Links for 2009-09-18

"But then there's this other phrase which, when we listen to ourselves saying it, is the scariest part of any given Sunday. "Forgive us our trespasses," we pray, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."**

That's disturbingly conditional. It's almost contractual. The conditions laid out there are crystal clear and explicit, but we tend to recoil from them. We pray this one prayer more than any other, but every other prayer omits this quid pro quo. "Forgive us according to thy infinite mercy," we pray, or "according to your boundless grace," or "for Jesus' sake," or "in Jesus' name." Straight-up, unconditional, one-way forgiveness is what we ask for in every other prayer. Apart from our recitation of that one prayer, you'll rarely ever hear us ask that this be conditional -- "Forgive us as we forgive others.""

"The site's a little new to bring the bad news in this way, but, believe me, it's because I love you all: If you're consistently in bad meetings, it's time to look in the mirror.

No one would accept consistently terrible classes. No one would continually repeat research procedures that didn't yield interesting data. But there's this weird assumption that meetings are just inherently bad and unimprovable."

"The Let's Define Words Differently Meeting

Common floating signifiers include assessment, integrity, diversity, transparency, affirmative action, budget, and horse's ass"

"It's tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss it out of hand, and if in fact you did you wouldn't be wrong. But why? It would certainly better if more people knew a little more about molecules and light, and maybe the next generation of farmers could work out for themselves what the effect of microwave radiation on crops is likely to be."

"Now pretend we've got a photon of light, which in our picture we can treat as a tiny particle flying through this storm of water molecules crashing around. It runs into a molecule and in the process interacts with these rotations and vibrations - if you think of yourself as jumping on to a fast-moving merry-go-round it's clear that you'll gain speed if you land on the side rotating with your direction of motion and lose speed if you land on the side rotating against your direction of motion. Same sort of thing for the photon hitting the rotating molecule. A photon can't change speed though, so its energy change is expressed in terms of a changing frequency. "

"If you want less bullshit and less kool-aid drinking, dispense with all the "vision statement" and "mission statement" crap and just say "What is our problem and what are we actually willing to do about it?" That focuses the mind quite remarkably."

"Embarking on a frantic hunt, Langdon and his companion follow a 500-year-old trail through Atlanta's most historic libraries and exalted monuments, pursued by a asthmatic assassin the cult has sent to thwart them. What they discover threatens to expose a conspiracy that goes all the way back to Allen Ginsberg and the very founding of NAMBLA."