I am continuing with this book.  It is getting more in depth on the intricacies of the creation of the English bible.  I thought that it would be very very boring, but it is actually proving to be a little interesting.  The first part talked about the first advocate of the English bible, Wycliffe,  and how this related to the budding reformation.  It also gave a history of how the church came to be, and its status at that time.  The church at the time was hugely corrupt.  It took money from each and every person it could, in each and every way it could.  Governments were required to pay huge amounts of money to the papacy in Rome, and they were starting to resent it.  Around this time the church also introduced indulgences.  The idea behind indulgences was that there was a great celestial "bank" which the good of Christ and the saints had "deposits" in.  If you had sinned, instead of doing penance you could ask a priest to take out  a "withdrawal" of goodness from this celestial "bank" in return for monetary payment to the church.  So you were essentially paying the priests to tell you your sins were gone.  This proved to be a huge source of income for the church, and also a huge point of debate with the budding reformists.  It is now going into the reign of Henry the VIII, which was a hugely turbulent time for religion, and the english bible changed in status more than once. 

I did a blog post before about the impact of growing technology.  There is no question that it has a huge impact on our lives, and how we live them.  Its impact on science and how investigations are carried out is a huge part of its effect on our lives.  I read an aritcle that really showed this point.  The article was about a computers use in the field of archaeology.  (Link).  The scientists were using a computer to locate spots that were possible digging sites.  I was a little skeptical of the idea at first, but apparently the computer can use satellite images to find these little spots where there is a special discoloration of the earth that means a settlement has been there.  Seems pretty amazing to me.  Dr. Ur says that this completely changes the work of archaeology.  Instead of intensively searching the ground that they THINK might contain a digging site where people used to live, they can now just ask the computer and pick and choose from over 9,000 sites it has already identified. Dr. Ur says that this saves them an enormous amount of work and will  allow them to search sites that before would have been overrun by development and civilization before they could have ever identified them.  This is only one example of the way technology is changing the way we work and look at the world.

        A big story in the news lately has been the story about the "rogue soldier" who went on a rampage, killing sixteen afghan citizens, including women and children.  It is a tragic story, and it has really caught the media's attention.  Nobody can really believe that an American soldier, somone we look up to, could do a horrible thing like that.  So now there is an investigation into how, and why, this happened.  Many people aren't satisfied that this is a lone incident.  That this one lone soldier just simply snapped one day and decided to go on a rampage.  I found an article on bbc that discusses the possibility of post traumatic stress disorder as a cause for the killings.  (link).  Besides their assertion that post traumatic stress disorder is a cause of the soldier's killings, they also say that post traumatic stress disorder is not uncommon in the soldiers in Afghanistan.  In fact, the say that 18% of them show signs, but that only 9% get help.  They talked to soldiers and people at the camp where the "rogue soldier" came from (The Lewis-McChord Base) who said that the people with post traumatic stress disorder aren't getting the help they need, and that it is in fact being downplayed by the military.  If that is true, how could that be proved?  It's definitely something that they should look into, in light of the recent massacre by a U.S. soldier.  If it is true, it is a horrible thing for the military to do to the people who sign up to protect our country. 

I ditched the Girl with the Pearl Earring.  I liked the book, it was a fun read, but I just couldn't find anything in it that I wanted to use for a project.  So I started the book Wide as the Water.  I do not think I will have any trouble finding something to write about here.  The book is about the writing of the English bible, and the enormous ramifications it had on history.  It starts out discussing John Wycliffe.  Wycliffe was a very important man in the story, he was the one who originally instigated the writing of the bible.  He disagreed with many of the churches doctrines and so was condemned as a heretic many times over the course of his life.  He condemned their use of the church as a way to get money, and the enormous corruption that followed.  The church of the time obviously did not want someone taking away from their income, or their powerful and luxurious lifestyle.  They relentlessly persecuted him and his followers beginning around 1401.  So far I am only about seventy-five pages into the book.  The book seems a lot more scholarly than I expected it to be.  I definitely think that it will take a lot longer for me to read this book than other books I have read for this class, but I also expect it to have a lot more subject to write about in it. 

Coffee.  I love coffee, as you can see from the giant picture of it I have at the top of every page in my website.  I drink it every morning, without fail.  Always with cream and sugar.  I love my coffee, but according to some people, I could be seriously hurting my health by drinking it.  I hear it all the time, that it is bad for me, bad for my heart, etc. etc.  It's definitely addictive, no doubt about it.  But I have always taken the view that as far as vices go, coffee is probably one of the better ones.  So when I saw an article extolling the benefits of coffee, I had to read it.  Here is a link to the article (link) .  The article says that coffee can actually play a factor in decreasing depression (among women: there were no men in the studies).  That it increases an overall feeling of well-being, and that the supposed adverse effects of coffee drinking are largely unproven.  So as long as you drink coffee in moderation, you are fine.  I would love to believe this article, since it means that I can keep drinking my daily cup of coffee and not feel guilty over the effect it may have on my body.  What they are saying fits in with a lot of what I think about coffee anyways. 

I recently read an article about the controversy against paying for bone marrow (or any other sort of) transplant.  Here is a link to the article from bbc (link) .  This is not the first time I have heard of the controversy over selling organs instead of donating.  There was an episode of some crime show (maybe NCIS?) that revolved wholly around the diffucult questions that it brings up when you sell body parts instead of donate them.  It is a diffucult situation, because it is against the law, yet it helps someone live.  Perhaps that someone is a child, who desparately needs a kidney.  On one side, people say that it would bring in more donors, if the donors felt they would be compensated in some way.  But then on the other side, would they be donors?  Would the whole feel of the system change? Would other people still donate just for the simple reason of doing good?  Those are the questions that are in the center of the controversy.  And the leaders of donor organizations say that it would ruin the system.  What is hard to watch though, is the children and people who just die off because they can simply not attract enough donors to find a match.  I honestly don't know where I stand on this subject.  I think that both sides have good points.  I think that it would be great to attract more donors and save more lives, but I also think that saying you can sell body parts could turn into a very dangerous thing.  Even if you say you can sell just very rare things (like the blood stem cells of the article) then that begs the question of why are those people allowed to offer monetary value to save their lives, when the man dying of kidney failure is not.  No matter how much I look at the issue I

There is so much to say about the subject of Joseph Kony and the Invisible Children organization.  I would guess that a majority of America has heard about it by now, and it's spreading even farther, through the use of social media.  The "promo" of the invisible children organization is very convincing, and really pulls you into the cause.  Which, of course, is it's goal.  They want people to want to help their cause.  And it's a great cause no doubt, and definitely something that all of us, as human beings, should care about.  Their video makes me question a few things though.  First off, it's very well made (which is why it's been spreading so far and fast) but there is not a lot of concrete information in there that I could pull out, and at the end there was still a lot of questions about the cause that were not answered.  The point of the video is obviously just to get the cause out there.  Second, was what they were telling us to do. Their solution was to make the leader, Joseph Kony, known.  Well they have definitely succeeded.  My question is how effective is that at really helping the cause?  Just sharing the video on facebook or twitter doesn't seem like it would do a whole lot right?  My view is that the more people you reach with the cause, the more times you will reach someone who genuinely wants to do something about it and then DOES something.  So there are more people actually acting to end Joseph Kony, and they keep pressure on our government to use their power to do the same.  However, I don't know enough about the statistics of the organization in the last week to know if that's true.  Are they really getting more things done, or is there just more people out there who know the name Kony, but content themselves with just retweeting the message? It's something that I'd like to look more into as the campaign moves forward

In class the other day we watched the Invisible Children organization's new promotion/ad.  The way that it has spread is different than any other activist's story that I have seen.  It has reached millions upon millions of people in just a few days.  All through the power of the media and technology.  It made me think about the impact that the media can have on a cause like this, and even in our everyday lives.  It is something that we generally take for granted, living in America, but technology is all around us.  Just five minutes ago I made coffee with just the push of a button, no effort needed.  And that's what is happening with social media, and the technology that powers it: there is no effort needed to share a story.  The social media has enabled this story to get farther than it ever could have on its own.  In fact, without media and the technology, the original documentary wouldn't even exist, and the story would still be stuck in Africa.  The technology is changing our world, and how information travels.  It makes it easy to get your cause out there, and to get attention and support for it.  The campaign against Kony is just one huge example of this.  Some people think it's a bad thing, and some think it's a good thing, but either way it's happening, and media and technology is going to continue to have a huge effect on our society and the way we look at the world around us for a long time to come.