Seven Expenses Keeping You in Debt.
“What has separated [Heisman Trophy winner Tim] Tebow from other college stars of his generation has been his focus on using his popularity to help others” (NYT). But Ted Kluck at CT says believers have him on a pedestal and need to give the guy a break.
“Gene Burd, a UT professor for 38 years who has never been promoted to full professor and at this point doesn't care what colleagues say about him, is the exceedingly rare individual willing to speak out. He says that Christians at UT ‘have to stay in the closet. If they come out, they're doomed.’ He added, ‘It's ironic: Texas is a conservative state with many Christians, but this campus is an enclave for leftist indoctrination’” (World, covering Rob Koons, a University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor and evangelical Christian, who poured six years into development of a UT Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions before administrators yanked it away from him).
“In University of Vermont research, after men and women pedaled for 20 minutes on a stationary bike, questionnaires showed their moods remained buoyed for about half a day, whether they were fitness fiends or just venturing off the couch for the first time” (RD).
Wired magazine has an interesting article on “Good Enough” technology: “Companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability.” The author calls it the MP3 effect, a reference to the fact that MP3 files are lower in sound quality than CDs or records, but have taken over the market because they are much easier to share and store. Lots to chew on here.
“Guilt in its many varieties — Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, etc. — has often gotten a bad rap, but psychologists keep finding evidence of its usefulness” (NYT).
“A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it's just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not” (Boston Globe).
“All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline….But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships” (WSJ).
“A new study shows that simply holding a heavy object can affect the way we think. A simple heavy clipboard can makes issues seem weightier - when holding one, volunteers think of situations as more important and they invest more mental effort in dealing with abstract issues. In a variety of languages, from English to Dutch to Chinese, importance is often described by words pertaining to weight. We speak of 'heavy news, 'weighty matters' and 'light entertainment'. We weigh up the value of evidence, we lend weight to arguments with facts, and our opinions carry weight if we wield influence and authority. These are more than just quirks of language - they reflect real links that our minds make between weight and importance” (Link)
“In 21 years time, the world's population will have increased by a third, rising to 8 billion people. In response, demand for food will increase by 50 percent, water by 30 percent and energy by 50 percent. All these factors will come together to create a problem much more serious than the sum of its parts” (Story)
The space shuttle mission includes a bit of missionary history: part of the airplane that Nate Saint flew on the day he and other missionaries were martyred in outreach to Auca Indians. (story)
Ignatius the Ultimate Youth Pastor (HT: Between Two Worlds) --
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