Rotundus.com

Can "Church" Happen Online?

"... in the end, promoting an internet community as a “church” is problematic. An important part of church is sharing common life with spiritual siblings, and it’s hard to see how this can happen with little more than a laptop."

Needed: A science stimulus

"U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering; South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively. America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering. America has been consuming its seed corn: From 1970 to 1995, federal support for research in the physical sciences, as a fraction of gross domestic product, declined 54 percent; in engineering, 51 percent. ... Annual federal spending on mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering now equals only the increase in health-care costs every nine weeks."

The Unborn Paradox

An article about a recent MTV show involving abortion - "This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed."

Waking Up From the Pill

"Fifty years ago, birth-control pills gave women control of their bodies, while making it easy to forget their basic biology—until in some cases, it’s too late."

God's little rabbits: Religious people out-reproduce secular ones by a landslide

"… women among all denominational categories give birth to far more children than the non-affiliated. And this remains true even among those (Jewish and Christian) communities who combine nearly double as much births with higher percentages of academics and higher income classes as their non-affiliated Swiss contemporaries."

Weisleder: Religious marriage does not include property rights

I'm a little bit confused about this one given the state of the law regarding common-law relationships - however the judge in this case appears to have distinguished between the religious marriage (in this case under Sharia law) and the state endorsement of this several years later in determining how property is to be divided in the event of a divorce.

To cut the deficit, get rid of our surplus of laws

"Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities." - how it's easier to get a new program than to kill an old. Another suggestion: "There is one common technique that has been used in successful legal overhauls, from Justinian's recodification in ancient times to the Napoleonic code that is the basis of modern European civil law to the uniform commercial code adopted in the United States in the 1950s. The technique is this: radical simplification."

The World's Most Expensive Drugs

"The nine drugs on our list all cost more than $200,000 a year for the average patient who takes them. Most of them treat rare genetic diseases that afflict fewer than 10,000 patients. For these diseases, there are few if any other treatments. So biotech companies can charge pretty much whatever they want."

The blurb accompanying this 5 minute video clip: "In the Netherlands professional women have been able to work part-time for years. Now many men are doing the same, leaving them with more time for family."

Curious what people here would think of this sort of thing.