Have you ever wondered where the “worst” areas of the country are? So did the Kansas State University Geography Department. So they mapped it out. They looked at each of the “seven deadly sins” and plotted the highest and lowest concentrations of each. The breakdown of their methodologies of calculations:
Archive for LDS Life
Why is BYU successfull right now?
Mendenhall talks to players before 2006 TCU game -- From Wikipedia
It’s all summed up in a single quote from BYU’s head coach, Bronco Mendenhall:
“What’s happening here isn’t about me,” he says. “My ultimate goal is for my job to be expendable, where I could walk away from this program and have it continue on without missing a beat. We’re a lot closer to that than we were three years ago.”
He’d like to work himself out of a job! Now how many FBS (Division-I) coaches would ever say that?
* In an interview for Rivals.com (read the full article)
New LDS.org Mapping
Have you ever been on vacation and wanted to know where the closest LDS Church is? How about moving to a new area and wondering to which ward you belong, to which building you should go and what time are services?
The IT team for the church has just released a beta version of their new mapping application. This will eventually replace the current “Meetinghouse Locator.”
Check it out. It’s nicely done. Even if you don’t know an address, you can “Place a Marker” (click the icon on the top left of the map and then click on your desired location) and it will figure it all out for you. It provides surrounding meetinghouses and all the wards that meet at each location as well as contact information. It will also identify to which ward that location is assigned (even gives you language and YSA wards).
Under the hood, it can either use Google Maps or Microsoft’s Live Maps.
Well done guys!
The Refiner's Fire
There are tragedies in this world that nobody ever expects will happen to them. It’s always someone else that experiences tragedy. Yesterday, tragedy hit far too close to home. My sister-in-law, Liz, and her husband, Zac, just experienced one of the most difficult tragedies. They lost their little baby before they even got to experience the joy of holding it.
Rather than explain things myself, I’ll let you read their own accounts of how their unborn child died. There accounts show the beauty of the Gospel and the peace that the knowledge of the Atonement brings to our lives. The Lord has a plan for each of us.
It’s so hard to see the good in such a tragedy, but yet these two brave souls are looking for just that. They know the Gospel and they know that the Lord watches over them. And for whatever reason, the Lord determined that it wasn’t time for this little one to come into the world. And they realize that! Only through faith in Jesus Christ can this kind of peace surface in such a tragedy. What a powerful testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel this event has brought to those involved.
And of course as a side note (with a little controversy tossed in), my wife and I both (although separately) thought of the greater (although less personal for us) tragedy that is far too accepted in our society. We see so much pain for this couple, yet there have been between 1 to 1.7 million (yes, that’s million) abortions performed in the United States each year since 1975.
How did we get to this point, where hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of couples each year expirience the pain of loosing an unborn child while 1.7 million abortions are performed in the same time frame. I just don’t understand.
iPhone scriptures (and more)
I’ve reviewed the iPhone in the past and although I love the device, it has it’s problems and I have my pet peeves. One of the cons I mentioned in my review was a lack of third-party applictions. And although I am waiting with baited breath for the iPhone SDK (promised by end of February), which will bring third-party apps, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the online applications inspired by the iPhone.
Within the first few days oh having my iPhone, I went looking for the scriptures online. But not just the scriptures. I wanted something that was optimized for the iPhone so I wasn’t waiting for several minutes in Church for a verse to load. I found a decent application at MountainMighty.com ScripturesApp.com. This little site provides not only a the scriptures formatted for the iPhone, but handy tools like bookmarks, community bookmarks and searching. Just recently though, they outdid themselves by adding the current Elder’s Quorum and Relief Society lesson manual as well as the words to the hymns. I’ve been wanting the hymns for a while and although the manual is available on lds.org it’s much more bulky and hard to navigate. So thank you Chuck!
Scientists "prove" Adam and Eve — kinda
Scientist recently studied mitochondrial DNA to determine ancestry at a large scale level. Their objective was to determine lineage across today’s major racial groups. They took 147 individuals from these groups and analyzed the DNA to determine their parentage. The results are quite astounding.
… the geneticists concluded that every person on Earth right now can trace his or her lineage back to a single common female ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago.
Card pleads with Romney over illegal immigration
Orson Scott Card has once again posted an opinion on the 2008 presidential race. Although Card indicates that the war is still one of the major priorities of this election, he speaks mostly concerning “illegal” immigration. The portion that really jumped out at me was the following (penned before the New Hampshire primaries).
Book Review: Folk of the Fringe
When I see a new Orson Scott Card book pop-up on Audible.com, I snatch it up and give it a listen. So when Folk of the Fringe came up, I recognized it as a suggestion from my brother and was rather excited about it.
Folk of the Fringe is actually a collection of themed short stories similar to The Worthing Saga. They all take place in a post-world-war-three era where nuclear and biological weapons have destroyed a majority of the United States population. All infrastructure is gone along with communication and government. Those who have survived have to create their own government and salvage the old infrastructure.
Only in Utah
So in Utah, we deal with some interesting quirks in the culture. Here’s something you would never hear on the radio anywhere but Utah.
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Apparently, she was hopped up on Nyquil or something similar.
Note: If you can’t see a flash applet to play some audio, visit the original post to listen.
The link between linguistics and dementia
According to this article, those who are bilingual (and use both languages on a daily basis) have a better chance of avoiding (or at least delaying onset of) dementia. I knew I was supposed to go on a foreign speaking mission! Ok, so I kind of did. I served in the California Oakland Mission and loved (almost) every moment of it.