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[personal profile] andrewducker
  • Very, very true.
  • In which it transpires investors no longer think that companies that give away their products are worth investing in...
  • 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.
  • 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?'"
  • 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...
  • 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.
  • 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."
  • Well, to be fair, the worst plot you've ever read. Very funny, in a car crash kind of way.

Date: 2008-10-07 09:18 am (UTC)
zz: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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".

Date: 2008-10-07 09:37 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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.

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