Weekend Links 4-6-18

A random collection of links for your weekend reading:

ICYMI: my review of Brad Meltzer's The Escape Artist is here.

This is one of my favorite stories of the week. A couple decided to open an independent book store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of its more notable features is a typewriter in the store available for anyone to use. Those contributions have been collected and published in a book.

Uncovering the secret of Chick-Fil-A's success.

Ranking the best westerns ever made.

Once a rare sight, the C-flap is becoming more common among baseball hitters. Here's the story of how it came to be. 

Want to be a better writer? Study the habits of these famous writers.

This made me laugh out loud.

How to beat the Facebook algorithm by becoming your own curator. I don't really use Facebook for much of anything (except for friends who still want to stay in touch). It's definitely not the site to use to curate news.

Tweet of the week (watch the catcher carefully):

This is absolutely amazing. This is my buddy’s son up to bat but please watch the catcher. Let’s make this guy known! 👏👏 pic.twitter.com/M6goz7VYa1

— Tony Austin ⚾™ (@TonyAustin_10) April 1, 2018

Weekend Links 3-30-18

A shorter than normal collection of links for your weekend reading. Just means I had less time to hunt stuff down this week.

Facebook has been in the news a lot because of a data breach. But the problem goes much, much deeper as Gracy Olmstead points out.  I've long since stopped sharing personal stuff on Facebook and these days don't spend a lot of time there.

There's a lot of truth in this article: Remote Workers Outperform Office Workers. I have worked remotely for the past fifteen years and always find I am far more productive working remotely than in an office.

Wise words from Andy Crouch: It's Time to Reckon with Celebrity Power.

It amazes me that decades after the end of World War II there are still news stories connected to the war. The latest is the discovery of the wreckage of the USS Juneau which sank in 1942. The wreck is notable because among the victims were the five Sullivan brothers from Iowa who insisted on serving in the Navy together.

Via The Curious Reader, a wonderful analysis of master and servant, Jeeves and Wooster.

The benefits of practicing attention management.



And finally, baseball is back!

Ready for some baseball!

A post shared by Snoopy And The Peanuts Gang (@snoopygrams) on Mar 29, 2018 at 9:40am PDT

Daily Links 2-7-14

Good morning! Here are a few links to start off your weekend: debating creationism, time to stop Facebook lurking, the importance of writing letters by hand, and more.

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Earlier this week, the Creation Museum hosted a debate between co-founder Ken Ham and Bill Nye. In case you missed the debate, here's a great recap from Dr. Albert Mohler on what was discussed.

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It's time to stop Facebook lurking:

For all of the good it’s done in connecting us all, Facebook has redefined the way we think about community in a singular way: It’s turned us into a culture of lurkers.

Where actual community requires that its members compromise and meet certain social requirements (like listening, interacting, being in relationship), Facebook allows users to join a community on their own terms. With its filters, search tools and editing powers, it’s turned community into a product that can be customized by its customers. 

We see, react and share only what we choose to. And, there’s nothing preventing us from standing on the sidelines and just lurking into lives we’re not involved in. 

Real community is predicated on two-way communication: The delivery of information and feedback. Though social media applications like Facebook have plenty of tools that enable back-and-forth discussion, scanning a newsfeed and checking out profiles turns community into a consumer experience: It distills conversations into one-way updates, that are filtered into easy-to-consume streams.

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This week also saw the conclusion of series three of the popular BBC program Sherlock. Here's why we love the show so much. After the final episode concluded, I was left wanting to see more. That's what good television will do.

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Tim Challies on the new book The Gospel at Work:

The Gospel at Work is a new book from Greg Gilbert and Sebastian Traeger and its big idea is this: You work for the king, and this changes everything. No matter what you do, your work has value because you are doing it for the Lord and who you work for is far more important than the details of what you do. This means that there is no such thing as a meaningless job and no such thing as a job that is insignificant. 

Much of the book is structured around two of the ways that we can allow our work to become sinful. Each represents an extreme. For some the temptation is idleness at work while for others the temptation is idolatry of work. Some hope to find their significance and worth in the work they do so that work becomes “the primary object of our passions, our energy, and our love. We end up worshiping our job.” But then others “can slip into being idle in our work. When we fail to see God’s purposes in our work, we don’t really care much about it. We fail to give any attention to it, or we despise it and generally neglect our responsibility to serve as if we are serving the Lord.” And, sadly, both of these extremes are celebrated in our culture. 

The challenge of The Gospel at Work is to avoid those extremes, and the way to do that is to work out the implications of the gospel in what you do.“ If you are a Christian, we want to challenge you to begin connecting the reality of what God has done for you in Christ to your job, thinking carefully about how this applies to and changes the way you think about your work.”

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Brett McKay (from The Art of Manliness) on the importance of writing letters by hand:

In our hyper-connected world, with its text messaging and its Facebooking and its Twittering, the good, old-fashioned handwritten letter has nearly become extinct. Which is a shame because when it comes to sharing one’s true thoughts, sincere sympathies, ardent love, and deepest gratitude, words traveling along the invisible digital superhighway will never suffice. Why?

Because sending a letter is the next best thing to showing up personally at someone’s door. Ink from your pen touches the stationery, your fingers touch the paper, your saliva seals the envelope. Something tangible from your world travels through machines and hands, and deposits itself in another’s mailbox. The recipient handles the paper that you handled and they see your personality and individuality conveyed in your handwriting. 

So what keeps folks from taking advantage of the marvels of letter writing? Laziness, primarily. But I also think there’s an intimidation factor in play. Thanks to Ken Burns documentaries in which talented voice actors read eloquent 19th century correspondences, a misguided belief has formed that if you’re going to write a letter by hand, it needs to be filled with ponderous gravitas. Both roadblocks can be eliminated with a bit of preparation and education.

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Six ways to salvage an unproductive day. I've had my fair share of those.

Daily Links 10-17-13

Living digitally is the theme of today's link roundup. Something tells me our digital lives aren't all they are cracked up to be.

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This is interesting: 18 obstacles to personal daily devotions in the digital age. Sadly, I can relate to a lot of these. When you're done with that you can click over to this handy list of 20 tips for personal devotions.
(Hat tip: Challies)

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I'll admit it. I was surprised by this statistic:

E-Reader and Tablet Owners Read Over 60% More Books Than Those Without Digital Devices

USA TODAY and Bookish (www.bookish.com), a website designed to help readers discover and buy books, conducted a joint national poll of adults that finds how e-readers and tablets are shaping the culture and attitudes toward reading. More than a third (35%) of readers report they are reading more books thanks to their e-readers and tablets. Adults with reading devices say they read an average of 18 books a year, while those without devices say they average 11 books.

Other findings include:
• Doubling the numbers from less than two years ago, 40% of adults — including 46% of those between 18 and 39 – currently own an e-reader or a tablet.
• 60% of college graduates have an e-reader.
• 27% of readers say they have used Facebook, Twitter or book websites to comment on a book, and that number rises almost two-fold (50%) among those under 40 who own a reading device.

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How bad is multitasking for the brain?

When we multitask all day, those scattered habits literally change the pathways in our brains. The consequence, according to Nass's research, is that sustaining your attention becomes impossible.

"If we [multitask] all the time--brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably adaptable," he says, referencing neuroplasticity, the way the structures of your brain literally re-form to the patterns of your thought. "We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains back, our brains are plastic but they're not elastic. They don't just snap back into shape."

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There are advantages and disadvantages to being hyperconnected. Here are a few physical problems that you probably hadn't thought about. I think the stats about how often folks check their smartphones might be a little inflated. I check my phone often but 110 times per day seems excessive.

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According to a new study, age and narcissism drive whether you choose to use Facebook or Twitter.

You Can't Fix Stupid

Saying Goodbye to Facebook

This morning I did something I had been thinking about for quite a while. For many in our internet-connected culture it will seem a little counter-cultural and probably would leave some scratching their heads. I deactivated by Facebook account.

This was a decision brought on (in part) by recent events in the news involving a congressman's online extracurricular activities. But it was also something I had been thinking about because I was never really comfortable allowing others to connect to me.

Granted, while I was on Facebook I did connect to college friends as well as members of my extended family. I managed to reconnect with folks I hadn't spoken to in many years.

I rarely received an unwanted message and can count on one hand the number of times I received an invitation to be friends with someone I didn't know.

It was convenient to have the news feed from a lot of different blogs and websites I follow in one central place. But there are other applications that allow that function without connecting with strangers.

I only signed up in the beginning because my girls were curious about having their own account. I signed up because I wasn't familiar with it at the time and needed to see what it was all about before allowing my girls to get on it. Ultimately I decided they didn't need an account and they both agreed with my decision.

But I still couldn't help shake the nagging feeling that this was not a good thing to have. I've never been interested in having a Twitter account and don't bother following anyone. While I enjoyed being on Facebook, increasingly I didn't have time to keep up with it or find things to share.

My mind kept coming back to a book I read several years ago by Jerry Jenkins entitled Hedges: Loving Your Marriage Enough to Protect It. It talks very frankly about sexual sin and how it can subtly enter into your marriage. In order to protect our marriages, we need to build "hedges" which are ground rules for interacting with the opposite sex that protect us from falling into the trap that sexual sin can put us in.

Increasingly what I realized was that with my Facebook account I was tearing a huge hole in the hedges that I had been placing around my marriage. Although I never had any issues while I was on Facebook I felt it was better to get out before a problem arose.

Social media can be a wonderful thing. But it also provides a wealth of danger. Recent news stories have shown that Facebook contributes to divorce. The bottom line is while it may seem innocent to reconnect with old friends it can present danger.

I know plenty of people that are on Facebook and have not run into any issues. I think whether to be involved in social media or not is a personal choice that each individual has to make. As I said before, I didn't have any problems with being on Facebook. But when I weigh everything together, it's better for me personally to not be out there allowing myself to be set up as a target for temptation. I don't want to do anything that puts my marriage and my family at risk. For me, the risks involved with being on Facebook outweigh the rewards.

Facebook Ruins Friendships

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day that has teenagers and we were discussing problems in relationships. It seems that her daughter was having some problems with friends that was exacerbated by things that were being posted via text message and Facebook. I then ran across this column about how Facebook can ruin friendships and thought it really struck a chord.All of this made me think about all the stupid things I did as a teenager and how glad I am that I didn't have technology available to make me more stupid. Frankly, I don't know how teenagers today manage. Perhaps we're all better off not relying so heavily on technology to help us maintain contact with our friends.

Why I Am Not On Facebook (or Twitter)

A few months ago I started a Facebook page at the urging of a couple of friends. Having heard so much about the service I decided to check it out. It was also partly an experiment for my kids' sake as they were asking me about getting their own pages.

A couple of months ago I took it down. It's not because of any specific problem I had with it. It was really more a matter of not having time to keep up with it.

The fact is that I am pretty busy and while I am interested in what's going on in the lives of folks on my friends list it was just taking far too much time to keep up with. Maybe I'll go back one day. But the longer I leave my account deactivated the less likely I am to reactivate it.

Meanwhile, I've never seen the attraction of Twitter. I know it's all the rage these days but it doesn't seem to have any benefit. Like Facebook, it seems like something that takes a lot of time to keep up with. And that's more time than I have on my hands at the moment.

I'd be interested to hear from those who use either Facebook or Twitter regularly. What do you like or dislike about it?

In a related item, check out the video below on how Twitter can kill you:

Quick Takes 1-9-09

A new year and time for another new roundup of interesting links.....

Pride and Prejudice as a Facebook page. Very cool indeed. (Hat tip: nosh)

Not just pro-life but pro-woman.

Need a cool nickname? Try this.

I don't think that President-elect Obama will be able to blame Bush much longer for the bad economy. (Thanks to Lorie Byrd)

Name that party. Hint: it's not in the first eleven paragraphs. No news bias here, right? (Hat tip: Hot Air)

America as a celebritocracy. (Hat tip: Jonathan) However, I'm more in agreement with Bill Bennett that the nomination of Dr. Gupta as Surgeon General is a smart move.

Bailout for porn kings? Let's hope not. (Warning: adult content)

Rejoicing in Red Sox Nation: John Smoltz signs with Boston. Assuming he's healthy, that could be a big pickup for the Sox.

John Zeigler meets Sarah Palin and finds her to be a real person.

This story brings a whole new meaning to the term "ugly divorce". (Hat tip: Dave Barry)

January 10th at 9pm Eastern Fox News will feature a special presentation of Gary Sinise's tour of Iraq. You won't want to miss this. Here's a special message from Gary that's worth reading.

With the inauguration almost upon us, it's interesting to look back at the history of prior inaugurations with Jane Hampton Cook:



Have a great weekend.