Rotundus.com

I posted a year ago over a year ago, about why it seems pragmatically a bad idea to marry someone uncommitted to a church. Most Christians would agree with restricting dating to other Christians (e.g. 2 Cor 6:14), but I hadn't come across anything like my argument before. Yet, recently I found a couple such sources:

Cherlin ties the divorce culture in marriage to the prioritization of “choice” in “spirituality” and religion. Before we learn to divorce our husbands or wives, we learn first to divorce our parents’ churches. He is right, and we have the revolving door congregations and marriage licenses to prove it, to our shame and, ultimately, to our judgment.

- Russell Moore, reviewing Andrew J. Cherlin's book The Marriage-Go-Round

... and secondly:

I think it's also an important factor for single women as they are trying to discern the various men around them and their relationships. When you see a man who's willing to commit to a local church in a generation that commits to nothing, that doesn't even really want to commit to marriage, you're seeing somebody who has said, "All right. There's something that is greater than myself; there's a community that is greater than myself." And you're also seeing a man who's willing to submit himself to other men in terms of authority. I always counsel the women around me, when they're considering somebody they might marry, to ask themselves if this is a man who is himself accountable. If we're to practice the biblical commands to submit to and to honor and to respect our husbands, one of the greatest safeties that we will encounter is knowing that this man is himself submitted to other men.

- Carolyn McCulley

Scientists conducted a survey of some 7,000 players who were logged on to a game called EverQuest II. And they discovered some interesting things. First off, the average age of the gamers surveyed was 31. And that playing time tended to increase with age. Which is also where the sex differences come in. The female gamers actually logged more time online: an average of 29 hours a week, versus 25 for the males, with the top players putting in 57 hours a week on the girl’s side, and 51 for the guys. What’s more, it looks like women are more likely to lie about how much they really play. The researchers found that the gals tended to lowball how long they spend glued to the screen.

- Excerpted from Scientific American

I don't think that this would apply to all types of computer games, but still something interesting to think about.

At the moment my internet connection is defaulting to use OpenDNS servers, but they've been annoying enough for me to dig around in the settings to find out how to hardcode alternate DNS servers.

Why the annoyance? I keep getting messages like this one found in the OpenDNS forums:

For the past few weeks, I've been getting this error for about 60% of the websites I visit. Other DNS providers can resolve the domains fine, it seems OpenDNS is the one having issues..

"Hmm, isn't loading right now.

... (As a sidenote, it seems to happen to a domain for about 20 minutes, then the domain is fine for a day or so, then it happens again.)

Hijacking DNS requests to redirect to an OpenDNS page, instead of simply failing to respond to them is simply unacceptable. And, since I've never had similar, repeated problems with any DNS server I've used, I feel quite free to blame OpenDNS. But with alternate DNS server hardcoded, things are now working normally again.

[A] Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

... The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide -- each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.

- Excerpted from The Record