An excerpt from The Christian Paradox on Harpers’s web site tells how a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong…

In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it’s that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention.

This is possibly the discussion America most needs to have. Anyone who has read their Bible - and I don’t mean like a chore, I mean really read it - will agree that Jesus was a liberal. If Jesus were alive today, he’d be a Democrat. He taught his followers to care for the sick, give to the poor, feed the hungry, visit the prisoner. The idea that the right-wing seems to have a monopoly on religion in this country is a horrible irony that does nothing to honor the very faith of the people it claims to represent.

Yesterday it was on Engadget, and now today I see it on Photoethnography - there is rumor spreading that Canon has a new digital SLR coming to market soon.

Rumors of the EOS-5D include:

• 13 megapixel full-frame sensor! (24mmx36mm)
• 9 point autofocus (w/ 6 invisible points)
• up to 60 frames at 3fps with JPG high quality
• 2.5" LCD display
• USB 2.0

If there is any truth to this, an announcement should come within weeks, and the camera itself should be available in October. Street price is rumored to be around $3000 USD.

In an article about getting organized on his site, Steve Pavlina offers some interesting insight on what causes clutter:

So the process of organizing really comes down to having a system for automating decisions about where everything goes. Disorganized people have few or no systems, so they must make every decision on a case by case basis. Eventually this becomes overwhelming, and clutter begins to pile up. Organized people will make far fewer decisions in the long run. It takes far more time to be disorganized than it does to be organized because disorganized people lose so much time to inefficiency.

It’s absolutely true. I get stacks of receipts and mail and various papers that grow over the week until I sort them on the weekend: filing what should be kept, shredding anything with personal information on it, and trashing everything else. The real reason for my pile(s) of unsorted clutter is that I don’t have a systems in place for dealing with those things immediately - or, in at least one case, the systems I do have is ineffective.

Pavlina offers good advice for creating a physical organization that provides visual cues to mental organization. That is to say that upon entering the room, you will immediately recognize the organizational system and file things accordingly. It’s really very good advice, especially for those of us who keep too many things filed in our heads already!

From the CDC, we find:

• Within 20 Minutes of Quitting - changes in your health that begin as little as 20 minutes from your last puff.
• The Benefits of Quitting - a list of health benefits when you stop smoking.
• The Health Consequences of Smoking on the Human Body - an interactive look at the effects smoking has on various organs in the human body.

There are also a dozen or so links to information to help you quit.

This is pretty cool. This guy has sliced up subway maps for your iPod photo. He’s done Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Hong Kong.

How many members of the Bush administration does it take to change a light bulb?

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb
4. One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of light bulbs
5. One to give a billion dollar, no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner: Light Bulb Change Accomplished
7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally in the dark
8. One insider to viciously smear #7
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along
10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

original here

Space shuttle Discovery landed safely at 8:11am ET at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California without incident. I predicted disaster, but sometimes it’s good to be wrong. I’m happy to see the crew return home safely.

Shuttle, docked at space station.

Adding further to my recent tirades (1, 2) about the shuttle program, I’ve found another voice with which I agree.

The black hole of the shuttle/ISS has left the projects that produce real science advances to scrabble for crumbs. For the amount of tax money sunk into the shuttle, we could have sent untold numbers of unmanned probes around the solar system. We could have continued the moon program and thoroughly explored our own satellite. We could have developed powerful and practical ion drive units to speed our probes (and possible future manned missions) over the vast distances of space.

Alas, we are stuck with this white elephant. NASA plans on finally scrapping the shuttles at the end of this decade. The ISS will still not be completed by then. And thus we will have spent 40 years and untold hundreds of billions of dollars to find ourselves no further advanced than when the Russians placed Mir into orbit.

Okay, guilty admission time…
It’s morbid to say, and I don’t ever want to wish for seven of our society’s best and brightest to die, but I have a feeling this shuttle is going to have trouble. I voiced it quietly last week, and I might as well make the prediction here in writing. I won’t be surprised if Discovery burns up on re-entry just like Challenger did. I think removing that filler material from the bottom was a bad move, and I’m not comfortable with that damaged blanket under the nose cone, either.

The return trip was supposed to happen today at 4:00am, and we got up at four this morning to see it. It’s interesting that NASA decided to pass on this one and keep the crew up in space for an extra day, eh? And all they’re saying is that weather was unfavorable.

The cloud cover, although within NASA’s safety limits for landing, was enough to make mission controllers uncomfortable about attempting a Monday touchdown in Florida.

It’s not being made into a big deal. News programs are just brushing it off and taking NASA at their word. But it seems to me that with Irene approaching Florida’s coast, doesn’t it seem like weather is going to get worse if they wait, rather than better? And if the cloud cover is “well within safety limits”, what are they worried about… maybe the possibility of being unable to see a shuttle burning up because the clouds were in their way?

For the sake of the astronauts aboard that hunk of junk, I hope everything is all right. But honestly I feel that things might not be, and I can’t help thinking that a disintegrated shuttle is pretty hard to sink billions of dollars into.

Travel is a hassle. It’s fun to get out and see things, but arranging hotels and flights and rentals - it’s a hassle. With the advent of the internet, sites like Expedia and Travelocity and Orbitz came along promising to make that all easy. So when I read stories like what happened to Maddox, it pisses me off.

Boycott Orbitz. There are plenty of other places to get your tickets. Consumers must unite for their causes if they want their voices to be heard.

A cool blog about photobooths.