My Tools | Michael Hyatt
davemorin:
The next generation Nest thermostat
Okay, so who knew thermostats were the frontier of innovation? :)
by yours truly
What a world full of wonder…
marylikesbagels:
Earth and Space category highly commended: The Milky Way View from the Piton de l’Eau, Reunion Island by Luc Perrot (Reunion Island). The Milky Way arches over a mirror-like lake on the island of Reunion. At the bottom of the picture Piton des Neiges, the highest peak of Reunion Island, can be seen. The bright patch to the left of the image marks the bulge of stars at the heart of our Galaxy. The photographer waited two years before all the combined conditions were favourable to succeed with this photo. Picture: Luc Perrot
marylikesbagels:
A spoken-word piece about the Catholic Church’s view on same-sex attraction. He really gets to the heart of the matter, but he packs it all in there very quickly. If you have any questions, please feel free to message me or even Fr. Pontifex himself. This is a topic that deserves a huge amount of sensitivity and compassion.
Early on in this I compared beginning to believe to falling in love, and the way that faith settles down in a life is also very like the way that the first dizzy-intense phase of attraction settles (if it does) into a relationship. Rapture develops into routine, a process which keeps its customary doubleness where religion is concerned. It’s both loss and gain together, with excitement dwindling and trust growing; like all human ties, it constricts at the same time as it supports, ruling out other choices by the very act of being a choice. And so as with any commitment, there are times when you notice the limit on your theoretical freedom more than you feel what the attachment is giving you, and then it tends to be habit, or the awareness of a promise given, that keeps you trying. God makes an elusive lover. The unequivocal blaze of His presence may come rarely or not at all, for years and years – and in any case cannot be commanded, will not ever present itself tamely to order. He-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard may be much more your daily experience than anything even faintly rapturous. And yet, and yet. He may come at any moment, when and how you least expect it, and that somehow slightly colours every moment in the mass of moments when he doesn’t come. And grace, you come to recognise, never stops, whether you presently feel it or not. You never stop doubting – how could you? – but you learn to live with doubt and faith unresolved, because unresolvable. So you don’t keep digging the relationship up to see how its roots are doing. You may have crises of faith but you don’t, on the whole, ask it to account for itself philosophically from first principles every morning, any more than you subject your relations with your human significant other to daily cost-benefit analysis. You accept it as one of the givens of your life. You learn from it the slow rewards of fidelity. You watch as the repetition of Christmases and Easters, births and deaths and resurrections, scratches on the linear time of your life a rough little model of His permanence. You discover that repetition itself, curiously, is not the enemy of spontaneity, but maybe even its enabler. Saying the same prayers again and again, pacing your body again and again through the set movements of faith, somehow helps keep the door ajar through which He may come. The words may strike you as ecclesiastical blah nine times in ten, or ninety-nine times in a hundred, and then be transformed, and then have the huge fresh wind blowing through them into your little closed room. And meanwhile you make faith your vantage point, your habitual place to stand. And you get used to the way the human landscape looks from there: re-oriented, re-organised, different. —
Francis Spufford, from Unapologetic (via ayjay)
Wow. I need to read this book.
(via sds)
Shakesbear
(via tastefully…)
The process in which well-defined and prioritized objectives are broken down into specific states and actions whose progress can be monitored and measured is not the reality of how people find fulfillment in their lives, create great art, establish great societies or build good businesses. — John Kay, in his book Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
campfiresmell:
doin it right. ~CFS
Sometimes speeding things up, helps us understand time’s value. Reminds me of something a friend said recently: ‘The days are long, but the years are short.’
arainert:
From birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45. (by Frans Hofmeester)
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. — Reinhold Niebuhr (via @ronaldbaker)
SCOUT, an iPhone app for location scouting.
Okay, so I have no practical or immediate use for this app, but I think it’s cool. :) Somewhere deep down inside, maybe there’s a movie stirring or something. At any rate, it certainly captures my imagination, and I think there may be other uses for it too – now just to figure out what … :)
More details available from their website, and iTunes page.
(by FCTN)
soultips:
The reason why we cannot keep our good resolutions is that we count too much on ourselves. - St. John Vianney
How can you say there are too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers. — Mother Teresa (via weweremade2love)
clearscience:
In explaining why I haven’t been writing more Clear Science posts, I said the “activation energy” was high. That’s a scientific term. Imagine something has to go from start to finish. In the plot above, notice how finish is lower than start, meaning it has a lower energy. Things want to have a lower energy, so it’s natural to go from start to finish. But there’s a problem: In order to get from start to finish, it has to go over a hump, which has higher energy than both start and finish. The energy required to go over this hump is called the activation energy. It’s like some extra energy required to get to an overall better (lower energy) state.
Gonna hafta remember this one. ;)
African-Americans are aborted at higher rates than
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. — G. K. Chesterton
by A
It’s almost here, it’s almost here! :)
olympics:
The Finishing Touches! Workers prepare a London 2012 banner at ExCel on July 24, 2012 in London, Great Britain. Photo by Scott Heavey/Getty Images
Ottorino RESPIGHI “Antiche Danze ed Arie”, third suite, 3. Siciliana, 4. Passacaglia (by wetubemusic)