Top iPhone apps

Here's 3 recent NYT articles on top iPhone apps:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/ten-favorite-iphone-apps/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/technology/personaltech/11smart.html

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/app-smart-extra-the-best-free-apps-for-the-iphone/

Here's Time's list

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379_1944345,00.html

And here's my list

http://seattletacomatom.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-favorite-iphone-apps-as-of-november.html

Fruits of the Spirit

"The fruits of the Spirit are most clearly demonstrated in our relationships with others. They are a visible and practical measure of our spirituality." i.e. the way we get along with those around us tells others about God's love. The quotation is from a recent IVCF daily devotional. 

Galatians 5:22-23 (Version: The Message)

But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments,not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. 

See it at YouVersion.com:

http://read.ly/Gal5.22.MSG

Credit card mistakes to avoid.

By Moolanomy for U.S. News & World Report
There is plenty of debate over whether or not you should use credit cards, especially if you are in debt. If you have credit cards, you want to be sure you are using them to your advantage and avoid costly mistakes. To help you avoid these mistakes, here is a list of the 10 biggest credit card mistakes that people make.

Find the best credit card rewards
1. Using your credit card like a debit card.
Your credit card is not your bank debit card. Never put your credit card into an ATM. No, it's not going damage your credit card, but it will cost you. Often you can expect a flat fee for getting a cash advance and also an astronomical interest rate on top of that for the convenience.
2. Signing up for a card with an annual fee and not setting a reminder in your calendar
It is sometimes a good idea to sign up for a new credit card to get a big sign-up bonus or take advantage of a balance-transfer offer. However, if you ended up with a card that has an annual fee, be sure to set a reminder in your calendar if you don't plan to keep the card and want to avoid the fee. Far too many people pay annual fees on credit cards because they forget to cancel the card.
3. Not properly researching foreign transaction fees
Before traveling overseas, you need to realize that every credit card has different foreign currency exchange rates and international transaction fees. Typical fees are anywhere from 0% to 3%. If you have several cards in your wallet, you should use the one that has the best exchange rate.
Please install the latest version of the free Adobe Flash Player. Download now.

For help with Flash, see Adobe's Flash Player Support page.

Please install the latest version of the free Adobe Flash Player. Download now.

For help with Flash, see Adobe's Flash Player Support page.

4. Lending someone your card or card number
This is a recipe for disaster. If you give someone your card number, he or she may be able to make an exorbitant number of purchases. Protect your account by refusing to give out your card or card number.
5. Spending more on your card than you have in the bank
Credit card debt is one of the most costly types of debt. In fact, it is one reason so many people face huge financial problems. If you have a card, you need to be sure that you have a system in place to limit or monitor your spending. You need to know how to budget with your card, and if you don't do it well, you need to immediately address your credit card debt problems.
6. Giving anyone other than your spouse signing rights
If you get a secondary card for someone, you are liable for all the charges. If you're married, you're already liable. Otherwise, you are taking a serious risk by adding other card members. The only possible exception might be your children, and if they have accounts you should monitor them.
7. Not calling to ask to reduce your APR
If you are trying to get out of credit card debt, call your card issuer and ask for a lower rate. Just gather a few offers for lower rates you have in your mailbox and threaten to leave if they don't reduce your rate. If they don't budge, move your balance elsewhere.

8. Signing up for a card to get a free T-shirt or a 10% discount on a $20 shirt
There can be some very lucrative sign-up bonuses. Your best bet is to sign up for cards with really good offers. A free T-shirt and a 10% off are not good incentives.
9. Not properly managing your statement and payments
Some people get into credit card trouble simply because they don't review their statements and they don't have a system in place for paying their bills. You need a system. If you are not in a habit of reviewing your statement, it is likely that you are making some recurring payments you know nothing about.
10. Not taking advantage of credit card rewards
I figure if you have a credit card you might as well be getting rewards. There is no such thing as the right card because the right card depends on your spending habits. Just be sure your spending is offering you something of value.
Published Nov. 15, 2010
 from MSN Money and U.S. News and World Report
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Banking/CreditCardSmarts/10-worst-credit-card-mistakes.aspx?ucsort=1

NYTimes: Google Fashion Shopping Site Makes Debut

"The process at Boutiques.com is accomplished through visual search technology, and what style experts like Ms. Goodman and Ms. Holtz conveyed to Google code writers about the nuances of fashion — from color and pattern to silhouette and what looks good together and what does not."

CRITICAL APPRAISAL: Google Fashion Shopping Site Makes Debut

With Boutiques.com, Google has created a new e-commerce site that significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online.

http://nyti.ms/blFBF1

This fashion site really is game-changing for online fashion shopping - look at the lengths they went to. TE

"In simple terms, what the style experts did was come up with about 500 words for color, shape and pattern — robin’s egg blue, for instance, and gingham — and then the engineers trained the algorithm to know what each was. They would have pictures of what gingham was and what gingham wasn’t. “We did that word by word by word." ...
"Despite the amount of products that a search on Boutiques.com kicks out, the download time is very fast, and choices appear on extra-long pages so you don’t have to keep clicking. Virtually every kind of information is analyzed — price, brand, color and so on. The site also includes a system called “Complete the Look,” for which Ms. Goodman wrote “a ton of rules,” Mr. Shah said, “and our computer vision and machine learning guys implemented them.”

Well said

"It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.""

From The New York Times:

OP-ED COLUMNIST: Too Good to Check

This tall tale just had to be repeated. And repeated. And repeated. The facts had to wait till Anderson Cooper checked them out.

http://nyti.ms/cw3LHg

NYTimes: When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays

" "Life is not long,"Samuel Johnson said, "and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent." Henry Ford was more blunt: "Idleness warps the mind." [and...] one of the favorite sayings of William F. Buckley Jr.: "Industry is the enemy of melancholy.""

FINDINGS: When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays

Researchers said they found that in most activities, a mind that wandered could diminish one's happiness.

http://nyti.ms/bubc3G

Warning about kids and cell phones.

"...Children should text rather than call, she said, and pregnant women should keep phones away from the abdomen."
"...Radiation that penetrates only two inches into the brain of an adult will reach much deeper into the brains of children because their skulls are thinner and their brains contain more absorptive fluid"

DIGITAL DOMAIN: Should You Be Snuggling With Your Cellphone?
If you assumed that worries about cellphone radiation were unfounded, a new survey of scientific investigations suggests that you think again.
http://nyti.ms/d4HfVC

Gal 5:16-23 (The Message)

"The Message" translation makes a familiar passage look suddenly new.
Gal 5:16-23 (The Message)
16 My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness.
17 For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day.
18 Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?
19 It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;
20 trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits;
21 the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.
21 This isn't the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God's kingdom.
22 But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments,
23 not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

2 Corinthians 1 The Rescue

 ^3-5...He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. We have plenty of hard times that come from following the Messiah, but no more so than the good times of his healing comfort—we get a full measure of that, too.

 ^6-7When we suffer for Jesus, it works out for your healing and salvation. If we are treated well, given a helping hand and encouraging word, that also works to your benefit, spurring you on, face forward, unflinching. Your hard times are also our hard times. When we see that you're just as willing to endure the hard times as to enjoy the good times, we know you're going to make it, no doubt about it.

 ^8-11We don't want you in the dark, friends, about how hard it was when all this came down on us in Asia province. It was so bad we didn't think we were going to make it. We felt like we'd been sent to death row, that it was all over for us. As it turned out, it was the best thing that could have happened. Instead of trusting in our own strength or wits to get out of it, we were forced to trust God totally—not a bad idea since he's the God who raises the dead! And he did it, rescued us from certain doom. And he'll do it again, rescuing us as many times as we need rescuing. You and your prayers are part of the rescue operation—I don't want you in the dark about that either. I can see your faces even now, lifted in praise for God's deliverance of us, a rescue in which your prayers played such a crucial part.

Atomic clocks, and using light energy to cool things down

Atomic clocks measure time by getting atoms to resonate at their specific frequency, but they have to be very cool to do so.  They cool them with laser light... but how does shining a light on something cool it down?
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/lascool1.html
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/press.html
"...The laser light functions as a thick liquid, dubbed optical molasses, in which the atoms are slowed down. ...a photon that collides with an atom can transfer all its momentum to that atom...What determines the right energy for photons to be able to affect atoms is the inner structure (energy levels) of the atoms...If an atom moves the conditions change because of what is termed the Doppler effect - the same effect that gives a train whistle a higher pitch when the train is approaching than when it is standing still. If the atom is moving towards the light, the light must have a lower frequency than that required for a stationary atom if it is to be "heard" by the atom.

Down the drain, then into biofuel.

About 5% of what we throw down the drain is grease, and it can be collected and turned into fuel - neat!TE
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/new-plan-could-turn-dirty-grease-and-dairy-biofuel

Cheaper Better MRI

This ingenious researcher built his own MRI machine to study lungs in upright subjects.  Because the inhaled helium atoms are so light, a weaker magnetic field can be used than for conventional (water-based) MRI scanning.TE

http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/martinos/assets/Nov2010PopSci.pdf

NYTimes: Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore

If people have more money, it seems neither they nor their neighbors are any happier for it. TE

ECONOMIC VIEW: Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore

Economics was founded by moral philosophers, and links between the two disciplines remain strong. So why won't economists make judgments on the gap between rich and poor?

http://nyti.ms/9Cg2SD

"...income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007
"...Recent research on psychological well-being has taught us that beyond a certain point, across-the-board spending increases often do little more than raise the bar for what is considered enough. A C.E.O. may think he needs a 30,000-square-foot mansion, for example, just because each of his peers has one.
"...I found that the counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress.
"For example, even after controlling for other factors, these counties had the largest increases in bankruptcy filings.
Divorce rates are another reliable indicator of financial distress... counties with the biggest increases in inequality also reported the largest increases in divorce rates.
"Another footprint of financial distress is long commute times, because families who are short on cash often try to make ends meet by moving to where housing is cheaper — in many cases, farther from work. The counties where long commute times had grown the most were again those with the largest increases in inequality.
"(Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University)"

NYTimes.com: The Tools You Really Need to Maintain Your Home

What tools to get a new homeowner.TE HOME & GARDEN   | October 14, 2010 The Pragmatist:  The Tools You Really Need to Maintain Your Home By BOB TEDESCHI Spend about $250 now and you'll avoid repeated trips to the hardware store.

Funny pacifiers

Never knew there was a word for these.

"Dragées" are little hard candy decorations like these silver spheres.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragée?wasRedirected=true