Do You Take Coffee Breaks?

Once upon a time in Corporate America folks took coffee breaks.
Anyone out there still take a coffee break?

Happy National Coffee Day!

Celebrating the day with a 50/50 Decaf/Regular blend of Starbucks Verona!
What are you drinking to celebrate the day?

Blogging: Good for Your Mental Health?

An article titled A crossword puzzle a day may delay dementia makes the case that "doing crossword puzzles, reading, and playing cards daily may delay the rapid memory decline that occurs if people develop dementia". Good news for me and my wife.. we love to do crossword puzzles we find in magazines and newspapers as well as books from Simon and Schuster. Here are a few clips from the article:

Researchers from New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine spent five years following 488 people aged 75 to 85 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. During the study period, 101 of these people developed dementia.

At the start of the study the participants reported how often they participated in six leisure mind activities — reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing board or card games, having group discussions, and playing music.
...
The researchers then looked at the point when memory loss started accelerating rapidly and found that for every additional activity a person participated in, the onset of rapid memory loss was delayed by 0.18 years.

I wonder how many folks watch a lot of mindless TV instead of engaging their brains in stimulating activities like blogging? I wonder.. maybe engaging in stimulating blogging dialog is good for your mental health.. even if it is not so much beneficial for other parts of your body :)

The World Shrinks!

The world has certainly shrunk in the past 20 years. Jobs once done in the USA are now performed all over the earth. In his book review of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Edward Leamer lists what he calls three revolutionary forces in the global economy:

1. More Unskilled Workers: The economic liberalizations in China and India and Russia and South America and on and on have added to the effective global labor markets a huge number of unskilled workers and relatively little human and physical capital.
2. New Equipment for Knowledge Workers: The Internet and the PersonalComputer have fundamentally changed the nature of knowledge work, raising productivity, emphasizing talent and reducing the need for “helpers.”
3. Communications Innovations: The cell-phone and the beeper and e- mail and voice-mail keep us all wired and connected 24/7, thus eliminating the borderline between time at work and time at leisure. These same communication tools, together with the Internet and virtually costless telecommunications have extended the geographic reach of suppliers, and have increased the intensity of competition for mundane work and standardized products.

Did you catch that last part.. "competition for mundane work"?  Seriously.. I think that somewhat captures the essence of this shrinking world. We are mostly not speaking about a competition to be fulfilled in exciting and interesting jobs. What we are focusing on are jobs that need to be done so that folks like you and me can have cheap stuff.

You know.. once upon a time I really didn't care that jobs were outsourced.. most of them were manufacturing jobs.. my take was a somewhat arrogant one for sure. Then the new millennium dawned and people from places like India and Pakistan were not only carrying green cards and working here in the USA..doing jobs similar to mine.. but jobs like mine were being done in places like India and Pakistan. In other words outsourcing became personal.

So what am I trying to say.. I feel that I am once again rambling.. I guess my thoughts on this shrinking world are two fold. Firstly, it is good to understand that these jobs we are fighting for are not glamorous ones. Secondly, many of us live in denial of these impacts thinking that our jobs are safe.. and we don't care all that much until it gets personal.

I do wonder where the next 20 years will take us.. maybe one day overseas doctors will be reading our eCharts, diagnosing our diseases and prescribing treatments.. today even radiologists' jobs are being done overseas these days. Never know.

Brief Summer Movie Reviews

Autumn came to us this week so I thought that I would report in brief on the movies and videos that I saw this summer.. kind of like one of those "what I did on summer vacation" things. Here they are in random order:

	Dan in Real Life
	Waitress
	Gran Torino
	Nights in Rodanthe
	The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
	Sunshine Cleaning
	Eagle Eye
	Match Point
	Taken
	Mad Hot Ballroom
	Doubt
	Confessions of a Shopaholic
	Get Smart
	Scoop
	Ghost Town
	Atonement
	Frost/Nixon
	Duplicity
	Last Chance Harvey
	Julie and Julia

I suspect that you all may have pointed the thumb in a different direction on a few of these. A thumbs down does not mean that the movie was totally worthless (although it could mean that) and a thumbs up doesn't mean that the movie was Oscar worthy.. the thumb only indicate whether I generally had favorable memories of it.

Let me know if you saw anything this summer that is worth putting on my Netflix queue.

Violence in the Name of Religion

My cyberfriend Brian and I have been having a great conversation over at his blog around the topic of violence perpetrated in the name of religion.

I thought that I would expand the dialog here asking if you agree with these statements:

• Violence perpetrated against people for breaking a religious (not a moral) rule is not a good thing.
  
  
• Legitimate expressions of religion promote love for other people and false religious expressions advocate animosity towards others.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts about the role of religious rules in a government and what you think about countries that have (or even once had) theocratic rule. Should religion be used to justify violent behavior in punishing the violation of a religious (not a moral) rule?

Redneck Lion

From my e-mail inbox.. the owner in South Carolina was tired of thugs breaking into his shop so he came up with this idea..

The Bureaucracy of Health Insurance

This NY Times article titled Insurers Fight Speech-Impairment Remedy tells the story of a 48 year old mom who has ALS and a son with Downs Syndrome. These few clips from the piece give us a glimpse into why health insurance needs to be reformed in our country.

Kara Lynn has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., which has attacked the muscles around her mouth and throat, removing her ability to speak. A couple of years ago, she spent more than $8,000 to buy a computer, approved by Medicare, that turns typed words into speech that her family, friends and doctors can hear.

Under government insurance requirements, the maker of the PC, which ran ordinary Microsoft Windows software, had to block any nonspeech functions, like sending e-mail or browsing the Web.

Dismayed by the PC’s limitations and clunky design, Ms. Lynn turned to a $300 iPhone 3G from Apple running $150 text-to-speech software. Ms. Lynn, who is 48 and lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said it worked better and let her “wear her voice” around her neck while snuggling with her 5-year-old son, Aiden, who has Down syndrome.

Medicare and private health insurers decline to cover cheap devices like iPhones and netbook PCs that can help the speech-impaired, despite their usefulness and lower cost. (read more here)

You can see a photo of Kara and her son at the top of the article.. it is a moving photo.. more than ever it makes me want real reform in health insurance.

Ideological Fundamentalism

My friend Brian recently posted that there is usually Two Sides to Every Story.. I encourage you to check it out.. Brian is a great writer. I responded to his post saying:

"These days terms like conservative and liberal are representative of ideological fundamentalism. It is why I have been identifying more with moderation or centrism."

To that point here is a definition of Fundamentalism that I agree with:

"strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles"

Now usually this pejorative word (i.e. Fundamentalism) is used to marginalize and cubbyhole religious people who generally lean to the extreme right leanings of religion. I submit to you that many folks who hold extreme left leaning religious and ideological views are Fundamentalists as well. Their views are often as narrow as the conservative ones that they decry.

The journey from Fundamentalism has not been a straight or easy one for me. I think the first journey was a religious one where I began to embrace the ideas of grace and love from a different perspective. I had always been able to give the Greek definitions of those words but seldom manifested them in my life.. I was a hard judgmental human being. I recounted this journey from Charismatic Fundamentalism here.

The journey from Ideological Fundamentalism was a bit different. I remember in the 1990s calling Bill Clinton evil and gloating when the Monica Lewinsky scandal brought him down.. sad days for sure. My journey to Ideological Moderation or Centrism oddly came via the Blogosphere. As I dialoged with liberals I found much common ground in the conversation. I also found that there is a wide diversity of thought in the world of conservatism.. we all did not walk in locked steps. Depending on the issue I found myself comfortable in both camps.. and I was so enjoying the stimulation that this more moderate journey was bringing me.. I was learning a lot and growing as a human being.

Well, I think that I am rambling a bit and don't really have a lot more to offer on the topic. I invite you to join the conversation. Do you think Ideological Fundamentalism is an issue in the country that you live? Do you think that people on the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum can ever work together? Or are folks simply too deeply entrenched in their ideology to have a productive conversation with folks with opposing ideologies?

And yes.. I think that I am becoming more of a "glass half-full" kind of guy ☺

History on the Run

A lot has been said about the "Main Stream Media" and about the bias' (both left and right) in the press. Thought I'd share a few defining quotes about journalism. Let me know if you have a different perspective on what journalism is and how you protect yourself from being swayed by media bias.. not to say that we aren't all swayed a bit by what we read, see and hear :)

Journalism: writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation; writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest. -Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Journalism is in fact history on the run. -Thomas Griffith

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine. -Walter Cronkite

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. -Oscar Wilde

I hope we never live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of our newspapers make it. -Will Rogers

Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air. -Henry Anatole Grunwald

We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective. -Dave Barry

Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. -G. K. Chesterton

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read. -Frank Zappa

Talk Like A Pirate Day

Aaaargh! How will you celebrate? Leave your comment in Piratese :)

Christian Spam

HT: ASBO Jesus. Click on the picture to enlarge!

E-Cigarettes: Bad for Your Health

File this under "Now I have heard everything"!

Mary Travers, 1936-2009

Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, died yesterday at 72 in Danbury, Connecticut after a long battle with leukemia. She joined forces with Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey in the early 1960s. They had some great songs like "If I Had a Hammer", "Lemon Tree" and "Puff (The Magic Dragon.)"

I will always remember her when I hear "Leaving on a Jet Plane".. it was one of my favorites growing up in the 60s. May God comfort Mary's friends and family during this time of mourning.