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The View from Mudsock Heights: A Tiny Plastic Rectangle Reminds Me What Terrible Futurists We Are

By Dennis E. Powell | Feb 02, 2010 at 6:50 AM

For some reason, talk turned to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. You may remember the remnants of that event, especially if you saw the movie, “Men In Black.” The centerpiece of the fair was a huge, skeletonized globe, called the “Unisphere,” and there were two tall, modern-looking observatory towers that in the movie were actually captured flying saucers. My favorite line of the movie has to do with the fair having disguised an alien invasion: “Why else would they hold it in Queens?”

A Month In, How Are Those Resolution Going?

By Timothy R. Butler | Feb 01, 2010 at 9:44 PM

It is February, believe it or not. Just a month ago was that time many of us would like to forget when we made hopeful resolutions about things we needed to accomplish this year. How are your resolutions working out? If you are thinking perhaps you could use some help with them or perhaps need a new resolution or two, a handful of mobile apps and a good smartphone might actually be your ticket to success.

The Missing Screen

By Timothy R. Butler | Jan 27, 2010 at 2:57 AM

While the January 2007 unveiling of the iPhone was over a year prior to the App Store launch, the iPhone was already stunning at its initial unveiling despite its limitations. I suspect if a nearly empty app store had been unveiled at the same time, if anything, it would have merely been a negative distraction to the overwhelmingly positive points of the device. The lack gave time for the iPhone’s merits to build up a market for the store that in some ways felt like it should have been there from the beginning. The iPhone and, eventually, its app store, also helped create the market for the tablet, and, I’ll up the ante, the product after it.

The View from Mudsock Heights: The Haitian Earthquake Brings Thoughts of Midwestern History

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 21, 2010 at 11:13 PM

The sheer vastness of the devastation in Haiti, a nation that was not a garden spot to begin with, is such that it is almost impossible to grasp. It appears that at least as many people as populate all of my county — every man, woman, child, and out-of-town college student — were killed. The mind lacks perspective for such things, even as a phrase like “a trillion dollars” is so big as to be meaningless.

With Respect, Brett Favre is Your NFL MVP

By Jason Kettinger | Jan 19, 2010 at 7:25 AM

It should not have been close. The scandal of it is that Brett Favre is already a three time MVP from the 1995-97 seasons, which was a record until now. That he lost the award to another great, Peyton Manning, in itself is not scandalous; that he lost it this season is.

When Jerks Abuse an Organization

By Eduardo Sánchez | Jan 15, 2010 at 8:58 PM
When I read the article by our Editor-in-Chief, "The Hidden Danger of Peacemakers," the other day, the dreadful actions that were told in the article sounded eerily familiar to me. I am not acquainted with the Peacemakers (they are not active, or so it seems, in my home country of Paraguay); but the actions depicted reflect the almost uniform sorts of behavior that appear when jerks -- that kind of person that has no trouble abusing others as long as he or she can seek their stated goal -- take control of an organization.

The View from Mudsock Heights: The Joys of Heating the Whole House With a Woodstove

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 12, 2010 at 11:03 PM

Here we are, a third of the way through January and well into very cold weather, and I still haven’t fired up the furnace this winter. I don’t know if I will.

The Hidden Danger of Peacemakers

By Timothy R. Butler | Jan 09, 2010 at 5:41 PM

Here is a story. The leaders of a church have a personal agenda against someone and want to quiet him, exact revenge or what have you. They not only come at him within their church, they continue by following him outside of that church to any other church he seeks refuge at and any place he works, making a wreck of his life in the process. That is the sort of thing that only happened in the past, in dusty tales of witch-hunts in Salem or the Inquisition in Spain, right? Wrong: it is happening today, perhaps at a seemingly normal church near you.

The View from Mudsock Heights: What Do We Do About the Asteroid Problem?

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 08, 2010 at 1:52 AM

The article caught my attention — how could it not?

It seems that the Russians are going to get busy and, if they work hard and fast, they will push an asteroid away from Earth before it comes close — maybe too close — in 2032.

Aristotle on His Head

By Ed Hurst | Jan 01, 2010 at 4:10 AM

Aristotle and his friends clearly stated only philosophers can really get where we are going. Thus, it was their duty to lay it all out for everyone else. To this day, we still use a significant amount of Aristotle's formal structure for human knowledge. Unfortunately, we carry forward his ideas without really ever questioning if they are valid.

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