religion

Don’t use oxygen and smoke, please.

Thomas PM Barnett, a great Powerpointer, mentions that Al Gore has his Nobel Prize because of his PPTs (actually Keynote, but same difference, presentation software).

Read/Write Web has good thoughts on Microsoft’s playing catch-up with Google on a number of web tools. I like competitor for Google. It means we’ll keep getting innovation. And don’t count our Yahoo. They are building a lot of stuff these days.

The cartoon where Jesus, Mohammed, and the unseen Barmaid talk are usually good. Like this one: Snake.

Free To Play notes a study that says of the time kids ages 2 to 17 play games, 91% of it is on free games.

WebKit now has an implementation of a local SQL database (via John Gruber). That’s odd, and cool. It seems to be what Google Gears is trying to do, or what Flash does with its Local Shared Objects. All of these kick the butt of mere cookies for storage. The real thing they allow is to allow web applications to work without an internet connection. What’s WebKit? It’s the engine inside Safari and KDE browsers. This local storage thing is being discussed with great enthusiasm these days seems like. It’s still a great time to be working on web stuff.

Last night Leah and I visited a bookstore after dinner and I looked at a book called Beautiful Code. It’s got a chapter by Douglas Crockford. I’ve not bought it yet, but it’s been added to my “to read” list. I’ve been trying to write my JavaScript according to his code conventions.

I have mentioned before how much I esteem Thomas P.M. Barnett. In a recent blog post he points out a USA Today story about a new term in American Islam: Sushi

The quote from the USA Today story:

He calls himself “Sushi,” the popular term for a combination of Sunni and Shiite. Once the glib nickname for the children of intermarried couples, it has become shorthand for Muslim who blur sectarian lines.

Here’s TPMB’s comments:

Gotta love “Sushi.” Yet another example of Japan’s successful cultural exports! Seriously. A term people choose for themselves because the word strikes them as cool.

None of this is to suggest that America grows less religious, because just the opposite is true. But don’t confuse rising religiosity (more faith and more practice) with rising religion (the institutions and hierarchies and sectarianism that come with them).

The rule set on religion gets looser in America even as people get more intense about it. It becomes more personalized and direct and about “the book.”

And it becomes non-denominational as a result.

Read Stephen Prothero’s history of faith in America in his Religious Literacy, and you’ll see the argument plain as day.

Yet another reason why I do not worry about losing any “Long War.” The outcome was never in doubt. Just our belief in ourselves.

That book “Religious Literacy” looks pretty good.