MySmallerSpace

MySpace shrinks as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo grab its users | Technology | The Observer: "MySpace had 124 million monthly unique visitors last month, a decline of 2%, according to the marketing research company comScore. Facebook, by contrast, racked up 276 million unique visitors, an increase of 16.6%.

Michael Arrington, co-editor of the influential industry blog TechCrunch, posted: 'What was a bad situation in November 2008 is starting to turn outright ugly - Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace ... It was less than a year ago that MySpace and Facebook were the same size.'"

Northeast: Losing Religion

State of the States: Importance of Religion: "Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts are the least religious states."

This is dramatic because these states were pioneered by people seeking explicitly to practice religion. Of course, as far as I can tell the survey didn't count things like Marxism, Secular Humanism and Global Warmism as religions. Man is incurably religious which is why all "philosophies" take on the structures of religion (e.g. clergy, sin, penance, apocalypse) and are no more or less verifiable scientifically than traditional religion.

War. What is it good for?

The Progress of Our Arms: "And McPherson has emphasized that the end of slavery ultimately depended on the military defeat of the Confederacy. Without victory, slavery would not have been destroyed. Lincoln was able to free the slaves--and should be granted the credit for freeing the slaves--because he succeeded in winning the war."

but is he a campus "Crusader"...

Ed Driscoll: "“AP’s Labeling: Obama the ‘Populist Crusader’ vs. ‘Hardline Conservatives.’”"

Back to the Future: The Law

10. Ecological Intelligence - 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now - TIME: "But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That's what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision — and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That's thinking ecologically — understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. 'We can know the causes of what we're doing, and we can know the impact of what we're doing,' says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence. 'It's going to have a radical impact on the way we do business.'"

How, in practice, is this different from the Pharisees of the New Testament and the Medieval Scholastics?

Official Twitter Tags for CSU09?

With all the power invested in my by this garden variety Blogger account, I hereby declare that this year's CSU staff conference will be referred to on Twitter as #csu09ccc

YouTube Symphony

YouTube - symphony's Channel: "Play your part in music history."

I love this.

The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science

Denver Seminary: "The strength of Harrison's argument is his insistence that experimental science grew out of the acute awareness that attaining knowledge is not an easy, natural process. In a postlapsarian world, strategies must be devised to overcome the inherited infirmities of original sin, as well as circumscribe the difficulties of apprehending nature, which had become less intelligible since the Fall. A scientist would have to create controlled environments so that experiments could be performed and repeated, and naturalia observed and described. As Harrison points out in the first chapter with numerous cited examples, many of these early modern scientists wanted to recreate the approximate conditions of the Garden of Eden, which had allowed Adam full and unobstructed knowledge of the natural world. He quotes many important thinkers of the time, like Francis Bacon, who reasoned that Adam had been able to name every creature in the Garden because he had known, a priori, the essential nature of each one."