Random Thoughts 7/19/11

• It's a bad week for the printed word, sort of.  Due in part to the internet and the increase in e-books and e-readers, like the iPad, Reader's Digest has put itself up for sale and Borders book stores is going out of business.  Companies like Barnes & Noble and Amazon sell more digital books than paper books and that's not counting the thousands of public domain digital books that are freely available.  It's too bad; I love the feel and smell of a paper book; if you take care of it a good book can last a hundred years.  Even though I read e-books and love the convenience of a library in my pocket, I don't have any confidence that an e-book I own today will still be accessible to me ten years from now.
• OS X Lion, the latest version of the operating software that runs Mac computers is likely due out tomorrow.  I'm very excited but I'm more excited for iOS 5 for my iPhone due out this fall.
• The law of unintended consequences strikes again.   Windmills in Pennsylvania are killing tens of thousands of bats per year, which would otherwise eat millions of insects, which is now costing farmers millions of dollars (about $74 per acre) to deal with the insects.  Oops. 
• Over a third of the 454 White House staffers make six figure salaries, twenty-one of them making the maximum $172,200.  Really?!  And 75% of them got a raise last year. 
• This twenty-minute video is worth watching; it profiles Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry – his background and family, his heroism, and his award ceremony.  It's very touching and inspiring.
• If you get an email from "Allen Daves, minitser of the gosple of chirst" containing a couple of long, small-type PDFs full of wild-eyed, out-of-context pseudo theology… RUN!!!!  I actually read through these ramblings, and my brain is about to melt.  Not only does the guy desperately need spell-check, but it's hard for him to get through a single, angry paragraph without either condemning standard, historical doctrine or proposing an old heresy.  It would be hard to be more wrong than this guy; it's a train wreck of typos and heterodoxy.  But you've got to ignore him.  What else can you do with a fanatic who has spent thousands of hours stringing together King James Version verses to come up with a whole new systematic understanding of Christianity?