Scratch

Lately I’ve been very interested in REST. That is, the real REST, which isn’t necessarily tied to HTTP and hasn’t necessarily got a thing to do with pretty, human-readable URLs. REST, as it turns out, is all about decoupling the client from the server such that each can evolve completely independently of the other. More to come.

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Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field in which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis

http://www.christianmind.org/history/Augustine1.htm

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the NPR production style

always feels to me like a really condescending dance partner

"We’re going to give you information, and you’re going to like it. We’re going to package it in a highly-refined and expensively-produced sequence of mounting suspense and turns out moments that’ll keep your adrenaline going the whole way, and you’ll come out the other end feeling really special and intelligent, even if all we’re talking about is the dominant color of smartphone screens."

"You like that? You’re gonna love this."

"Bet you hadn’t heard this one before"

"But wait, there’s more brain candy!"

"Let me show you something really cool"

it’s like Mr Rogers for adults

instead of "You’re beautiful and I love you just the way you are"

it’s "You’re very intelligent, and you’re learning a lot of valuable things that’ll get you ahead in life."

It’s all on the same emotional level

"Here’s a candy so you’ll hold still for your haircut. You look great, go get ‘em tiger!"

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The success of Doom made it obvious that this was no longer the case. There was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time. Once Doom had been released, any of thousands of programmers and artists could create something similar (and many did), but none of those had anywhere near the same impact. Similarly, if you’re a programmer, you’re probably perfectly capable of writing Facebook or the Google search engine or Twitter or a browser, and you certainly could churn out Tetris or Angry Birds or Words with Friends or Farmville or any of hundreds of enormously successful programs. There’s little value in doing so, though, and that’s the point – in the Internet age, software has close to zero cost of replication and massive network effects, so there’s a positive feedback spiral that means that the first mover dominates.

Michael Abrash http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/

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If Christ be glorious, it is all the heaven I ask for. If he shall be King of kings, and Lord of lords, let me be nothing, if he shall but reign, and every tongue shall call him blessed, it shall be bliss to me to know it; and if I may be but as one of the withered roses which lie in the path of his triumph, it shall be my paradise.

Charles Spurgeon

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What’s the first thing you do when you arrive at your desk? For many of us, checking email or listening to voice mail is practically automatic. In many ways, these are among the worst ways to start a day. Both activities hijack our focus and put us in a reactive mode, where other people’s priorities take center stage. They are the equivalent of entering a kitchen and looking for a spill to clean or a pot to scrub.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-spend-the-first-10-minutes-of-your-day/

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There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings," she says. "Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.

Charlan Nemeth

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Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.

Keith Sawyer

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The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner

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The Boom picture is uglier than mere splatters and a wandering, pointless, cosmic, global, national, state, and personal history. What is good and what is bad? Isn’t rape an evolutionary impulse? Isn’t trading in every post menopausal wife for a fresh bit of breeding flesh a sound evolutionary move?

N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl

People are who they really are when they think no one is watching.

I would rather have someone who is a little bit of a jerk all the time than someone who is pleasant *until* no one is watching.

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The concept of Christian morality has been hijacked by boring people who have reduced morality to the avoidance ethic (and, it’s deranged [and worse] cousin, the boycott ethic).

Matt Perman

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What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

Think about your own death. It is coming, as inevitable as your birth.

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I will destroy you. Then you will know that I am the LORD.

God

I don’t think there are very many direct quotes in the OT.

I have trouble believing that my God is both central in his own affections and interested in my little day-to-day activities.

Individual virtue and selflessness have been replaced with systems of checks and balances to ensure that people’s tendency to look out for number one doesn’t destroy the whole. That in itself isn’t bad, but when we rely on these systems as a replacement for virtue, we prepare ourselves for failure. Our systems will never be good enough to counteract human sinfulness.

Only virtuous individuals taking personal responsibility for their spheres of influence can prevent the disintegration of society. Individual hard work and sacrifice.