Sunspots 651

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

The Arts: Here's a web page explaining many of the features of The Garden of Earthly Delights, a really strange painting by Hieronymus Bosch. (His first name is also spelled with a J.)

Listverse tells us where some movies were actually shot.

Christianity: Christianity Today discusses how information appliance use changes the way we read the Bible.

Christianity Today also reflects on the 500th anniversary of Luther's theses.

Ken Schenck has posted 95 theses for today's church.


Computing: National Public Radio reports on Facebook's questions about whether it's doing more harm than good.

Gizmo's Freeware reports on a free Optical Character Recognition web site.

Food: Listverse discusses 10 food plants that have been drastically genetically modified (all prior to the discovery of DNA).


Politics: FiveThirtyEight analyzes tweeting, and finds that those who self-report that they are very conservative, or very liberal, are much more likely to tweet about politics.

Economic columnist Robert Samuelson says that there's no hard evidence that cutting taxes leads to economic growth.

FiveThirtyEight also says that we don't really know how many people are in gangs in the US.

A Wired writer discusses how the Trump administration has stopped collecting all sorts of potentially useful data.

Science: Nature reports that there are actually two species of orangutan, and one of these is in danger of extinction.

A US Government report clearly blames human activity for global climate change.

A poem, "Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist," was featured in The Writer's Almanac for November 7.

Thanks for looking!



Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 503

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

The Arts: A man with cerebral palsy creates artwork with a typewriter. Amazing. The Mind Unleashed includes a video, less than 5 minutes, of the man and his work.
Christianity: From The Daily Beast: Rap artists using their music for Christianity.
Computing: (and maybe Politics) The National Security Agency released a report on December 24th -- the release date, by itself, suggests that there were things to try to hide -- on how data collected on US citizens has been misused, and how it hasn't helped catch terrorists, according to a report by Bloomberg News.
Science:  Wired has an article on the most amazing discoveries about microbes, in 2014. There were a lot of them.
National Public Radio reports that scientists are making progress on producing artificial organs (which include cultured human cells) as a way of looking for cures for various disease conditions, where mice are not a good model of human physiology.
Sports: Michael Jordan, arguably the best basketball player ever, turned 50 last year, not too happily.

 Image source (public domain)