Rotundus.com

I find it amusing the sorts of queries that lead people to Rotundus.com, and one that seems to drive a fair number of people to Rotundus is talk of athletic scholarships. I don't think that anyone is too likely to mistake me for a world-class athlete, so I decided to investigate this. Go to Ask.com and query for "should universities offer athletic scholarships" (no quotes). I find it kind of amusing that Rotundus seems to be beating out places connected with Yale University in the search results. (The way that the query from my server logs is phrased also makes me wonder if Rotundus.com has ever been cited in an essay of some sort - maybe at the high school level where they aren't too picky about references).

Other random queries that have driven people to the site in the past few weeks have related to charismatic christianity, the planet pluto, accomodations in Saskatchewan (where incidentally I've not yet been), worldview analysis, pawn shops, stargate, and carcasonne. I love the eclectic mixture!

I've observed lately that I seem to be drinking a lot more tea than before and was wondering if there was a maximum amount of tea that one should drink any given day. I tend to drink decaf tea, so it can't really be caffeine that I'm getting hooked on. (Currently I alternate between Tetley decaffeinated orange pekoe and a selection of Celestial Seasonings herbal teas also lacking in caffeine). As well, when I drink tea I don't add any sugar or the like to it so it doesn't seem to be sugar that's driving me to drink tea.

Today, or yesterday according to the clock, I came across an article talking about whose hands control of media outlets falls into. In this case, the article used the statistic that the vast majority of US political contributions made by employees of Google went to the Democratic party to argue that the company is a left-leaning organization.

The article goes on to give an example of a recent removal from YouTube of some material by a right-wing individual, insinuating that political motivations may have lain behind this. (I haven't seen the material in question).

I guess that my question is, if the list of articles displayed on Google News is computer-generated using some unknown algorithm, how much of an impact do you think that the developers' political views have? (Depending on how exactly the algorithm works, this might be one of the better ways of trying to avoid bias in media reporting.)

(There are some statistics that suggest that already the journalistic profession's views may not reflect those of the public at large. Might be true, but then again you know what they say about statistics...)

I tend to buy quite a few books, but I don't really want to expand much beyond the two bookshelves that I purchased since moving out of Alberta. (I suppose that I have another bookshelf kicking around in "my bedroom" back in BC, but I'm not going to count that). Albert Mohler seems to find it difficult to get rid of old books, but I don't think that I'm quite as attached to those that I've previously read. I tend to keep a few, but try to keep the number of kept books down.

One question that this leaves is how to keep the number of books in my posession down to a reasonable quantity. Has anyone tested out BookCrossings which works on the premise of leaving free books around with ID stickers pointing you to the website if you wish to track them?

It sounds like an interesting system, although I have my suspicions that books left lying in random places will frequently be tossed in with the garbage when people come around to clean the place. I'm also not sure how well it might work with anything other than plain old fiction.