solar cars, facebook, obama, anglicans...
My random information bucket of things I found interesting today:
- Toyota will start selling a Prius hybrid with built in solar panels on the roof that power the air-conditioning. Only in Japan, though.
- A political story from Australia about a child posing nude for a magazine cover highlights the idea that any kind of standard societal sexual morality is out the window as soon as some of the older generations die. I've been predicting for a number of years that things like the legal age of consent will drop much lower, and acceptance of some child p-rnography will become mainstream. This isn't scary as much as sad, and I believe rather inevitable. But Christians work best as as compassionate counter-cultural agents, anyway.
- Who knew that Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate Chris Hughes is the social architect behind Barak Obama's social networking website: my.barackobama.org? It has almost 1 million members. The NY Times did a story.
- Related: Rolling Stone just published a bio of Zuckerberg during his Harvard-dorm days (not that long ago) that paints him as a calculating jerk who stole the Facebook idea from other students. Whether or not he's a jerk, he's clearly a genius programmer. Obama's Chris Hughes wasn't mentioned as one of the belligerents.
- Meanwhile, employees of Google are, interestingly, big contributers to Obama's campaign. Though David Brooks points out that Obama's fundraising, while significant with small donors, is hardly the grass-roots-only system that Obama's campaign implies.
- Today's younger college faculty are more likely to politically moderate than politically liberal.
- The Anglican church has now had the closest thing to a real split between conservatives and liberals. The former met in Jerusalem for GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) and drew up fourteen evangelically-worded statements of orthodoxy. Suprisingly, liberal archbishop of Cantebury Rowan Williams was "positive and encouraging."
