Sunspots 81

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Politics: Charles Colson wrote "Our message is not, We put you in office, now pay up; but rather, This should be done because it is right, it is a principle that undergirds any well-ordered civil society," and "This is why it is so crucial not to allow ourselves to be tucked into any party's hip pocket, or cast as just another political interest group in the ideological struggle."

Computing: An article reports that Tim Berners-Lee, who probably best deserves the title, inventor of the Internet, has called for studying it socially, economically, and psychologically. It's not just a computer network. He's right about that.

There's a Six Word Story group in Flickr. The idea is to post a photo, and a six word story that goes along with it. * (see below for another Six Word Story item)

Science: P. Z. Myers on Jonathan Wells (author of Icons of Evolution), who, says Myers, misunderstands and/or distorts the embryonic evidence for common descent.

Mathematicians on how to cut a cake (or divide other items) fairly.

Literature: A good post on Why I Read Fantasy. She says "Best of all, fantasy novels are almost always about great heroes, which I see as illustrative of our Lord, the greatest hero of all."

Heard, and read, on The Writer's Almanac for November 7th , this quotation from Stephen Greenblatt: "I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago."

Christianity: Jan argues that Christians, like others, have an erotic imagination. She also remarks that our art doesn't reflect that, although there's some that does in the Bible.

Patricia, at Intellectuelle, has posted that not just men like Ted Haggard (whatever he did), but women may be tempted toward wrongful sexual behavior.

*Commenter John Dekker told me about a blogger who is compiling six word summaries of all the books of the Bible, and taking suggestions. (In my last Sunspots , I mentioned six word science fiction stories by well-known authors.) This week's Christian Carnival is here. (For information on locating these Carnivals, see here.)

When I don't tell where I found an item above, I either found it directly, or was probably pointed to it by the Librarian's Internet Index, SciTech Daily, or Arts and Letters Daily. All of these sources are great.

Thanks for reading! Keep clicking away.

Image source (public domain)