical story. Laxatives, these days, just aren’t what they used to be.

It all began with very smiley couple sampling the wares of one of the diamond merchants at the 56th Bangkok Gems and Jewelry Fair, according to the Bangkok Post….

One of the saleswomen — they must be well-trained — knows right away that something is wrong. The stone the couple returned is a fake. Within seconds, she goes running after them. By then, according to the Bangkok Post, the couple had taken off in a taxi….

On Friday, however, the Post reported, “Ms. Yang was forced to confess to having swallowed the precious gemstone after an X-ray scan showed a diamond like object in her large intestine.”

The Bangkok Post picks up the story from there with this headline on Saturday: *“*Diamond theft: Waiting for nature/laxatives to do the job.”…

[When that didn’t extract the diamond, what did? Read the link.]

Paying college athletes? Andrew Sharp:

Allowing players to make money on their own gives college sports the best chance of surviving in the 21st century. For one thing, it alleviates the pressure on schools to pay players themselves. You don’t have to buy in when people crow about the value of a scholarship, but when administrators say that most athletic departments can’t afford to pay a salary to 80 or 90 college football players while maintaining all the other sports, it’s generally true. Likewise, it’s bad enough that publicly funded state schools spend millions of dollars wooing coaches, but this could get awfully unhealthy if public schools are suddenly competing to pay players, too. It’s also fair to point out that most major college athletes aren’t the ones generating the revenue swirling around college sports. The same way people watch every Olympics regardless of who’s swimming, LSU football will fill Tiger Stadium no matter who’s playing. These are the practical arguments against turning the NCAA into a free-market economy overnight, and some of them make a decent amount of sense.

But none of that means Leonard Fournette shouldn’t be allowed to sign a shoe deal, or make a few grand doing an ad for a local car dealership. If Les Miles can charge tens of thousands of dollars for speaking engagements all summer — side note: I would pay anything to have Les Miles come talk to Grantland — there’s no reason his players should be banned from doing the same.

At perennially dominant programs (Oregon and Alabama football, Duke basketball, etc.), brands like Nike or Adidas could pay stipends to every starter, and it could be negotiated into the overall licensing fee they give to schools. At smaller schools, it would be closer to the status quo, where most athletes play for little more than a scholarship. In other words, most of college sports would look the same. Powerhouses would have a massive recruiting advantage, but that’s always been true. Upsets would still shock the world when those advantages are rendered irrelevant. Sponsors would just make the hierarchy more official, and something closer to fair for the players. If anyone doubts that brands would be interested in funding this reality, shoe companies are currently doing battle in the shadows andflying high school stars to the Bahamas, reminding the world that the interest is already there.

Going to school would continue to be part of the job for star athletes in college, but it’s never been the no. 1 priority, and for the best college athletes in the country, it probably shouldn’t be. There’s too much life-changing money available to worry about protecting the pretense that classes matter most.

[HT: LNMM]

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