But many churches fail to make this distinction. They tacitly set up the following equation for church life:
Spirituality = Sociability
For example, I was once visiting with a church leader at my church who was making a recommendation that, to make our adult classes more “meaningful,” we would need to share more of our lives in these classes. I stated that such a recommendation would drive the introverts crazy. The response was, “God is about relationships and church is about relationships. Thus, if these people aren’t going to be involved in relationships they will just have to change.”
via Experimental Theology: Introverts in the Church.
rePost::A Rant About Women « Clay Shirky
read the whole thing!!!
Not caring works surprisingly well. Another of my great former students, now a peer and a friend, saw a request from a magazine reporter doing a tech story and looking for examples. My friend, who’d previously been too quiet about her work, decided to write the reporter and say “My work is awesome. You should write about it.”
The reporter looked at her work and wrote back saying “Your work is indeed awesome, and I will write about it. I also have to tell you you are the only woman who suggested her own work. Men do that all the time, but women wait for someone else to recommend them.” My friend stopped waiting, and now her work is getting the attention it deserves.
If you walked into my department at NYU, you wouldn’t say “Oh my, look how much more talented the men are than the women.” The level and variety of creative energy in the place is still breathtaking to me, and it’s not divided by gender. However, you would be justified in saying “I bet that the students who get famous five years from now will include more men than women”, because that’s what happens, year after year. My friend talking to the reporter remains the sad exception.
Part of this sorting out of careers is sexism, but part of it is that men are just better at being arrogant, and less concerned about people thinking we’re stupid (often correctly, it should be noted) for trying things we’re not qualified for.
via A Rant About Women « Clay Shirky.
2010 Presidential Elections Watch::Unwarranted Advice To Dick Gordon and Bayani Fernando
Are you guys serious about campaigning?
Come one Dick-BF (as pointed out by friends) the name alone is worthy of so many catchy phrases.
You should be mining your names for unintentional comedy and some votes.
Let’s make this election a tad bit more enjoyable!
Elink Video:2010 Presidential Election Watch: Noy tries to Rap
It is said that the reform wing of the NoyMar Campaign is running things. If this is true maybe we should get the not so reformist wing to run their campaign. The ads are simply not cool. Kailangan nakaka LSS. The tune needs to be catchy. How do you know this? Simple demo a jingle to friends. Wait a day. Ask if anyone can sing the tune, or still know the lyrics (don’t ask superbrains they won’t forget the words and the tune) if no one can the tune/lyrics/melody is just not good enough.
rePost::Gabriel García Márquez, investigative journalist – Chris Blattman
A good writer is a good writer.
The public always likes an exposé, but what made the stories so popular was not simply the explosive revelations of military incompetence. García Márquez had managed to transform Velasco’s account into a narrative so dramatic and compelling that readers lined up in front of the newspaper’s offices, waiting to buy copies.
via Gabriel García Márquez, investigative journalist – Chris Blattman.
rePost::Intro to TOR: how you can be an anti-censorship activist in your sleep Boing Boing
Intro to TOR: how you can be an anti-censorship activist in your sleep
Here's a nice little introductory article on TOR, The Onion Router, a privacy-enhancing technology that helps you to circumvent national, corporate and school firewalls and enhance your anonymity. Originally developed by the US military to help communications get in and out of countries that heavily filter their networks, TOR is free/open software and is maintained by many volunteers around the world, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
TOR works by passing your traffic through several (theoretically) unrelated computers all over the Internet, using cryptography to keep the origin, destination, and intermediary steps secret from each computer it passes through.
You can run TOR on your own computers and they'll become part of this array of intermediary hosts all over the net, making your network connection into a tool for privacy and free access to information
via Intro to TOR: how you can be an anti-censorship activist in your sleep Boing Boing.
rePost:Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.: Hello iPad, Goodbye PC
Apple endured its darkest days during the early 1990s, when the PC had lost its original magic and turned into a drab, utilitarian tool. Buyers flocked to Dell’s cheap, beige boxes. Computing back then was all about the programs. Now, computing is all about the programming – the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens. Computing, in other words, has moved back closer to the ideal that Steve Jobs had when he founded Apple. Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer.
Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Hello iPad, Goodbye PC.
Quote:: Hello iPad, Goodbye PC
The rapturous reaction to Apple’s tablet – the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual – shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Hello iPad, Goodbye PC.
Quote:: Fathoming People's Emotions and Motives from Afar
A friend once said to me, “I don’t judge other people, I don’t care if other people judge me.”
What’s more, deconstructing the dynamics of a relationship we have no part of is a fool’s errand:
A friend of mine once said that the only two people who know what’s going on between a man and a woman are the man and the woman themselves. He was half right. The man and the woman—or man and man, woman and woman; it’s all the same—are the last to know. The idea that we can precisely fathom people’s emotions and motives is absurd. We can barely comprehend our own. Maybe pretending that we understand what makes our political figures tick is how we console ourselves for not understanding our politics at all.
via Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Fathoming People’s Emotions and Motives from Afar.
rePost:: Obesity, widowhood & happiness
I really need to get thinner!
Obesity, widowhood & happiness
Which is worse for happiness – being fat or suffering the death of a spouse?
Two recent papers suggest the answer is – being fat.
First, Marina-Selini Katsaiti finds that “obesity has a negative and statistically significant effect on individual well being”. She estimates that, in Germany, a three-point rise in BMI (from, say 24 to 27 – equivalent to gaining around 20 pounds for someone who’s 5’8”) reduces happiness on average by so much that it would require a 67% pay rise to compensate. In Australia it would require a doubling of income to offset the adverse effect of such a weight gain. Of course, these figures tell us how little income raises happiness, as well as how much chubbiness reduces it.
In the UK, the effect is smaller, but even here a 10-point rise in BMI reduces happiness by 0.1 units on a seven-point scale.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Obesity, widowhood & happiness.