From the Wall Street Journal:
iPad 3 Likely to Have High Resolution Display
From Mike Allen’s Playbook the other day:
TOP TALKER –Supply-chain leak on iPad 3 — WSJ.com (not in print edition!): “Apple … has ordered … display panels and chips for a new iPad it is aiming to launch in early 2012 … The next generation iPad is expected to feature a high resolution display – 2048 by 1536 compared with 1024 by 768 in the iPad 2 … One component supplier to Apple said the company has already placed orders for parts for about 1.5 million iPad 3s in the fourth quarter.”
This is great news. 2048 x 1536 is a huge improvement. This would make the iPad far more usable, in my view. And it’s great to know, if the WSJ is accurate here, that the iPad 3 will likely be coming in early 2012.
Businessweek on Google Plus
When Multitasking is Not a Good Idea
This is a guest post by my friend Andy Naselli. Andy is research manager for DA Carson and editor of the online theological journal Themelios. He has two (!) PhDs and blogs at andynaselli.com, which I highly recommend.
From Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion
During a time of singing at a recent conference, I spotted a woman raising one hand in worship while sending a text message with the other one. We mix worship with our work and pleasure. Why are we surprised when we can only give partial attention to any one of them? . . .
One way we pursue the virtue of efficiency is by becoming multitaskers. If we are driven by efficiency, it is not enough that we work quickly; we must also work on many things simultaneously. Imitating our computers, we seek to switch seamlessly from one task to the next, from one priority to another. At our desks we work on our projects while chatting on instant messengers, sending off text messages, and glancing at our favorite blogs. Even in our entertainment we want to be able to do many things at once—to be able to watch television while sending a text message and checking in on our friends’ Facebook pages.
A rash of recent studies shows that multitasking is not a solution. In fact, studies show that multitasking is actually a misnomer. While we think we are multitasking, we are actually task switching, doing a little bit of one thing and then doing a little bit of another. Our brains just won’t allow us to perform two complex operations at the same time with the same skill. Quality necessarily suffers, as does depth. Not only that, but multitasking is not even very efficient. David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, found that “people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.”
Meanwhile, if we surround ourselves by too many stimuli, we force our brains into a state of continuous partial attention, a state in which we keep tabs on everything without giving focused attention to anything. . . .
Whether through multitasking or through monitoring so many sources of input that we remain in continuous partial attention, we lose the ability to think in a sustained way. . . .
This is as true in worship as it is in the workplace. Efficiency is a dangerous mind-set to bring to our faith. We do not want to be efficient worshipers, driven by a desire to get more of God in a shorter amount of time. We do not want to be hurried worshipers who value speed over quality.
Related from Andy’s Blog and Themelios:
- In the Zone
- Andrew Franseen reviewed The Next Story in the April issue of Themelios.
Apple Introduces iCloud
Here’s a good summary of iCloud from Mac Rumors. Apple also has a helpful overview on its site, of course.
A Preview of iOS 5
Here’s a preview of iOS 5 from Engadget.
Recommended iPad Resources
Andy Naselli has a helpful post where he shares the apps he uses for his iPad and how he organizes them. It is well worth checking out.
He also includes some my thoughts on organizing your iPad apps, which I sent him after he sent me an early draft of the post.
Accidental Post
Lots of people have been discussing how Christians should think of Osama Bin Laden’s death. If you are subscribed in a reader, you might have received a post I was starting to pull together on that — but which was unfinished and just a collection of notes at that point.
John Piper has some helpful things to say on the larger issue that this is a sub-set of, and I had started pulling them together for a possible post. After copying in a couple of verses and a John Piper quote (but not yet the main one), I accidentally hit “post” instead of “save” (I’m doing this on an iPad [long story] and hit the wrong button).
Anyway, the post was very incomplete. It had one quote, but not the most helpful one. Sorry for the mix-up!
Here is the link to Piper’s sermon where he addresses the larger issue involved here: “The Pleasure of God in All That He Does.”
And here’s the very helpful section I was intending to quote:
I have commended a solution to you before and I will commend it again: namely, that the death and misery of the unrepentant is in and of itself no delight to God (Ezekiel 33:11). God is not a sadist. He is not malicious or bloodthirsty. Instead, when a rebellious, wicked, unbelieving person is judged, what God delights in is the vindication of truth and goodness and of his own honor and glory.
… those who have rebelled against the Lord and moved beyond repentance will not be able to gloat that they have made the Almighty miserable. Quite the contrary. Moses says that when they are judged, they will unwittingly give an opportunity for God to rejoice in the demonstration of his justice and his power and the infinite worth of his glory (Deut 28:63).
The Best Round-Ups So Far on How Osama Was Found
Mike Allen’s Playbook over at Politico, which is always excellent, gives the most extensive details I’ve seen so far. Very fascinating and well worth checking out.
The Wall Street Journal also has an article that gives a helpful short summary: How Bin Laden Was Found and Killed.
Pursue Excellence, Not Being Elite
A good interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.
Crouch argues that “everyone should strive to make culture by humbly mastering a field that intersects with the world’s brokenness.” And he believes just that: everyone can make culture, not just the elite.
That seems to be a major difference between his book and James Davidson Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.
Wasn’t Mark using street language so as to communicate with common folks, not elites? Does the difference between street and elite play into the difference between your book, Culture Making, and James Davidson Hunter’s book To Change the World? He seems to argue that elites make culture, and you write more about everyone making culture. Is that a valid distinction? Yes, that’s so true. Dr. Hunter and I have different instincts. When you ask when I first made culture, I don’t think of my first publication in a national magazine. I think of the “ABC Song,” because that’s culture. Where does cultural influence come from? It’s very mysterious—the Holy Spirit can work through a lot of different vessels.
I think that’s a key difference.
I respect James Davidson Hunter’s book very much, and learned a lot from it. But I also think he makes some critical mistakes, chief among them being that he fails to take into sufficient account the changes brought about by the rise of the Internet. In many respects I think a helpful companion book would be Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?.