Michael Bates: November 2015 Archives
Who's Afraid of Campbell Brown? | The Weekly Standard
The former news anchor talks about her new website devoted to education reform news and the frustrations involved in getting education's entrenched special interests engaged in an honest debate.
Ex-Gay Songwriter Believes You May Be Born Gay, but It Doesn't Matter -- Charisma News
"'I never thought I'd be attracted to a woman, but everything changed because I changed the way I thought and put off thoughts until I didn't think them anymore,' Jernigan says.
"It's renewing of the mind described in Romans 12 the church should consider as they approach the sensitive topic.
"'I have a Christ-centered worldview, everything I believe comes from that point,' Jernigan says. 'Find out who your Creator says you are, not who you feel you are. If we don't think the way God designed us to think, we're going to latch onto something. What we put into our minds is what we put out. I agree with that, I am brainwashed, you need to be transformed by renewing of your mind.'...
"'God has been setting people free from identity issues for thousands of years,' Jernigan says."
The Miracle of Squanto's Path to Plymouth - WSJ
Eric Metaxas tells the story of God's providence in the form of an English-speaking Indian
"But one day during that spring of 1621, a Wampanoag walked out of the woods to greet them. Somehow he spoke perfect English. In fact, he had lived in London more recently than they had. And if that weren't strange enough, he had grown up on the exact land where they had settled.
"Because of this, he knew everything about how to survive there; not only how to plant corn and squash, but how to find fish and lobsters and eels and much else. The lone Patuxet survivor had nowhere to go, so the Pilgrims adopted him as one of their own and he lived with them on the land of his childhood.
"No one disputes that Squanto's advent among the Pilgrims changed everything, making it possible for them to stay and thrive. Squanto even helped broker a peace with the local tribes, one that lasted 50 years, a staggering accomplishment considering the troubles settlers would face later.
"So the question is: Can all of this have been sheer happenstance, as most versions of the story would have us believe? The Pilgrims hardly thought so. To them, Squanto was a living answer to their tearful prayers, an outrageous miracle of God. Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford declared in his journal that Squanto "became a special instrument sent of God" who didn't leave them "till he died.""
College Football Data Warehouse
Records of divsions, conferences, teams, players, bowl games, and playoffs from the early days of the sport to the present.
This Is What It's Like To "Wait Until Marriage" - Buzzfeed
A British couple explains why they're waiting for marriage, and how they're able to handle the pressure. A very winsome presentation. "We don't want to portray ourselves as these holier-than-thou people. But it's actually possible to have a functional relationship, in which you express physically that you care for someone, without having sex. There is a middle ground, and that's what we're trying to get across really, by agreeing to do something like this. I've had people ridicule me, and they get really explicit. They cannot get their heads around it.
"And I think another thing that is really a motivation is that, well, the Bible says that our faith is not just for ourselves, but for other people. Ore and I are trying to be a light for others. If there's one person who sees what we're doing and thinks, "I want to do that too," then thank God for that. It's another added pressure but at the same time we're honoured to carry that burden."
Conversations: Vishal Mangalwadi | Christianity Today
"I see the idea of human rights and human dignity as being a peculiarly biblical concept. In Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, a Catholic Italy, a Lutheran Germany, an Orthodox Russia succumbed to totalitarianism because of liberal humanist ideas that man can create a utopia. Joseph Campbell [the late renowned scholar of comparative mythology] and Carl Jung were both shocked after they came to India. They realized that the natural law is not natural. The fact is there are consequences to teaching that human beings are nothing but animals. This 'truth' destroys the entire basis of civilized political life."
Preservation work under way - Altus Times - altustimes.com
Local landmarks in the middle of treeless cotton fields, the cobblestone buildings east of Altus on the northside of US 62 at the Headrick "Y" (where the old US 62 alignment branches off to the southeast to pass through Headrick) are being stabilized and given new roofs by the Western Trail Historical Society. A detail in the article tells of the challenges of small-town historic preservation: "Although we did not have sufficient funds set aside for the entire project, we voted to launch into it without full funding to take advantage of an opening in [contractor] Jerry [Woodward]'s construction schedule that coincided with the window of time between the harvesting of one crop and the readying of the ground for the next planting."
The Last American Cowboys -- On Demand -- Medium
Four-part series of articles by a San Francisco taxi driver, chronicling his journey from being a cabbie to becoming a driver for ridesharing service Lyft. Fascinating details about the practicalities of driving a cab, and why ridesharing is a better deal for drivers and riders alike.
Capture network streams from BBC iPlayer (TV in the UK only; radio around the world) for later listening using this Perl application. It is up-to-date with the BBC's recent changes in streaming methods. It's a command-line tool -- no GUI. get_iplayer documentation can be found here.
For example:
get_iplayer --type=radio --get "Missing Hancocks" --modes=flashaaclow --aactomp3 --force
looks for any programme with Missing Hancocks in the title, looks for a flash AAC stream for the program, converts the received AAC stream to MP3 (the default is MP4), and the --force option overwrites any previous recording.
In lieu of --get followed by a title, you can specify a particular programme ID with an option of this form --PID=b06qht29, where the string after the equals sign is the eight-character programme ID that appears in the BBC iPlayer URL for that episode.
It's a joke, but it cuts close to home: "'We understand that the 1993 Camry was tremendously dependable, but, honestly, there's just no excuse for driving a 22-year-old car at this point,' said Toyota spokesman Haruki Kinoshita...."
Seven reasons to ban the Lord's Prayer
British cinema chains have banned an advertisement for justpray.uk which features people saying the Lord's Prayer. As Steven Croft, Bishop of Sheffield, goes through the seven petitions of the prayer, he explains why its understandable that the Lord's Prayer would be offensive in the context of a cinema.
"We are created and loved and called into friendship with God who is our father and into community with our fellow human beings who are therefore our sisters and brothers. Only someone who has found this new identity can stand against the advertising culture which night and day seduces us to define who we are by what we spend....
"Third, and most powerfully, the Lord's Prayer teaches us to live with just enough. This is the most dangerous reason why it cannot be shown with the adverts at the cinema. It teaches us not to want more. It teaches contentment, the most subversive virtue of them all....
"There are only 63 words in the Lord's Prayer. It takes less than a minute to say them.
"Yet these words shape our identity, give purpose to our lives, check our greed, remind us of our imperfections, offer a way of reconciliation, build resilience in our spirits and call us to live to the glory of our creator.
"No wonder they have been banned in the boardrooms of consumer culture."
Bartlesville Playtower | Atlas Obscura
Atlas Obscura's entry on the restored mid-century modern structure, designed by Bruce Goff, that has been restored and reopened in Bartlesville's Sooner Park. I remember climbing to the top of this when I was a kid, and I remember my dad and one of his brothers working their way around the Mobius Strip at the base of the tower. The last time I went up in the tower was 1978 when we were back at the park for my mother's high school reunion. One of the photos on this page shows the Mobius Strip structure and the tower in its prime.
What to Do If You Are Offended or Confused by Flannery O'Connor's Stories? | TGC
"Jesus's parables would offend us, too, if we hadn't heard them so many times--or if we were paying better attention.
"In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we can all understand why the older brother, the one who has kept his nose clean, is offended by his father's eager welcoming of the wayward brother. It's a little shocking to realize that Jesus presents the older brother as just as big a jerk as the younger brother. Consider how much more shocking it would have been for Jesus's original audience, who hadn't already been told what they were supposed to think about the story.
"The parables are driven by that dissonance between the truth and the way we feel about the truth. Jesus shows us what the kingdom of God looks like; if we allow ourselves to be offended by that vision, we begin to see what needs to happen in our hearts."
This entry includes audio of Flannery O'Conner reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and quotes her comments about the story.
MORE: Flannery O'Conner says that Ayn Rand "makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."
Here's How Crazy-Long German Words are Made | Mental Floss
The animation at the link "takes you, step by step, through what's involved in creating Rhababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel, a completely valid (and probably never before uttered) word," which means "Barbie of the bar where the beer of the beard barber for the barbarians of Rhubarb Barbara's bar is sold." A commenter at Language Hat breaks the word down as follows: "Rhabarber-Barbara-Bar-Barbaren-Bart-Barbier-Bier-Bar-Bärbel." Further comments at that link discuss the use of "rhubarb" as a nonsense word for background noise in films, German use of "rhabarber" as we use "blah, blah, blah," and the Quebecois practice of growing rhubarb on compost heaps.
A map of San Francisco's subway system that almost was
As originally conceived in 1956, the system would have served all the counties bordering the bay, reaching from Los Gatos to Santa Rosa and all the way to Fairfield, Brentwood, and Livermore in the outer eastern reaches of the metro area, serving nine counties instead of the three that BART actually serves. Lines would have crossed the bays along each of the bridges. Having dealt with traffic along many of these routes, I can appreciate the convenience of taking a train instead.
The 1956 plan was unearthed was uncovered by Jake Coolidge for his master's thesis at San Jose State University. Here's his presentation putting the original BART plan in its national and local historical context. Although the images are small and hard to read, I'm struck by the similarities in graphic design with the Tulsa comprehensive planning documents from the same period.
Project: U.S. Routes as a Subway Map | Cameron Booth
This beautiful piece of cartography converts the U. S. numbered highway system into a "subway map" that follows the conventions of the London Underground map. Included are all routes from 1 to 101, plus some significant three-digit routes, such as U. S. 183 and U.S. 412. Decommissioned highways (e.g. Route 66, U. S. 99) and decommissioned sections of highways (e.g., U. S. 70 between L. A. and Globe, Arizona, U. S. 6 between Bishop and Long Beach, California) are shown as skinnier lines.
Map designer Cameron Booth (curator of Transit Maps) writes: "However, being an older road system, cobbled together in the mid-1920s from a scraggly collection of road trails, the U.S. highway system sticks to its grid far more loosely, with many routes starting or ending well out of their ordained position. This map has taken me well over a year to complete (between other projects) and I restarted my work on three separate occasions, each time almost convinced that this map was impossible. This last time, I started at the most complex intersection of roads on the map - Memphis, Tennessee - and solved it first. Once that resolved itself, clues were revealed as to how to approach the rest of the map and things got a lot easier."
A Stalker's Best Friend: Inside JSocket's Android Remote Access Tool Builder - Threat Geek
Cybersecurity expert John Bambenek writes about vulnerabilities that can give a hacker an easy way to track your Android phone, and how to reduce your risk.
Novel Rocket: Tips for Writing Speculative Fiction
J. Wesley Bush, author of Knox's Irregulars, and several other writers of science fiction and fantasy talk about the work of creating a fictional world that provides an engaging and immersive environment for a story.
How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained | Atlas Obscura
"But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of "Italians," such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn't have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian....
"'I grew up speaking English and Italian dialects from my family's region of Puglia,' says Gardaphe. 'And when I went to Italy, very few people could understand me, even the people in my parents' region. They recognized that I was speaking as if I was a 70-year-old man, when I was only 26 years old.' Italian-American Italian is not at all like Standard Italian; instead it's a construction of the frozen shards left over from languages that don't even really exist in Italy anymore with minimal intervention from modern Italian...."
Voiceless consonants become voiced, final vowels get dropped, "oh" gets raised to "ooh," and that's how capicola becomes gabagool.
Honda Odyssey power sliding door reset
Here's the procedure I used successfully on a 2001 Honda Odyssey EX to reset the doors when the right door just stopped working. What I did was based on this post for a 2007 Odyssey power sliding door -- the only change was that I only had to pull as single fuse, passenger panel #13.
Privileged Patels of Gujarat fight to be given low caste status - Telegraph
There are many advantages to being officially "disadvantaged."
"At stake in the unconventional class struggle is access to millions of government jobs and free college places allocated to lower castes under the 'reservation system' of affirmative action to counter ingrained discrimination.
"Up to 50 per cent of such positions are ring-fenced for Dalits (previously known as the 'untouchables'), tribal peoples and social groupings designated together as 'other backward classes' (OBCs), whose ranks include Mr Modi, a tea-seller's son....
"By contrast, the Patels - the family name of the Patider caste - are traditional landholders who over the years gained important roles in politics and commerce in Gujarat, a major trading hub.
"They are also one of the country's best-known castes internationally, with a major diaspora across North America and Britain where their numbers include Priti Patel, MP, the environment minister.
"But as the cost of education soars and land-holdings have been divided into smaller parcels, a new generation of Patels claim that they are the ones suffering discrimination by their exclusion from jobs and college places set aside for lower castes."
