Free Music: Heart-Shaped Box

The Autumn Film : "For this Giveaway, we followed Tifah into her living room and recorded her as she sang some new material, playing on her old upright. It’s an intimate glimpse into the songwriting process."

Susan Boyle YouTube Video: 100 Million Hits

Epicenter from Wired.com: "Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent video is on track to become the most popular video in the history of YouTube, amassing nearly 100 million views in its first nine days and earning the producers of the program a serendipitous, potential windfall that should already be in the millions."

"Boom!"

John Madden retires from broadcasting - NFL- nbcsports.msnbc.com: "NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol announced today that John Madden, Hall of Fame coach and the most honored broadcaster in sports television history, has decided to retire from broadcasting.

Madden issued the following statement today:

'It’s time. I’m 73 years old. My 50th wedding anniversary is this fall. I have two great sons and their families and my five grandchildren are at an age now when they know when I’m home and, more importantly, when I’m not…"

Dungy and Donald Miller on Obama's Team

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: "Although there has not yet been an official announcement, word is leaking out about who else President Obama has selected to fill the remaining 10 seats on his Advisory Council for the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. So far, we know that Christian author and hero to under-35 evangelicals Donald Miller has been tapped for one spot. U.S. News and World Report says that former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy has been slated for another spot."

In-N-Out Burger: Professionalizing Fast-Food - BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek: "But on issues of quality, Rich remained his father's son. In 1984, in Baldwin Park, Calif., he set up In-N-Out University, a training facility, with the aim of filling the pipeline with qualified managers and reinforcing the company's focus on quality, cleanliness, and service. About 80% of In-N-Out's store managers started at the very bottom, picking up trash before rising through the ranks. Rich realized that if he wanted to expand, he needed to put a system in place that would professionalize management.

To attend In-N-Out University, an associate usually had to have worked full-time at a store for a year. In that time, she had to demonstrate initiative, strong decision-making ability, and impressive people skills. A cornerstone of In-N-Out's limited growth strategy was to expand only as quickly as the management roster would allow. At the university Rich came up with a number of ideas to hone the training process. For instance, a team of field specialists was deployed to motivate and instruct associates. Inspired by pro sports teams, Rich began producing a series of training films and videotaped trainees to critique their performance.

Although the work could be dreary—imagine a four-hour shift spent cleaning up spilled milk shakes—associates were made to feel part of an important enterprise and given opportunities to advance. On-the-job training was wedged in between mealtime rushes, and everyone was given large helpings of feedback. Rich wanted each associate to understand his job and how he could do it better. The result was that many part-timers came for a summer job and stayed for a career. "

Giant Chee-to spurs online frenzy - Mar. 7, 2003

CNN.com - Mar. 7, 2003: "It's believed to be the largest Chee-to in the world. The cheesy glob of fried cornmeal that Navy Petty Officer Mike Evans found last week in a bag of the snacks is about the size of a small lemon and weighs in at about half an ounce."

Wow.

Google Earth's flying tour bus

Google LatLong: Google Earth's flying tour bus: "I've been working on the new feature for Google Earth 5.0 which makes it easy for you to record and share your stories with others. It's called Touring, and with it you can create guided, narrated flights around Google Earth. Think of it like a flying tour bus. Just like a tour bus, you can look around while you travel, you can have narration explaining what you're looking at, and you can get off the bus to wander around. Even better, you don't need roads and you never have to worry about being left behind!"

I need to do some of this.

Pace of Cell Phones

Sent to my by Dave Dishman:

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."

Gmail fails, signals tech apocalypse | Webware - CNET

Webware - CNET: "But then these are gloomy times, and we're not talking about Twitter, which swoons dead away on a regular basis: this is Google, the bedrock of the Internet. What if we really are facing the Big Blue Screen of Death? What will be the signs if a higher power does hit CTRL + ALT + DEL on our technology-dependent world?

We decided to look for answers in the Bible. The Bible is sort of like God's user manual, and everybody knows you don't crack open the manual until something's gone epically wrong, so we just did what we always do and Wikipedia'd it instead.

According to the Book of Revelations, there are seven stages to the end of the world. These are seen in visions by a chap called John, who is called by an angel to document the end of days. Which he'll film on his Flip Mino and then Twitter about, presumably."

Hmm: Obama Plan Would Reduce Charitable Deduction for Some Wealthy Donors - Philanthropy.com

Philanthropy.com: "President Obama today proposed to cap the rate that high-income taxpayers can use to claim charitable deductions as part of a plan to finance changes to the country’s health-care system.

In a document outlining his 2010 budget plans, the president proposes to limit the tax rate for itemized deductions at 28 percent for families making more than $250,000.

That would reduce by as much as 20 percent the amount wealthy taxpayers could reduce their federal tax payments for charitable donations. Under the current system, taxpayers who are in the 33 percent or 35 percent tax brackets use that rate to claim deductions."

Her Christmas List

Right before Christmas my 10 year old daughter tore off a strip of wrapping paper and wrote down here wish list. I reproduce it here to enjoy her whimsy.

1. LPS Digtal planer
2. phone
3. Ds game
4. Wii fit board
5. fairy wings
6. Super power
7. more metal string
8. littile sister
9. cook book
10. liberty
11. my own holiday
12. peace on earth
13. Garden
14. Seeds
15. more allowence
16. own company
17. lot of money (10,20)
18. poputary
19. to be skiny
20. fairy God parents
21. puppy
    
22. laptop
23. condo
24. active
25. nicer schools
26. credit card
27. car
28. free School coupon
29. 3 snow days
30. cousin to come in summer or Christmas

Why believe in Science?

The Constant Nature of Science: "There is no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules, let alone one that abides by the rules of mathematics. The speed of light measures the same 186,000 miles per second, no matter if the light comes from a child's flashlight or a star that's galaxies away. Mathematically, there is an exact speed of light that doesn't change.

Physicist Eugene Wigner confesses that the mathematical underpinning of nature "is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it."³ Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner for quantum electrodynamics, said, "Why nature is mathematical is a mystery...The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle."⁴

This astonishment springs from the recognition that the universe doesn't have to behave this way. It is easy to imagine a universe in which conditions change unpredictably from instant to instant, or even a universe in which things pop in and out of existence. Instead, scientists cling to their long-held faith in the fundamental rationality of the cosmos.

Physicist Paul C. Davies comments, "...to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You've got to believe that these laws won't fail, that we won't wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour. Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are? ...The favorite reply is, 'There is no reason they are what they are--they just are.'"⁵"