A Woman texts her husband on a frosty winter’s morning. “Windows frozen!”
Her husband texts back, “Pour lukewarm water over it.”
Five minutes later comes her reply. “Computer completely messed up now”
–Reader’s Digest, January 2013 edition, page 13
South Korean pop sensation Psy’s “Gangnam Style” has become the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, with the infectious music video approaching 1 billion views worldwide.
The wildfire popularity of the four-minute song and dance video, uploaded just six months ago, represents an inflection point for the online video site, as YouTube’s entertainment offerings expand beyond candid homemade videos such as “Charlie Bit My Finger” or such made-for-TV moments as Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream” performance from the show “Britain’s Got Talent.”
More than six decades since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – and thousands of years after they were written – Israel on Tuesday put 5,000 images of the ancient biblical artifacts online in a partnership with Google.
The digital library contains the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the second listing of the Ten Commandments, and a portion of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, dated to the first century B.C.
Israeli officials said this is part of an attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts – often criticized for allowing them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars – to make them broadly available.
The Government’s announcement that a combination of legislation and regulations will be introduced to comply with the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the A, B and C case should be “of the utmost concern to all”, the four Catholic Archbishops of Ireland have said.
Minister for Health James Reilly presented a memorandum to this morning’s Cabinet meeting. The decision was taken to follow this route ”“ the fourth option from the expert group on abortion – rather than proposing guidelines, an option favoured by anti-abortion campaign groups.
Responding tonight to the announcement, the Archbishops said the proposal would “pave the way for the direct and intentional killing of unborn children. This can never be morally justified in any circumstances”.
Everyone seems to be amazed that the Pope is tweeting ”“ and there was a news story the other day about bishops in England using Twitter for their Christmas messages. The surprise reminds me of the way people pretend to be astonished when clergy admit to having heard the occasional rude word (never mind clergy actually using them”¦) or having watched a soap. It’s taken for granted that we’re far too unworldly for all this.
Even speaking as someone who struggles with any kind of technology, I don’t think it should be assumed that all my fellow clergy are or ought to be as dim as I am in this area. And I don’t buy into the panic that sometimes gets stirred up about social media and electronic communication. OK, we all know it can be poisonous and destructive at times. But there’s another side to it.
IBM’s 5 in 5 — a list of five innovations that could change the world in five years — focuses on how computers are developing the ability to taste, touch, hear, see and listen just like humans do, except way better.
It is kind of exciting and kind of terrifying, but mostly just really cool.
For example, Hendrik Hamann, a research manager of physical systems for IBM, describes a smartphone that could use a computerized nose to “smell” if we are sick. Forget the thermometer and the doctor’s visit — we will simply breathe into our cellphones to find out if we have the flu.
Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time he did not fight in Vietnam; he did not invade the Bay of Pigs; he did not guard Western Europe with tanks, or help build nuclear launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. Instead, he became the military’s leading expert in a secret Cold War experiment: to fight enemies with clouds of psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitate the mind””causing, in the words of one ranking officer, a “selective malfunctioning of the human machine.” For nearly a decade, Ketchum, a psychiatrist, went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel””or, at least, he told himself such things. To achieve his dream, he worked tirelessly at a secluded Army research facility, testing chemical weapons on hundreds of healthy soldiers, and thinking all along that he was doing good.
Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and dusting over in the National Archives. Military doctors who helped conduct the experiments have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects””in all, nearly five thousand of them””are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive.
It has been his life’s work. Now, Russell Portenoy appears to be having second thoughts.
Two decades ago, the prominent New York pain-care specialist drove a movement to help people with chronic pain. He campaigned to rehabilitate a group of painkillers derived from the opium poppy that were long shunned by physicians because of their addictiveness….
Opioids are also behind the country’s deadliest drug epidemic. More than 16,500 people die of overdoses annually, more than all illegal drugs combined.
Now, Dr. Portenoy and other pain doctors who promoted the drugs say they erred by overstating the drugs’ benefits and glossing over risks. “Did I teach about pain management, specifically about opioid therapy, in a way that reflects misinformation? Well, against the standards of 2012, I guess I did,” Dr. Portenoy said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We didn’t know then what we know now.”
Read it all (this was also referenced in yesterday’s sermon by yours truly–KSH.
(In the 16th chapter of this book Nathaniel Wyeth (who goes by Nat), engineer and inventor, responds to the interviewer and tells a story about on his brother, artist Andrew Wyeth–KSH)
Andy once did a picture. This is sort of an extension of what we’ve been talking about, but it’s indicative of the kind of training I’m talking about….Andy did a picture of Lafayette’s headquarters which is down here on Route One near Chadds Ford [a town in Pennsylvania]. It’s a beautiful, old building, built before the Revolutionary War, and in his picture was a huge sycamore tree coming up from behind the building with all its beautiful branches. You could see part of the trunk coming up over the roofline.
When I first saw the painting, he wasn’t quite finished with it. He showed me a lot of drawings of the trunk and the gnarled roots going into the ground, and and I said, “gee whiz, where’s that in the picture?” “It’s not in the picture, ” he said. And I looked at him.
“Nat,” he said, “for me to get the feeling that I want in that tree, the part of the tree that’s showing, I’ve got tounderstand and know very thoroughly how that tree is anchored to the ground in back of the house.” It never showed in the picture. But he could draw the part of the tree above the house with a lot more authenticity because he knew exactly the way that thing was anchored in the ground. Isn’t that remarkable?
To me, this was all very indicative of what my father [the illustrator N.C. Wyeth] trained into us in whatever we were doing: to understand what we were doing.
–Kenneth A. Brown, Inventors at Work: Interviews with 16 Notable American Inventors (Redmond, Wash.: Tempus Books, 1988), pp. 374-375, quoted by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has always prided itself on being one of the most pragmatic organisations of the United Nations. Engineers, after all, speak a similar language, regardless where they come from. Even during the cold war they managed to overcome their differences and negotiate the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR), a binding global treaty that even today governs telecommunications between countries.
But the internet seems to be an even more divisive than cold-war ideology. The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, where the ITU met to renegotiate the ITR, ended in failure in the early hours of December 14th. After a majority of countries approved the new treaty, Terry Kramer, the head of the American delegation, announced that his country is “not able to sign the document in its current form.” Shortly thereafter, at least a dozen countries””including Britain, Sweden and Japan””signalled that they would not support the new treaty either. (Update (December 14th, 3.20pm): Of the 144 countries which had the right to sign the new treaty in Dubai, only 89 have done so.)
A new ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts is described as “an eclectic expression of church that is as cutting edge as the moment and as ancient as first-century Palestine.”
The ministry, Clearstory Collective, says it seeks to reach out to college students and other young adults, homeless and otherwise marginalized people of faith who have become disaffected by the institutional church and who seek informal and often spontaneous faith communities. It is doing so through technology.
Pope Benedict XVI hit the 1 million Twitter follower mark on Wednesday as he sent his first tweet from his new account.
In perhaps the most drawn out Twitter launch ever, the 85-year-old Benedict pushed the button on a tablet brought to him at the end of his general audience Wednesday.
Church Publishing Incorporated has launched new eBook editions of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer to accommodate a variety of applications and most eReader platforms, including all versions of Kindle and Apple’s iBooks.
“We’re not the first to offer an electronic edition of the Book of Common Prayer, but we wanted to offer the best version possible in multiple formats to cover the widest range of liturgical needs,” said Brother Karekin Yarian, Church Publishing’s project manager of eProducts.
Asia will wield more global power than the US and Europe combined by 2030, a forecast from the US intelligence community has found.
Within two decades China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy, the report adds.
It also warns of slower growth and falling living standards in advanced nations with ageing populations.
Home House Press is one of at least a dozen book publishers operating in South Carolina. Half of those companies are based in the Charleston area. They produce traditional books ”” printed on paper, bound and shipped to stores and customers. They do this in a digital age when printed materials such as newspapers, magazines and books face increasing competition from other media platforms.
They are succeeding, more or less, even as larger publishers ”” typically divisions of multinational media conglomerates ”” are struggling to cope with growing demand for Web-based products and electronic books. They are flourishing even though powerful retailers and distributors like Amazon and Ingram demand discounts and high fees.
What’s the secret? Specialization, South Carolina publishers said. And a strong emphasis on local topics and people. Oh, and coffee table books.
The widespread use of antibiotics in hospitals triggered the emergence of two resistant strains of the Clostridium superbug that has killed thousands of people worldwide over the past two decades, a study has shown.
A genetic analysis of about 300 samples of Clostridium difficile bacteria collected from around the world found that the global outbreaks were in fact caused by two different strains that had independently acquired resistance to an antibiotic widely used in hospitals.
Scientists traced the evolutionary trees of each strain of C. diff and found that both originated within a couple of years of each other, one in a hospital in Pittsburg[h], Pennsylvania, and the other in Montreal, Canada.
Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft — basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically.
Our research shows that although warnings about cyberwarfare have become more severe, the actual magnitude and pace of attacks do not match popular perception. Only 20 of 124 active rivals — defined as the most conflict-prone pairs of states in the system — engaged in cyberconflict between 2001 and 2011. And there were only 95 total cyberattacks among these 20 rivals. The number of observed attacks pales in comparison to other ongoing threats: a state is 600 times more likely to be the target of a terrorist attack than a cyberattack. We used a severity score ranging from five, which is minimal damage, to one, where death occurs as a direct result from cyberwarfare. Of all 95 cyberattacks in our analysis, the highest score — that of Stuxnet and Flame — was only a three.
To be sure, states should defend themselves against cyberwarfare, but throwing vast amounts of money toward a low-level threat does not make sense.
In an age of modern science, can supposedly “reasonable” people harbor hope for Heaven? Or salvation through Jesus Christ? Can faith be plausible in the face of the billions of galaxies discovered by modern astronomy?
In The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable (University of California Press), Princeton University’s Robert Wuthnow brings his sociological acumen to bear on these most vexing of questions. Wuthnow, arguably the most productive and insightful sociologist of American religion, deploys rich empirical evidence against the widespread notion that faith and reason, religion and science, are engaged in a struggle for the soul of America. The evidence indicates that for many religious people there is no conflict but rather a creative tension, which they manage by establishing a balance between two distinct ways of looking at the world.
Blue whales can grow to 90 feet — that’s longer than a tennis court. Getting that big requires a lot of fuel, says Jeremy Goldbogen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cascadia Research Collective. That’s why Goldbogen studies the whales’ dining habits. They feed on krill, slurping in millions of the mini crustaceans along with hundreds of thousands of pounds of water in a single gulp. With the help of data tags and a National Geographic Crittercam, Goldbogen and colleagues found that blue whales do underwater acrobatics while they eat — specifically a move they coined “the blue whale barrel roll.”
Robert LeTourneau, a roving American evangelist and inventor, decided in the mid-1930s that a plot of lakefront land a mile and a half northeast of downtown Peoria would be a fine place to make earth-moving equipment. Skilled labor and suppliers were plentiful; transport links were good.
Nearly eight decades later, Japan’s Komatsu Ltd…., which owns the plant, still thinks Mr. LeTourneau chose the right location””even though most giant mining trucks made there are shipped overseas to Latin America, Australia, Asia and Africa.
The question of who rules the Internet and how is being debated at a 12-day conference in Dubai.
The World Conference on International Telecommunications, which started Monday, aims to draft a new treaty to underpin international telecommunications regulations. The current rules were put in place in 1988. The conference is sponsored by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency for information and communication technologies.
The bid to change the rule book has unleashed fears of a grab for centralized control of the Internet by the U.N. The process has also come under criticism for its lack of transparency, with documents unpublished and proposals up for debate kept secret.
The Vatican unveiled Pope Benedict XVI’s Twitter account on Monday (Dec. 3) as it announced a series of new initiatives aimed at raising the church’s online profile.
The pope’s account, @Pontifex, drew nearly 200,000 followers in the hours after the announcement even though Benedict will not officially start tweeting until Dec. 12. That’s when the pope plans to answer questions about faith submitted to him via Twitter through a special hashtag, #askpontifex, set up by the Vatican.
At least initially, the pope’s tweets will be related to his official speeches and activities but their scope might be extended in the future, for example in response to natural disasters.
Dick Bott started his first Christian radio station in the basement of the former Blue Ridge Mall, sandwiched between a barber shop and a child care center.
Fifty years later, the Bott Radio Network consists of 91 stations reaching into 15 states, with a combined audience of more than 50 million people.
Programs also can be heard worldwide by satellite, on the Internet and through mobile digital technology.
As a Christian and career scientist, I see the episode as an opportunity for both Republicans and evangelicals to establish a more coherent policy on evolution, creation and science, for two reasons.
First, the age of the Earth and the rejection of evolution aren’t core Christian beliefs. Neither appears in the Nicene or Apostle’s Creed. Nor did Jesus teach them. Historical Christianity has not focused on how God created the universe, but on how God saves humanity through Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Currently, a debate is unfolding in theological seminaries and conferences about the correct interpretation of the Bible’s Genesis account of creation. Echoing thinkers like St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Mark Noll and Pope John Paul II, many of the conservative theologians in the debate believe that a serious reading of Genesis can be compatible with the scientific account of our origins.
Cambridge researchers are to assess whether technology could end up destroying human civilisation.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and climate change.
The scientists said that to dismiss concerns of a potential robot uprising would be “dangerous”.
As you sat across the Thanksgiving table basking in the warmth of family and the aroma of chestnut stuffing, most likely you did not remember the vicious comment your Aunt Jennifer made about you a few years back. You didn’t dwell on Uncle Julio’s unkind reference to your drinking last Christmas or what cousin Duwan said about your girlfriend during that dreadful vacation at the shore. At family holidays, we tend to embrace our relatives even after months or years of not having seen one another, regardless of the quarrels we have had in the past.
We may chalk up our generous forgiveness to the festive spirit of the holiday, but the real reason has nothing to do with Thanksgiving; it is because of how we humans remember ”” and forget. Cognitive experts tell us that forgetting is fundamental to how we make sense of the world. Forgetting helps us survive, by making sure we don’t dwell in the past.
In the digital age, that mechanism of our humanity is under threat.
Growing into a fully formed human being is a long process, and scientists have found that unborn babies not only hiccup, swallow and stretch in the womb, they yawn too.
Researchers who studied 4D scans of 15 healthy fetuses also said they think yawning is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors a new way to check on a baby’s health.
Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments.
He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back….
People buying this option from Zeringue must accept concessions: They have no genetic connection to their children, and those children will probably have full biological siblings born to other parents….
“I am horrified by the thought of this,” said Andrew Vorzimer, a Los Angeles fertility lawyer alarmed that a company ”” not would-be parents ”” controls embryos. “It is nothing short of the commodification of children.”
Here is one:
David Brooks says the problem with society in this “age of possibility” is that people “go through adulthood perpetually trying to keep their options open.”
But certainly it is possible to view this as an improvement over centuries of more “traditional” values, like denying the humanity of homosexuals; the subjugation and oppression of women; and institutionalized discrimination against pretty much every non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic group.
The various values and commitments to choose from are no less valid or moral for not being “traditional” (whatever that means). The two-parent family and “commitments to family, God, craft and country” might be lifestyle choices that work for some people, who are still free to pursue some or all of those ideals.
The difference now is that others won’t be forced into a life they either don’t want or can’t have, and they won’t be made to feel ashamed about whatever life they choose to live. This is progress.
At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options.
The transformation has been liberating, and it’s leading to some pretty astounding changes. For example, for centuries, most human societies forcefully guided people into two-parent families. Today that sort of family is increasingly seen as just one option among many….
My view is that the age of possibility is based on a misconception. People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice ”” commitments to family, God, craft and country.
The surest way people bind themselves is through the family….