Giving Up Reading
Harry Marks presents a humorous take on the pledges some bloggers will take to do something seemingly difficult (and arbitrary) allegedly for some reason that will lead to a better life, but really mostly oriented towards publicity and obtaining more readers:
Abandoning reading will force me to be better with my time, vastly more aloof to current events, and a complete bore to everyone around me. And if you're still crazy enough to be talking to your computer screen, you might be asking, “Why couldn't you just limit how much you're reading instead of cutting it out completely?” The answer is simple, young one - because common sense doesn't get page views.
Towering
The new One World Trade Center sounds (and looks) quite impressive. I haven't followed it all that closely in recent times, so I was surprised they had made as much progress on it as they have. Too bad it isn't going to be the tallest structure in North America.
How the NYT News Room Works
This seems to be uncannily accurate to the way the NYT is covering Apple these days.
HT: Gruber
If Separated from Apple, "iPhoneCo" Would Be...
Henry Blodget, not typically a huge fan of Apple, notes some of the more incredible aspects of Apple's latest financial results report. If the iPhone portion of Apple were a separate company, for example, it alone could be the world's most profitable company:
Seriously… here's how we get there. Apple's overall profit margin is 30%. We estimate that the iPhone's profit margin is slightly higher, say 35%. The iPhone is currently generating annualized revenue of nearly $100 billion. The iPhone's annualized profit, therefore, may be as much as $35 billion a year. That's bigger than the $30 billion of profit ExxonMobil generated last year.
Incredible.
HT: Gassee.
On Disagreements Within the Church
Reading B.A. Gerrish's excellent essay on Calvin's view of Luther in a festschrift for Wilhelm Pauck edited by Lewis Spitz, I was struck by a particularly astute quote from Calvin's Commentary on Romans:
God has never seen fit to bestow such ravor on his servants that each individually should be endowed with full and perfect knowledge on every point. No doubt, his design was to keep us both humble and eager for brotherly communication. In Ihis life, then, we should not hope for what otherwise would be most desirable, that there should be continual agreement among us in understanding passages of Scripture. We must therefore take care that, if we depart from the opinions of those who went before us, we do not do so because excited by the itch after novelty, nor driven by fondness for deriding others, nor goaded by animosity, nor tickled by ambition, but only because compelled by pure necessity and with no other aim than to be of service.
Gerrish speculates that Calvin may have originally penned this statement as part of an apology he planned to send to Luther, but under advisement chose not to send. Whether it was aimed directly at what disagreements there were between the two great reformers or the Church as a whole, both points the Genevan reformer makes are invaluable. We ought to remain humble, recognizing out inability to reach “perfect knowledge,” and we should never depart from the faithful of ages past lightly.
Luther and Calvin both seemed to understand these principles better than many of us who are their theological decedents do. I am thankful for their examples.
Big Shrimp
The words do not fit together very well, but they do fit Asian tiger shrimp. According to the Daily Mail, these guys are starting to appear frequently in the Gulf. Somehow, I don't think they will work very well for a shrimp cocktail. I hope they do not completely overtake their smaller, native “cousins.”
Who Copied Whom?
Since Apple has been busy with their patent suits against Android phone manufacturers, certain parties have made claims about how Android was already going where Apple headed with an all touchscreen phone before the iPhone. Thus, a presentation the Verge discovered which presents what an Android phone was originally suppose to look like is enlightening:
Exact specs for those first concepts aren't detailed, but Google does spell out what it had in mind for the least common denominator across Android devices. […] At that time, touchscreen support wasn't a requirement — in fact, the baseline specs required two soft menu keys, indicating that touchscreens weren't really in the plan at all.
Keep in mind that this plan was communicated a month or so before the iPhone launched and over year before Android finally came to market in the United States. Google was clearly aiming to copy the BlackBerry until the iPhone completely changed what people wanted in a phone. To his credit, Thom Holwerda, who has been a vocal critic of this suggestion in the past, has admitted that this new revelation shows he was wrong.
AAPL Improves Year-over-Year. Again.
Tim Cook commenting today on Apple's second quarter performance for 2012:
“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million,” he said. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”
HT: Gruber
Bing for the Bard
Bing is decorated for the Bard's 488th birthday. Very nice!
Topography of Faith
If you curious about the religious breakdown of the United States, this map is quite insightful. It is almost five years old, so it might be slightly out of date, but it should still be relatively representative of the country's demographics.
