sabbath seduction
More from Brueggemann's preface:
In our anxious society, to cite a case in point, one of the great "seductions of Pharaoh" is the fact that "soccer practice" invades the rest day. Families, largely contained in market ideology, think of themselves as helpless before the requirements of such commitment. In context it requires (or "would require," subjunctive, contrary to fact) enormous, communal resolve to resist the demand.
But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our "rest time". The alternative on offer is the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God.
[...]
Thus I have come to think that the fourth commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses... along with anxiety and violence.
controlled experiment
From the Guardian.
“A statistician gave birth to twins, but only had one of them baptised. She kept the other as a control.”
gates on god
From an interview with Bill Gates, in Rolling Stone.
You're a technologist, but a lot of your work now with the foundation has a moral dimension. Has your thinking about the value of religion changed over the years?
The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.Do you believe in God?
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs]. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.
stressful jobs
Sam Archer, saturation diver, in an article in the Guardian on staying calm in the midst of stressful jobs:
What I do is install underwater gas and oil wells. The whole job involves stress, from getting in a helicopter to fly out to a ship 300km north of Shetland, to getting on the dive ship itself. There's the pre-saturation medical, and then I go into a 2.5m x 7m chamber for a month. I'll be in there with 11 other divers, working in teams of three. You go up and down to the sea bed in a submersible decompression chamber, basically a diving bell, that's lowered to 20m above the sea bed. Then two of you get out of a little hole in the bell and you're "locked out", as we call it, for six hours in the pitch black and off to do your work with all sorts of marine life. I've been doing this for 20 years. Usually I work one month and then have two months off.
There's no room for arguments in this environment. You need to be very tolerant of other people because you're living in such close proximity. You also need to accept the fact that if it goes wrong, you're probably not going to get out alive. You need to go in with your eyes open. There are deaths. We lost a 32-year-old diver a couple of years ago who had a three-week-old daughter. It happens, so you need to be aware of the risks.
That sounds crazy. I wouldn't survive a single day.
soldiering on
A Japanese soldier who refused to surrender after World War Two ended and spent 29 years in the jungle has died aged 91 in Tokyo.Hiroo Onoda remained in the jungle on Lubang Island near Luzon, in the Philippines, until 1974 because he did not believe that the war had ended.
He was finally persuaded to emerge after his ageing former commanding officer was flown in to see him.
Correspondents say he was greeted as a hero on his return to Japan.
As WW2 neared its end, Mr Onoda, then a lieutenant, became cut off on Lubang as US troops came north.
The young soldier had orders not to surrender - a command he obeyed for nearly three decades.
"Every Japanese soldier was prepared for death, but as an intelligence officer I was ordered to conduct guerrilla warfare and not to die," he told ABC in an interview in 2010.
"I became an officer and I received an order. If I could not carry it out, I would feel shame. I am very competitive," he added.
slowing down? or filling up?
People of a certain age (and we know who we are) don’t spend much leisure time reviewing the research into cognitive performance and aging. The story is grim, for one thing: Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping.
The story is familiar, too, for anyone who is over 50 and, having finally learned to live fully in the moment, discovers it’s a senior moment. The finding that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology.
But wait...
Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.
Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.