Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-6-2008

[andrewducker]

• Demotivating a (Good) Programmer
  Very, very true.
  (tags: management programming)
• Free Vs Paid
  In which it transpires investors no longer think that companies that give away their products are worth investing in...
  (tags: investment web2.0 capitalism)
• Starbucks has today been accused of wasting more than 23 million litres of water every day.
  The coffee chain, which prides itself on being green, has a health and safety policy of leaving taps running in all of its 10,000 branches worldwide it has been revealed today.
  (tags: business ecology)
• Oldest known bible to be digitised. Has many differences to modern translations
  Mr Ehrman was a born again Bible-believing Evangelical until he read the original Greek texts and noticed some discrepancies.
  
  The Bible we now use can't be the inerrant word of God, he says, since what we have are the sometimes mistaken words copied by fallible scribes.
  
  "When people ask me if the Bible is the word of God I answer 'which Bible?'"
  (tags: religion history writing bible christianity)
• The evil of payment meters
  Whereby the poor subsidise the rich. Which is a perfectly natural outcome of the system - but surely the point is that we _can_ make life fairer for the worst off...
  (tags: capitalism economics business)
• Lottery Tickets and Credit Cards: The Dangers of an Irrational Brain
  A paper in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making was inspired by the empirical observation that the poor spend a disproportionate percentage of their income on lottery tickets. They conducted two experiments to examine whether making people feel poor makes them want to play the lottery.
  
  Subjects were made to either feel relatively poor or relatively rich The group made to feel poor purchased twice as many lottery tickets (an average of 1.27) than those made to feel relatively wealthier (0.67 tickets, on average).
  
  In the second experiment, we indirectly reminded participants that, while different income groups face unequal prospects when it comes to education, employment and housing, everyone has an equal chance to win the lottery. This reminder that the lottery is a kind of "social equalizer" also increased lottery tickets purchases. The group given this reminder purchased 1.31 tickets, on average, as compared with 0.54 for those not given such a reminder.
  (tags: lottery gambling brains decisions)
• And the greatest of these is Contempt
  Using sensors that measure a married couple's heart rates, body movements and skin temperature, as well as a coding system for emotional responses, Gottman and his team are able to predict with 95 percent accuracy whether two people will divorce within 15 years.
  
  The secret, writes Gladwell, is to pay attention to what Gottman describes as the 'Four Horsemen' of a couple's relationship dynamic: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt ...
  
  "Even within the Four Horsemen, there is one emotion that he (Gottman) considers most important of all: contempt," writes Gladwell.
  
  "If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt towards the other, he considers it the single most important sign that a marriage is in trouble."
  (tags: relationships science)
• The Worst Script I Ever Read
  Well, to be fair, the worst plot you've ever read. Very funny, in a car crash kind of way.
  (tags: movies awfulness)

Comments

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how many of the Payment Meter arguments are genuine - I sat down with Scottish Powers incredibly complicated price list and worked out that I wasn't any worse off, as I didn't have to pay a standing charge. The only real downside was the lack of a direct debit discount (which I think might be banned soon anyway), and, of course, having to go to the shops to charge it up. You can get them changed to billed meters pretty easily.. am I missing a point here? Mo might disagree with me by now...

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I'd value a digital meter with an online payment option where I could, I dunno, pay for and enter a code for more credit a la phone top-up cards. Beyond that the practice of the pre-pay meter in and of itself doesn't bother me that much, although I sympathise with the anger at the principles behind it.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

I used over ninety (I saved exactly ninety) £5 Scottish Power cards in the year I was in Edinburgh. I'm not sure how that compares with my current power costs, but - I bought them on a card that was not in my name (the letting agents gave me when I moved in, so I could... buy electricity), and some time after I left, despite me still being in possession of ninety used cards (but sadly, not any of the blurry purple till receipts that come with them), they re-charged me for all the electricity that was registered as used by my meter, that wasn't shown as having been paid for on the corresponding card in my name that they sent me after I'd been there nine months.

Apparently the only way they could /not/ bill me would be to find the account of the person whose card I paid on, which they could do from the card number, on the card and on those blurry purple receipts I didn't keep ... but I had returned the card not-in-my-name to the letting agents when I left, (... so that the next person could buy electricity...), and they claimed to have destroyed it when I asked them.

I got bored of arguing and being stressed about it after a week or so, and paid them about £200.

But ... if they're going to make sure I'm /billed/ for all the electricity I use, what was the point in having to buy power cards in the first place?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

This story makes me sad :(

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

That sounds really bloody dreadful, the card system we had didn't appear to be registered to anyone, and after I didn't use my gas meter for four months, they disconnected the supply without telling me.

You know what? I used to live on a little island with no running water and only Calor gas cannisters for power. I'd quite like to go back to that...

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Demotivating a (Good) Programmer
My husband is a genius grantwriter who averages 5,000,000 per year in competitive grants. You would think his bosses would love him. Wrong. They are all threatened by him and thus treat him the way the poor programmer was treated in the article.

Oldest known bible to be digitised. Has many differences to modern translations
Uh, yeah. We knew that. :) It may be the word of God but it has been edited by men.

And the greatest of these is Contempt
I think this happens because in our society we expect to do power plays with our partners rather than love and accept them. This is sad. It is also why I hate romance novels so much.

Thanks for posting!!!

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

I have a nasty feeling my boss has already read the programmer article :(

*starts work on yet another internal application that no-one will ever use*

[marrog.livejournal.com]

"Oldest known bible to be digitised. Has many differences to modern translations"

This really isn't a great article.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I find the BBC article on Codex Sinaiticus rather annoying as it's presenting things in a rather sensationalist way. It's almost as if the writer has never heard of textual criticism, and doesn't know that the Nestle-Aland text (which almost all modern translations use as their Greek text) already accounts for the Sinaiticus text. I suppose that might be the case given that the writer seems to think that the Authorised Version is the thing to compare with (hardly anyone uses the AV nowadays, the NIV is the defacto standard), and expresses surprise that the Sinaiticus contains Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical texts.

It's also a bit unbalanced to only include comments from Ehrman, who does not represent mainstream scholarly opinion.

I expect this BBC article to be followed by a wave of uninformed "ZOMG those stupid Christians didn't know that copyists make errors!!!111! LOL!" type comments across the blogosphere.

Gah.

[zz]

i wonder how different christianity would be if it had, from an early age if not the beginning, the muslim policy of "the Text is only authoritative in language X".

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't think translations (at least modern ones) lose any of the authority that the Greek / Hebrew / Aramaic has. Islam and Christianity are going to differ on this because Islam has a stricter approach to how the text was revealed (dictated by an angel rather than inspired in otherwise ordinary people).

Certainly from the beginning 'language X' was not an issue because (the NT at least) was written in the lingua franca of the day (Greek), and even then it was 'common' (koine) Greek.

The quality of modern translations is incredibly high, but it's still useful that relatively intelligent people can access the original Greek / Hebrew fairly easily with tools like the NeXt Bible Learning Environment.