Michael Bates: October 2023 Archives
American megachurches are thriving by poaching flocks - The Economist
"Welcome to Life.Church, one of America's largest megachurches, headquartered near Oklahoma City. Really it is a chain of churches, with 44 sites across 12 states. Every weekend around 80,000 people attend one of 170 services in person. Most watch a pre-recorded sermon by a senior pastor, Craig Groeschel; a junior pastor acts as an in-person MC and a worship band plays live. The whole thing blends seamlessly, and it is streamed online, too.
"Churches have closed as the proportion of Americans who call themselves Christian has fallen from 76% in 2010 to 64% in 2020. But most of America's 1,750 megachurches--all Protestant and mostly evangelical churches with at least 2,000 worshippers--are thriving. Between 2015 and 2020 their congregations grew by a third on average, turning younger and more multi-racial, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, a think-tank in Connecticut....
"Two-fifths of megachurches are non-denominational. The rest tend to downplay theirs and emphasise their own brand. Life.Church is affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church--but few congregants realise that."
William Wheelwright on Twitter: "Dead Poets' Society isn't the movie you thought it was"
Interesting take from the perspective of classical education: "Dead Poets' Society isn't the movie you thought it was--it is in fact a brutal critique of boomer liberalism and a cautionary tale against the perils of hippie rebellion. Mr. Keating is its villain; the other teachers and Neil's father are the would-be heroes of this tragedy." RELATED: "How to Ruin a Favourite Film: Dead Poets Society Reconsidered" from 2020 by Rory Shiner: "Coming back to the film as an adult and a parent, I naturally have some quibbles with Keating's overall educational vision. But what is most noticeable to me is that, even by his own criteria, he fails." Found these in replies to this tweet from CLT president Jeremy Tate.
W. Jason Morgan, discoverer of plate tectonics (1935-2023)
"In 1967, Jason Morgan presented a groundbreaking paper at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington DC. It showed that Earth's surface consists of about a dozen rigid plates. They are created at mid-ocean ridges, destroyed in subduction zones where they converge, and move past one another along great faults, such the San Andreas Fault in California. Other papers followed, explaining that volcanoes occur where plates subduct, mountains rise where and when continents collide, and earthquakes result from jostling and shearing at plate margins."
Rob's tips for uncovering radio station stream URLs | The SWLing Post
Many radio-listening apps and some old-time internet radio appliances need a stream URL to find a station. This article describes how to use diagnostic tools in your desktop browser to dig through all the Javascript to find the actual stream URL for a radio livestream.
RELATED: radio-browser.info is a crowdsourced database of over 40,000 radio streams around the world. A GeoMap makes it easy to browse for streams in a particular part of the world. You can add map entries: I just added one for 4RPH Reading Radio in Brisbane. In turn, apps like RadioDroid use this database to find streams for listening. Unfortunately, some radio megacorporations s use stream-hopping techniques to force listeners to use their apps.
A 2014 article (updated in 2020) suggests using packet-sniffer tools to grab URLs and has a list of frequently used streaming domains, media types, and file extensions to look for.
Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing | Ars Technica
"In 1977, DEC introduced the VAX, a new line of minicomputers that featured a 32-bit instruction set architecture and virtual memory. Its operating system, VMS, was a multi-user, multitasking OS that provided features we now take for granted, including virtual memory, file sharing, and networking. It amassed a wide variety of third-party software packages that made it the most popular system in its class."
In 1982, 6.001, MIT's first-semester computer science course, used a DECsystem 20 running TOPS-20, with Emacs for the editor. In '89 I had to adapt code from a PDP-11/55 to a PDP-11/70 on a British Airways 737 ground maintenance simulator and hope nothing clobbered the brute-force entry I stuffed in the memory map; I carried the software with me from Oklahoma to England on a 20 MB disk pack the size of a large pizza. In the early '90s, we had a machine running VAXeln (a preemptive RTOS) as host computer for a human centrifuge. The same model computer and OS was used for years to run Oklahoma's Pikepass toll tag system, something I spotted when visiting the Pikepass office at the Tulsa end of the Turner Turnpike. 1993 was probably the last time I touched anything DEC except perhaps for the occasional VT100. When I graduated, Digital Equipment Corporation was a major employer along Boston's Route 128 beltway, but they were overtaken by the PC revolution.
COVID-19 autumn 2023 vaccination programme: JCVI advice, 26 May 2023 - GOV.UK
UK's Joint Commission on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommends COVID-19 boosters only for 65-and-older healthy people plus younger people in special risk groups. Anyone else wanting a booster will have to pay for it privately. The AP "fact check" story says that this is not a ban, but it does indicate a risk-benefit calculation that the risks of the jabs in younger people outweighs their risk of severe illness from the disease. JCVI estimates that you'd have to give the jab to 5,000,000 16-29 year olds in order to prevent one severe hospitalization from COVID in that age group. The UK stopped administering COVID jabs to 15 and under in the fall of 2021.
'Building a Deeply Inclusive Culture' : The Other McCain
Baltimore tech startup exec murdered and left on the roof of her apartment building. "She wanted to disrupt the tech industry's reigning power structure of white men and make way for more women and other people from disadvantaged groups. . . . She studied computer science for three years before switching her major to sociology because, she said, she wanted to use entrepreneurship to solve inequalities in society. . . . EcoMap has committed to a '50/50%' goal of employing a staff that is half women and half people of color."
