Obfuscation is Easy

If you do the figures, that’s over 2,700 children at a cost of only K25 (10 pence or 15 cents) per child per week. Nsinda school reported that enrolment increased by 65 this week as children returned to school when they heard about the programme.

This feeding programme at schools near Linthipe enables children to continue at school even during the 'hungry season', when most households eat only one meal a day to make their maize supply last until the harvest in April.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body.

In my outdoor kitchen, I started with the typical 3-brick stove used by most Malawians and then I remembered the six special insulation bricks in my storeroom waiting to be assembled and tested. A friend from Scotland, Darius Namdaran, had done research on cheap fuel-efficient stoves for Africa, and these bricks held significant potential. As Patrick (the watchman) helped me assemble it, he was shaking his head – indicating his doubt that such a stove could work. However he managed to start the fire surprisingly quickly and soon we were both watching in amazement as the flames produced an intense heat straight up to the pot while the sides of the stove remained cool. It worked! Patrick fed the fire with a few pieces of wood through the small side-opening and we were delighted to see the water boiling in just 15 minutes – 10 minutes less than the open stove! Patrick, a brick-maker, is keen to start producing the special bricks after harvest, and start a small business selling the special stoves.

Lots of news about Conservation Agriculture and the feeding programme too.

Touché

Mathematician Henri Picciotto was visiting a local McDonald’s with his son when he noticed that Chicken McNuggets are served in boxes of 6, 9, and 20 nuggets. This means that you can easily buy, say, exactly 15 nuggets, but not 16. What’s the largest “non-McNugget” number?

Visit Futility Closet to find out.

I can only imagine that I'm late to this party, but I've just discovered that Crossway are giving away the ESV Bible (non-study classic reference) in epub (Open Source Ebook) and mobi (Kindle) format. There's also a mobi format that supports Direct Verse Jump (DVJ) which is a fancy way of finding a particular verse with the Kindle's search.

Now, this might not provide you with an all-in Bible reading system like some of the Bible apps on my Android mobile. Tecarta, Olive Tree, et al all do a lot more than a simple book. For example, when I make a bookmark in Tecarta, it labels it with the book of the bible, the chapter and verse. In contrast, in an e-book reader like FBReader, the bookmark label is the text I selected - no hint of where it is within the book.

However, this does get around my two biggest annoyance with bible-specific apps: rough, jerky scrolling and an inability to remember where I'm up to. The eBook readers (like FBReader) are excellent in this respect.

That’s right, guys. Intype’s back! We invested a lot of time and effort to make this new version and we’re happy that Intype is getting to the 1.0 version.

The new version has over 50 new features and we’re going to write about most of them in future posts. For now, the only important thing is that we basically wrote a new editor based on your feedback from previous versions.

For those of you who've not come across Intype before, it's going to be just the most awesome text editor ever - once it's finished. To be fair, it's pretty good just now, so check it out. The developers are simply taking their time with it.

You should also expect that any criminal who breaks into your home when you’re inside it has come prepared to murder you and your family. To naive readers, this may sound like an extraordinarily paranoid assumption. It isn’t. Mere burglars generally make sure a house is empty before breaking in.⁠

If a window shatters in the middle of the night and someone comes through it, your life is on the line. There is nothing to talk about, no offer of cash or jewelry to muster, no demands worth listening to. You must do whatever it takes to escape. 

One of the most common and disturbing features of home invasions is how the victims’ concern for one another and desire to stay together is inevitably used against them. By exploiting these bonds, even a single attacker can immobilize an entire family. By merely holding a knife to the wife’s throat, he can get the husband to submit to being tied up. Again, it is perfectly natural for victims in these circumstances to hope that if they just cooperate, their attacker will show them mercy. If you get nothing else from this article, engrave this iron law on your mind: The moment it is clear that an assailant wants more than your property (which must be assumed in any home invasion), you must escape.

Sam Harris offers interesting and thought-provoking advice on dealing with intruders and violent people. I'll be changing my plan for responding to a home invasion now that I've read this.

A Megachurch Dilema

It’s a practical problem right? As a church gets sufficiently large, it starts running short on parking spaces and seating. You already have two or three morning services, one or two night services, a Wednesday night, and a Saturday night. At a certain point the church must decide between building a bigger building or adopting multiple campuses strategically located throughout the city.

It’s also hard for a pastor to tend to the actual needs of the individuals within his congregation once the population exceeds about 100. He might be able to remember your name and ask about your family, but he won’t be able to apply the gospel individually to the sin in your life, counsel you through a marriage difficulty, or train you for your own ministry.

I understand the legitimacy of these needs, but I think that the multi-site church can be short-sighted and miss out on some of the biggest ministry opportunities for these growing churches...

Read the rest of Ben's thoughts, meet the Lonesome Prophet and the Hipster Churchgoer. Very perspicacious.

3rd place working is much better than I'd imagined.