College Trip to a University

I am taking my son on a college-exploring trip. Our family is strongly oriented to small colleges. My son is the third child, so I have always expected that he would diverge more from his parents than the first or second child did. One form of that divergence might be that he would want to try a university for his undergraduate education.

Universities offer amazing resources for students who know just what they want to to do. Child #3, who wants to be Under-Secretary of State for East Asians Affairs, may be that student.

So, we might have to suck it up if he wants to go to Vanderbilt. It's pretty rough.

Mappiness

I nifty British experiment has begun to map happiness using iPhones. Mappiness pings iPhone users who have signed up for the project several times a day to ask them how happy they feel and what they are doing. The phone will also tell the researchers where the respondents are, and the time of day. The research project can them map which places are happiest, and what sort of features those places have. The app also keeps track of the users responses over time, creating personal happiness graphs for each person.

Christian Practice, Not Nominal Faith, Prevents Divorce

The widely-reported statistic that Christians are as likely to divorce as other people is not quite true.

Brad Wilcox, of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, reports that people who attend religious services are 35% less likely to divorce than people who do not attend religious services.

Even more intriguing, though, is his report that people who report conservative Protestant beliefs, but who do not actually attend church, are 20% more likely to divorce than secular people are.

The Ballad of Mary Magdelene

This song, by Cry, Cry, Cry, has this wonderful line:

Long ago I had my work
When I was in prime
But I gave it up and all for love
It was his career or mine