Top 10:

1. BP Oil Spill Effects:  Health and Wildlife | (The Nation and Al Jazeera)
2. Walk the Prank: Secret Story of Mysterious Portrait at Pentagon | (WSJ)
3. The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality | (Slog)
4. Near death, explained | (Salon)
5. Can gold be used as a currency? (w/ Video) | (Felix Salmon)
6. Surge of the ‘Second World’ | (National Interest)
7. South L.A., Twenty Years After the Riots | (Guernica)
8. FRACKED UP!: Hollywood,Interrupted Visits America’s New Boomtown
9. (Bee) Colony Collapse Disorder and Pesticides | (New Yorker)
10. African Men. Hollywood Stereotypes | (Youtube)

And the rest:

1. The Economics of a Part-time Drug Dealer | (The Billfold)
2. The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry | (Atlantic)
3. How recruiters look at your resume
4. Creepy Finance Guy With Spreadsheet of Match.com ‘Prospects’ Says He Was Just Trying to Be Organized
5. Space Shuttle in Extreme Detail: Exclusive New Pictures
6. CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover | (Wired)
7. Saudi princess: What I’d change about my country (BBC)
8. What They Don’t Tell You at Graduation | (WSJ)
9. Our Emotional Styles | (DailyDish)
10. The Legendary Paul Ryan | (Chait)
11. In Conversation: Barney Frank | (NYMag)
12. Diabetes: Myself, quantified | (Extenuating Circumstances)
13. Peak Plastic
14. Gamer Harassment | (Penny Arcade)
15. Tor Books goes completely DRM-free – Boing Boing http://bit.ly/Ia48Hc

Dating Photography Pro-tip #2:  If someone else is taking your photo, be gracious and say “Please” and “Thank you”.  It’s ok to give some basic directions if you want non-centered framing, but be generous when you see the results (that’s what cropping is for!).  And make sure to set up your shots before asking someone to take it.

Dating Photography Pro-tip #3:  If you’re not naturally photogenic, having a significant other who causes you to smile can do wonders.

VH

Ooo…so close…I almost managed to pare the list down to 10.  As usual, top5 and then the rest.

1. Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses | (Rolling Stone)
2. Antiviral Drugs Could Blast the Common Cold—Should We Use Them? | (Wired)
3. Chinese politics: The sacking of Bo Xilai | (Economist) & The Revenge of Wen Jiabao | (FP)
4. American diplomacy: What Hillary did next (& Interview) | (Economist)
5. Obamacare and the Supreme Court: A guide to the health-care case | (Economist)
6. History’s a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Moves Like Snoopy. | (McSweeney)
7. The slacker is back – and this time she’s female | (Observer)
8. Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope – Official Trailer [HD]
9. Murray Lender and frozen bagels: The man who made America better by making bagels worse. | (Slate)
10. What Comes After the Hipster? We Ask the Experts | (Flavorwire)
11. Voting patterns of America’s whites, from the masses to the elites | (Monkey Cage)

And one for fun:  Google Tap:

As I caught the tail end of The Passion of Christ on TV on Saturday afternoon, I thought

1.  “Wow, this is really gory.”

2.  “Why did Mel Gibson portray the Crucifixion with so much (if historically precise) bloody detail?”

3.  “What was God’s intent in making Jesus, his Son, undergo such a gruesome death anyways?”

The standard “Sunday School” answer is that Jesus had to undergo the punishment that I, as a rebel and sinner, was supposed to suffer, so that He could serve as my substitute when it was my turn to be judged by God, the Father.

Sure, that explanation, “made sense”, but it never really sat well with me.  After all, why should Jesus’ physical suffering have spiritual significance?  Why couldn’t Jesus just have died of “natural causes”?  He’d have still lived a perfect life and been able to serve as the perfect sacrifice, no?

Then, today, an alternate (and personally more satisfying, though not theologically verified) explanation came to me.  The physical pain that Jesus experienced during his trial and crucifixion WAS NOT all that he suffered.  The physical torment was an outward reflection of, and served to illustrate, the spiritual agony Jesus was about to undergo:  the timeless and infinite connection between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was soon to be sundered.  The Son would be a momentarily yet eternally torn from the blissful fellowship of the Trinity.  He would be banished from the Light of Life, Goodness, and Hope and plunged into the Darkness of Death, Evil, and Despair.  The Darkness that I was headed for, the Darkness that I deserved.

That was the price that Jesus, the Son of God, paid for my soul.

Because of His payment, I have instead been invited into to be a son of the God who made the universe, the God of Light and Life.

Jesus. Savior, Lord, and King.

Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Groom, TX

Hint 1:

Hint 2:

Oddly enough, the pigeons haven’t been back since that day, and I still have no idea what they thought they were doing.

Top5:

1. What Isn’t for Sale? | (Atlantic)
2. Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs | (NYT)
3. SXSW 2012: ‘Seeking Asian Female‘ Explores World of Mail-Order Brides | (WSJ)
4. No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart | (PopSci)
5. Atomic Bread Baking at Home: The story of white grocery bread

And the rest:

1. Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Personal Analytics of My Life
2. A world within a tumour – new study shows just how complex cancer can be | (Discover)
3. What We Lose in a Post-PC World
4. 2012 – eVolo Visions of future skyscrapers | (ArchMag)
5. The New Suburban Poverty | (NYT)
6. The Most Scientific Birth Is Often the Least Technological Birth | (Atlantic)
7. Minimum Rage: Will Gen Y’s Career Waiters Occupy the Service Industry? | (GOOD)
8. BBall Shooting Stats: CourtVision by Kirk Goldsberry
9. Scientific Hubris:  Why Monsanto Thought Weeds Would Never Defeat Roundup | (NPR)
10. Nazi rules for jazz performers | (Boing)
11. Resume, Cover Letter And Your Facebook Password? | (NPR)
12. Dear Science Fiction Writers: Stop Being So Pessimistic! | (Smithsonian)
13. Drive-by harassment: I’m fourteen, running late for Global Studies….
14. Stakeout: how the FBI tracked and busted a Chicago member of Anonymous
15. Spread Reckoning: U.S. Suburbs Face Twin Perils of Climate Change and Peak Oil [Excerpt] | (SciAm)
16. Search for Faster, Better Antidepressants Makes Progress: | (SciAm)

And one for awesomeness.  Coloring Bach: as played and seen by Evan Shinners, who has synesthesia

A top 5

1. Obama to Iran and Israel: ‘As President of the United States, I Don’t Bluff’ | (Atlantic)
2. We, the Web Kids
3. A Year of Shopping Only at Black Businesses (MoJo)
4. Africa’s Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World | (Atlantic)
5. 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Drones | (Foreign Policy)

And the rest

6. (The Magician) Teller Reveals His Secrets | (Smithsonian)
7. Rick Santorum and prenatal testing: I would have saved my son from his suffering. | (Slate)
8. The Brain-Focusing Power of the Lab Coat
9. The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever | (Wired)
10. The world’s most boring journal — and why it’s good for science | (Wonkblog)
11. Berenstain Bears co-creator Jan Berenstain dies | (AP)
12. Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End | (NYT)
13. Meat grown in lab may yield first ‘test-tube burger‘ by fall
14. 48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture The ’90s
15. Surviving MIT
16. Billy Sammeth, the Manager Fired by Cher and Joan Rivers, Tells His Side of the Story | (Daily Beast)
17. Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus | (New Scientist) (Another Take)
18. The Mystery Monk Making Billions With 5-Hour Energy | (Forbes)
19. Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work | (New Yorker)
20. Harvard’s Liberal-Arts Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain: Ezra Klein

And one for fun: Pure Michigan by Mitt Romney

1. It’s dry here. Like “put a line-item in the budget for lotion and lip balm” dry.
2. Once you get over the brown-ness, it is quite beautiful here. The sunsets are gorgeous, the Sandia Mountains make for a great backdrop, and the lack of trees means that you can see the city lights twinkling as you drive in from the outskirts at night.
3. The “city” basically consists of sprawl. There’s wealthy new sprawl and poor older sprawl, but outside of 1 or 3 neighborhoods, the population density is too low to even be considered pseudo-walkable.
4. And after the sprawl is…barrenness.  Like the city just ends.  And then there is desert.
5. I’m not sure which is more destructive to walkability: strip mall parking lots or 4-6 lane, 45mph roads.
6. Pet Peeve:  The inability to make left turns half the time due to road medians (see 4-6 lane, 45mph roads.)
7. Both chiles are really good.  I’m a fan of the green.  The red tends to be a bit smokier, the green a bit smoother.
8. As far as I can tell so far, New Mexican food is essentially Mexican food + green/red chile
9. Evidently, to qualify as a New Mexican male, I need to (a) buy a truck, (b) own a motorcycle, and (c) shoot a gun.
10. Speaking of which, there are a LOT of trucks here. LARGE trucks.
11. And if you don’t drive a truck, there’s a 25% chance you have a very large spoiler (>6 in) on the back of your car.
12. Weather:  The sun is hot. 42 + sun feels perfectly fine.  The lack of cloud cover means it cools down a lot at night. 35 degree temperature swings over the course of a full day aren’t uncommon.  And by the sound of the wind howling outside my window, spring is just around the corner.
13. Stars. I can see them. Easily. I can’t wait to go on a legit stargazing trip.  And a hiking/camping trip.  And a snowboarding trip.  A snowshoeing trip.  A mountain biking trip.  And evidently there’s good whitewater and flyfishing as well.  Just you wait.  I’ll be an outdoorsman in no time.  Once I manage to step away from this computer…
14. I like good bread as much as the next person, but sopapillas are decadent pillows of fried deliciousness (especially with honey.)
15. There is a greater variety of McDonald’s facades here than I’ve seen anywhere else in the US.  I think I’ve counted at least 6 types.  There’s even a Rock ‘n Roll McDonald’s!

Western Albuquerque with Sandia Mountains in the background
Taken from Petroglyph National Monument, 111119

Q: How many marriage proposals have you gotten in the last two weeks?

A: (Smiles) I don’t know. It just depends — you mean including Twitter and signs and stuff? — I don’t know (chuckles).

Q: Do you have a girlfriend?

A: No.

Q: Describe your ideal mate.

A: First she would really love God and be a faithful Christian, and then after that, I think, a desire to serve other people, to help with the underprivileged, do a lot of social work . . . great personality and easy to be around. Someone that’s definitely chill, low key, low maintenance.

source: NYPost

As a Chinese American and having followed Jeremy Lin’s ups and downs (mostly downs) since he was drafted, I’m enjoying his meteoric rise* to superstardom as much as the next casual basketball fan. But I think something has been lost amongst all of hype, debates about whether his success is sustainable, and stories about his convoluted and nearly unsuccessful path to being a starter, his grad-student like living conditions, his newfound status as a stereotype shatterer, and his deep faith and humility.

He just doubled or TRIPLED the pressure on your average Asian American kid. Go to Harvard, have good character AND become an athletic superstar? I bet he’s also a musical virtuoso and speaks fluent Mandarin and Taiwanese. Growing up, all we had were Michael Chang and Kristi Yamaguchi, and there was NO WAY my parents were going to pull me out of school to pursue athletics.  Now?  I bet they’ll be forced to memorize SAT vocabulary words while dribbling two balls at once.  While maintaining a 3/4 tempo in one hand and 4/4 in the other.

Poor kids.

Hopefully he keeps putting on enough of a show to distract them from this horrid new reality that he has brought upon them.

My favorite comment on J.Lin so far, from the Laker’s Metta World Peace

Q: Did the Lakers talk about him in the locker room?

A: Do we talk about him? Yeah, we talk about him. We think he needs a better haircut. I don’t like that style. You’re in New York, the fashion capital. Change your haircut, OK? You’re a star now. Wear some shades. Shades, OK? Put down the nerdy Harvard book glasses. Put on some black shades, OK? With some leather pants. Change your style. Fashion.

Q: Do you wear leather pants?

A: No, I won’t wear them, but he should wear leather pants. He’s the type of guy who should wear leather pants, some nice shoes and change his fashion. You’re Jeremy Lin, for godsakes. You know what I’m saying? You know? Put down that law book, stop reading the New York Times and start reading the Daily News. Newsday, that’s the one. I like that one because there’s always color in that one. What else? Wall Street Journal. Get some swag. You’re in New York City. Put your hat to the back, too. Put your hat on backwards. Come to practice with your pants sagging and just tell them, ‘I don’t feel like practicing.’ Practice? You know? Practice? And wear an Iverson jersey. You know? Come to practice with a cigar. Lit. ‘I’m Jeremy Lin.’ You know? He should change. We’re all excited to play tonight. It’s like the first time for everybody. Everybody’s excited. Kobe’s excited. He wants to get 50. He wants to welcome Jeremy Lin to his new level.”

* Ever notice how other than meteors, things hardly ever experience a “meteoric fall”?

1. Seven things I learned about the transition from communism
2. Burn Victim Sam Brown Treated With Virtual-Reality Video Game SnowWorld | (GQ)
3. Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class | (NYT)
4. Lunar New Year 2012 | (Big Picture)
5. Striking a Pose (Women and Fantasy Covers)
6. The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold | (Businessweek)
7. The Life and Death of Pvt. Danny Chen | (NYMag)
8. How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? | (NYT)
9. What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?
10. Flavor network and the principles of food pairings | (Nature)
11. How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics | (Sullivan)
12. AMERICA TODAY: Young And Homeless In NYC and One Night in a Homeless Shelter | (BusInsider)
13. ‘El Wingador’ | (NYT)
14. Miniatur Wonderland, Hamburg | (promo video)
15. Zanesville Zoo Animal Escape | (Esquire)

And yet another hip-hop classical collaboration, this time featuring Yo Yo Ma and Lil Buck.