Weekend Links 5-11-18

A Friday roundup of interesting stuff from the internet. Here are the articles that caught my attention this week:

Brad Meltzer, best selling author of The Escape Artist has a new book in the works. This time he is delving into non-fiction with the story of the secret plot against George Washington.

A profile of the man who invented book selling as we know it.

This is a terrific look at the geniuses behind the Babylon Bee.

Analytics is pretty commonplace now in Major League Baseball but at the college level it is still a novelty. At UNC they are leading the way in adopting analytics into the game.

Many evangelical leaders have not only been outspoken in their support of President Trump but have gone to great lengths to defend his most egregious behaviors. David French has some very frank words for the President's evangelical backers.

Tim Challies poses an interesting question: is your church Christian or Christianish?

10 things you should know about your smartphone.

Nostalgia alert: 10 Fun Facts About Highlights.

The woman who was the subject of one of the most iconic photos to come out of the Vietnam War shares how she came to Christ. It's a powerful testimony.

Baseball America polled its correspondents to come up with a list of the ten best major league parks (excluding Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, and Dodger Stadium as they are in a class of their own).

This is one of the more interesting stories I have run across this week: How a Coney Island sideshow helped to save thousand of babies.

On an almost daily basis there are new reports of scientific studies reported as absolute fact. But there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such studies. 

As I visit used book stores in my travels I am always on the lookout for vintage cover illustrations. In fact, I believe that book cover illustration is in many ways a lost art. This collection of pulp covers of classic fiction is fantastic. 

Daily Links 2-25-14

In today's post: the Christian leader in the digital age, smartphones are making us tired and unproductive, food brands named after real people, and more.

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The Christian Leader in the Digital Age:

The Digital Age is upon us. In the span of less than three decades, we have redefined the way humans communicate, entertain, inform, research, create, and connect – and what we know now is only a hint of what is to come. But the greatest concern of the church is not a technological imperative, but a Gospel imperative.

The digital world did not exist a generation ago, and now it is a fundamental fact of life. The world spawned by the personal computer, the Internet, social media, and the smart phone now constitutes the greatest arena of public discussion and debate the world has ever known.

Leaders who talk about the real world as opposed to the digital world are making a mistake, a category error. While we are right to prioritize real face-to-face conversations and to find comfort and grounding in stable authorities like the printed book, the digital world is itself a real world, just real in a different way. 

Real communication is happening in the digital world, on the Web, and on the smart phone in your pocket. Real information is being shared and globally disseminated, faster than ever before. Real conversations are taking place, through voice, words and images, connecting people and conversations all over the world. 

If the leader is not leading in the digital world, his leadership is, by definition, limited to those who also ignore or neglect that world, and that population is shrinking every minute. The clock is ticking.

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21 English words we need to get rid of. It's surprising to me how many of these words are commonly used.

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For all their advantages, smartphones don't seem to be making us more productive. Quite the opposite:

For a productive day at work tomorrow, give the smartphone a rest tonight. 

Reading and sending work email on a smartphone late into the evening doesn’t just make it harder to get a decent night’s sleep. New research findings show it also exhausts workers by morning and leaves them disengaged by the next afternoon. 

That means the way most knowledge workers do their jobs—monitoring their iPhones for notes from the boss long after the office day is done and responding to colleagues at all hours—ultimately makes them less effective, posit researchers from University of Florida, Michigan State University and University of Washington.

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A handy infographic on why readers prefer print books to e-books.

via EBookFriendly.

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Real or Fake: The Names Behind 12 Famous Food Brands. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of these were real.