Since moving to an apartment sans Internet I’ve not done much online reading lately. To be honest, I haven’t missed it much either. Not that I don’t enjoy it; but it’s not one of those necessary things in life, like peanut butter or clean clothing.
That one’s from This Is Indexed.
Tim Challies had a fascinating paragraph quoted from Martin Lloyd-Jones. A bit is excerpted here; the rest of the paragraph is at Challies’ blog.
Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’.
Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in online sales, according to a study noted by the BBC.
Charles Duncombe says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Mr Duncombe says when recruiting staff he has been "shocked at the poor quality of written English".
I guess it’s a good thing I can spell. Ironically it’s my editor who can’t. (Link via Gene Veith)
Pay cash to win the junk food war—i.e., paying cash seems to correlate with a lesser likelihood of buying so-called “vice foods” like cookies and chips. (Hint: it’s also a good way not to go into debt or overspend your budget!)
Relying on the Internet for factoids isn’t necessarily a great thing… or so goes a study summarized in the New York Times and at the Chronicle of Higher Education blog (which link I found via Challies).
Long ago, Socrates warned of the danger of writing. In recording thought in written words, he believed, people save themselves the trouble of keeping thought alive in the mind. People wouldn’t have to remember things, or reason their way ”through” to ideas and values on their own. Instead of “living” truth we would have dead letters.
I can vouch for that idea from Socrates—I ran across the same aversion to writing when studying the early history of rhetoric this past spring. (Side note: the Greeks had a point when they weren’t quite so keen as we are on writing. Sure, it facilitates mass communication, but it’s also communication removed from context—you don’t have the intonation or inflection of the speaker to help interpret the writing. Then of course there is this aspect.) Maybe you’ve experienced the phenomenon the study showed: if you can go back to it later, you don’t remember what you’ve read as well. It’s almost common sense.
And for your lighthearted viewing pleasure: Star Wars as told by a three-year-old.
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