Jonathan's blog

Not exactly shocking news, from an AP article of the same title by Maria Cheng:

European and international health experts say a new study makes the most convincing case yet for the benefits of children being active. They say the research may lead to new guidelines saying youngsters between ages 5 and 16 need to be active up to 1 1/2 hours a day. For some parents, that might be accomplished simply by showing their children the door... The study looked at 1,732 9-year-olds and 15-year-olds from Denmark, Estonia and Portugal. Physical activity was monitored for four consecutive days by strapping little machines to the youngsters' hips, which monitored accelerations in body movements. Despite differences among the three countries where children were monitored, the benefits of physical activity were consistent. The more active children had healthier numbers for blood pressure, cholesterol and insulin.

Via Digg, from a Reuters article of the same title by Thomas Ferraro:

The religious right, which helped re-elect President Bush in 2004 by rallying opposition to abortion and gay marriage, is now facing a pushback from the religious left. With a faith-based agenda of their own, liberal and progressive clergy from various denominations are lobbying lawmakers, holding rallies and publicizing their positions. They want to end the Iraq war, ease global warming, combat poverty, raise the minimum wage, revamp immigration laws, and prevent "immoral" cuts in federal social programs... "The religious right intends for you and I to live in a country where church and state are united -- where only their interpretations of biblical law dictates the law of our land," said the Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister in Washington who heads The Interfaith Alliance which seeks to maintain the constitutional separation of church and state. But it's unclear how big an impact the religious left will have. Laura Olson, a Clemson University expert on religion and politics, said the religious left is energized, but "a lot of times it shoots itself in the foot. It often pushes an overly broad agenda that results in conflicting priorities." "The call of the gospel is to help the poor," Meyers said. "The strong ought to help the weak, instead of the strong helping the strong get stronger, which the Bush administration is all about."... Amid the war of words, some clergy are making a point to steer clear of labels. Rev. Jim Wallis, who heads a faith-based group in Washington called Sojourners, has been widely viewed as part of the religious left. Yet he rejects the name and preaches the need to bring the nation to "a moral center." "I'm an evangelical Christian who thinks that justice is a biblical imperative," said Wallis." The monologue of the religious right is finally over and a new dialogue has just begun."

Via Digg, an article by Becky Barrow in the Daily Mail titled "19 minutes - how long working parents give their children":

A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children, official figures revealed yesterday... The Office for National Statistics looked at nearly 4,950 people over the age of 16 in Britain to find out what they do all day... Parents who work full-time spend just 19 minutes every day "caring for [their] own children", according to ONS's "Time Use Survey", published yesterday. A further 16 minutes is spent looking after their children as a "secondary activity", but this means that they are doing something else - such as the weekly supermarket shop - at the same time...

From an article of the same title by Charles Piller in the LA Times:

Yoism - a faith invented by a Massachusetts psychologist - shuns godly wisdom passed down by high priests. Instead, its holy text evolves online, written by the multitude of followers - much the same way volunteer programmers create open-source computer software by each contributing lines of code. Adherents of Yoism - who count Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud among their saints - occupy the radical fringe of the open-source movement, which is quickly establishing itself as a new organizing principle for the 21st century... At its core, the process presumes the intelligence of crowds, and Yoans build their faith around the notion that, together, they take the place of divine inspiration... To Dan Kriegman, who founded Yoism in 1994, an open-source framework offered the solution to an age-old challenge: how to make religion inclusive, open to change and responsive to collective wisdom. "I don't think anyone has ever complained about something that didn't lead to some revision or clarification in the Book of Yo," said Kriegman, a 54-year-old psychologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass. "Every aware, conscious, sentient spirit is divine and has direct access to truth…. Open source embodies that. There is no authority."... The open-source frontier is religion. That's where Yoism comes in. But is it really a religion? Chester L. Gillis, chairman of Georgetown University's theology department, is skeptical. Yoism, he says, embraces a transitory view of reality that contradicts traditional concepts of religion based on belief in fundamental truths. "There's an authoritative source in religion that [Yoism] lacks. It doesn't talk about revelation from the divine," he said. "Any religion that hopes to survive is essentially conservative - it conserves elements of the faith. This one lacks that." But Yoans have an answer for Gillis. As it is written in the Book of Yo, "There always exists the possibility of one day discovering that all our current truths are indeed wrong."

From a certain perspective, it's not all THAT much different from a traditional religion, like Christianity, where the Christian community strives together to properly understand, interpret, and apply that which has been revealed. A big difference, as pointed out by Chester Gillis in the article, is that the Christian community believes that their wisdom originated with a deity while the Yoans believe it originated with themselves.

FYI - there's a video here of Stephen Colbert on 60 Minutes.