Rotundus.com

Here's a brief excerpt of what Tim Bayly at The Resurgence had to say on the topic of men missing from church:

Men want to be challenged. Don't sell them short or coddle them. I once had the privilege of spending an evening with a veteran pastor who had pastured five churches in his forty years of ministry, a man respected in his denomination who routinely took dying churches and turned them around.

We were discussing visitation and I was surprised to hear him describe his current visitation program: He was visiting six to ten homes a week--visits set up in advance for times when he could be sure the fathers would be there, as well as the mothers. During these visits he would ask such questions as: How often do you attend worship? How often do you lead your family in devotions? Do you yourself have a time of Bible reading and prayer each day?

Why was I surprised?

Because just the thought of doing something similar in my church caused my face to blush as I thought of the embarrassed responses I'd get from many of our members. "In fact," I told him, "if I pulled a stunt like that in my church I might not last much longer as their pastor."

"You know," he responded, "one thing I've learned over the years is that people do what you expect them to do."

When Willow Creek released a study earlier this year on Christians' thoughts on their churches, they reached a similar conclusion: that the most common reason given for leaving the church was a lack of challenge.

The answer, by and large, is no, according to a Pew Forum survey.

Among all singles, just 16% say they are currently looking for a romantic partner. That amounts to 7% of the adult population.

Of course, some may want to interpret a no in this survey as synonymous with too-chicken-to-say-yes. Or, in the case of women, saying no may reflect a commitment to traditional gender roles.

I think that I may have posted the wrong article for Jen earlier. For some reason I had the lying-correlated-with-intelligence angle on my mind. Here's the intro to another article which provides details of research suggesting that kids learn to lie at a very young age.

Whether lying about raiding the biscuit tin or denying they broke a toy, all children try to mislead their parents at some time. Yet it now appears that babies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.

Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.

Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old.

You've heard, of course, of digital rights management - used to control how you play, copy or otherwise use media files like music.

Now Apple wants to apply that concept to your sporting wardrobe. In US patent application 2008/0218310, the company details a way to stop us using unauthorised training shoes with the in-sole sensors it sells as part of the Nike + iPod kit.

...

The patent details a way of "pairing a sensor and an authorised garment", such as "running shoes, shirts or slacks". Companies like Nike could authorise their garments by burying an RFID chip inside it. That chip is required to activate the sensor. No longer will you be able to use the sensor you paid for with any shoe of your choosing.

(From New Scientist)

Why is it that people seem to complain more often about Microsoft's business practices then they do about Apples?