Mormons the Most Bible-Literate? Who'd-a-thunk?

Being a Mormon, I get all the fun feeds about my religion. Today I learned from the Pew Research Center that Mormons, on average, possess a stronger knowledge of the Holy Bible than any other faith group. Says the report,

On questions about Christianity – including a battery of questions about the Bible – Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge.

It goes on to say that Mormons have the greatest overall religious knowledge, along with Atheists/Agnostics and Jews.

This is due in large part to the four-year seminary program that most Mormon youth attend during high school, along with the missionary program to which many young men and women devote two years of their life.

Mormon blogger Kevin Barney offers this additional insight:

Mormons discuss religion openly, both among themselves and with others. Religious discussion is not the taboo among Mormons that it might be for some.

Another possible consideration is that any time you are a minority (or other underdog type group) you are forced to be more aware of things than if you are in the majority. You just run across more resistance, more sticking points, little things it is easy to breeze by if you are in the majority. See also: race, being a woman, having grown up poor, etc. So the dynamic of being a somewhat exotic religious minority group may have something to do with the results.

What does it all mean? Nothing, really. I just found it interesting.

Chase Bank Website Down Again

Back in 2007 Chase's website went down. Looks like it's happening again, and it seems to be a more serious outage this time. Look at all the nasty comments over here!

It's been about 24 hours since the outage began, and people are worried about not being able to pay their bills on time. Some are also worried that the bank is the recipient of a malicious hack job. Whatever it is, hopefully they'll get it sorted out soon.

Social Security: Massive Ponzi Scheme

That Social Security is a decades-old, massive ponzi scheme that is reaching its foregone conclusion sounds pretty right to me. To quote a very interesting article on Bloomberg,

[Overwhelming debt] is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.

The article delineates the reality that our government is totally bankrupt, but that thanks to politically expedient obfuscatory financial labeling, government debts are bearing down on us under the radar.

The article concludes,

Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: “Something that can’t go on, will stop.” True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.

And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.

Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it’s the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.

Hold on tight, this is gonna get rough.

New Tron Legacy Trailer

10 degrees of cool.

The Grades Your Grades Could Be Like

Unless you've been disconnected from the Internet for the past few months, you've seen the universally praised Old Spice commercials, which have taken on a life of their own and launched actor/former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa into superstardom.

There's a parody of those spots making the rounds this morning--promoting none other than the Harold B. Lee Library, on the campus of my alma mater, Brigham Young University. The execution and delivery are nowhere near the impeccable Old Spice productions, but it's not too shabby. Check it out.

Poetry in Translation

A few years ago I stumbled across a technique to turn mundane text into wacky poetry – using the amazing Google Translate tool.

Here's a sentence from a news story from this morning.

In its first ruling on the rights of employees who send messages on the job, the Supreme Court rejected a broad right of privacy for workers Thursday and said supervisors may read through an employee's text messages if they suspect work rules are being violated.

And here's the glorious poem that results. (The line breaks are my own addition.)

In the first Human Rights Award

them the right way,

the Supreme Court rejected the rights and privacy

of its kind to work

last Thursday, he said,

can read text messages to officers, staff,

we suspect violations of the trade rules.

The technique? Simply translate some text into another language using the Google Translator. Then take the result and translate that text into a third language, and so on. Finally, translate it back to English. If you've done enough translations into enough languages, you should end up with something fairly presentable.

My example above translated from English to Afrikaans to Arabic to Belarusian to Catalan to Traditional Chinese to Czech to Irish and then back to English. Voila!

Human Flight to Mars - 20 years behind schedule

I stumbled across this 1969 news article stating that President Nixon wanted achieve a manned Mars landing as early as the 1980s.

Of course, back they all believed that in 2010 we'd have flying cars and unlimited energy. I guess dreams just became too expensive. They probably got sucked up by government social programs.