Rotundus.com

Television viewers in Canada now get to pay a little bit more and might have to view more advertising courtesy of new cable and broadcasting rules that came into effect Tuesday.

Conventional television broadcasters are free as of Tuesday to air as many advertisements as they wish, up from a maximum of 15 minutes per hour under the old system that died on Aug. 31. And beginning on their September bills, cable customers will start to see a new line on their monthly invoice amounting to a 1.5 per cent increase.

- Excerpted from the Calgary Herald

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

- Excerpted from Lisa Miller in Newsweek
(Via Albert Mohler)

I think that she's missing out on the significant number of deists among the founders of the United States. (At least she's not as crazy as those who put together the The American Patriot’s Bible). That said, I think that she's got quite a point.

The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That's the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.

"The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview.

- Excerpted from the Washington Post (emphasis mine)

One of the reasons that I canceled cable is the hope of decreasing the amount of multi-tasking that I do. Of course, the whole reason that this is getting posted now is that I'm procrastinating from reading a wonderfully-boring 237 page document. (Which is at least slightly more readable than the recent 500ish, 600ish, and 700ish page documents that I've been working through).