1. Hobby Lobby Decision
2. Facebook Study
3. NASA’s Flying Saucer
4. Pale Blue Dot

What does the Supreme Court decision mean?

According to the Associated Press, “The Supreme Court ruled Monday that some corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women.”

Hobby Lobby’s co-founder Barbara Green said, “Our family is overjoyed by the Supreme Court’s decision. Today the nation’s highest court has re-affirmed the vital importance of religious liberty as one of our country’s founding principles. The Court’s decision is a victory, not just for our family business, but for all who seek to live out their faith. We are grateful to God and to those who have supported us on this difficult journey.”

Tell us what you think. Comment below.

1. Should the government be forcing individuals to have health insurance? Should they require employers to cover specific things?
2. Should health insurance be tied to employment? Or should it be more like other forms of insurance, subject to the free market?

• [AP] Justices: Can’t Make Employers Cover Contraception
• [WTVA] Hobby Lobby responds to Supreme Court ruling

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, shows off the new messaging system in Facebook. Image Credit: Robert Scoble.

“By analyzing three million Facebook posts over the course of a week in January 2012, a trio of researchers found that ‘emotional contagion’ seems to be a real, measurable phenomenon; that is, when people are exposed to negative or positive emotions from others, they tend to reflect those emotions as well.”

Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. – Hebrews 10:24 (NLT)

Don’t hang out with angry people; don’t keep company with hotheads. Bad temper is contagious — don’t get infected. – Proverbs 22:24-25 (MSG)

Tell us what you think. Comment below.

1. Does it bother you if Facebook manipulates your updates to determine your emotional reaction?
2. Do you believe Facebook violated the general held research code of ethics?

• [Blaze] Creepy Study Shows Facebook Can Tweak Your Moods Through ‘Emotional Contagion’
• [PNAS] Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
• [Facebook] Data Use Policy: Information we receive and how it is used
• [The Atlantic] Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment
• [Forbes] Facebook Manipulated User News Feeds To Create Emotional Responses
• [APA] Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct

he Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator Project is managed by JPL for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech [Click the photo for a larger view.]

NASA is moving closer to the idea of putting people on Mars. A statement released Saturday gave details of the operation, which included launching the vehicle known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD, with balloon 120,000 feet over the pacific ocean. “We are thrilled about yesterday’s test,” said Mark Adler, project manager for LDSD at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The test vehicle worked beautifully, and we met all of our flight objectives. We have recovered all the vehicle hardware and data recorders and will be able to apply all of the lessons learned from this information to our future flights.”

A fact sheet about the LDSD Program explains that, “Landing on Mars is not like landing on Earth, which has a dense atmosphere, or on the moon, which has no atmosphere. Mars has a tricky environment somewhere in-between: it has too much atmosphere to allow rockets alone to land heavy vehicles, as is done on the moon, but too little atmosphere to land vehicles from space purely with friction and parachutes, as is done on Earth.”

Tell us what you think. Comment below.

1. Is exploring space important to humanity?
2. Do you feel that placing an outpost on Mars, with humans, is worthwhile?

• [Space.com] NASA Launches ‘Flying Saucer’ to Test Mars Landing Tech (Video)
• [NASA] First LDSD Test Flight a Success
• [NASA] LDSD Fact Sheet (PDF)

NASA’s Pale Blue Dot Photo – You can see a tiny blue speck in the middle of the orange stripe on the right hand side of the photo. Image Credit: NASA/JPL [Click the photo for a larger view.]

On February 14, 1990, 13 days before my 9th birthday, NASA’s Voyager 1 Space Probe took one last look at Earth as it left our solar system. From nearly 4 billion miles away it took an iconic photo of a microscopic pale blue dot against a vastness of space.

Carl Sagan was not a Christian. He did not believe in a God. However, despite his very public criticism of religion, he was on to something extremely important. He once said, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

How can we see this pale blue dot, in the middle of a vast universe of unknowns, and feel like it all just accidentally happened? David must have felt this same sense of awe. Psalms 8:3-5 says “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

If you have never done it, go to Google, and type in Hubble, then click on images. Take a loook at some of the intensely beautiful images that we’ve been able to see from our solar system, and beyond. It is incredibly humbling experience. All of this somehow made for us to find. While many use the sheer magnitude of the universe to say there is no God, I’m left wondering how could there not be?

Tell us what you think. Comment below.

1. Do you feel small?
2. Do you believe that the universe was created by intelligent design or was it a random masterpiece?

• [Fox] Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
• [Amazon.com] Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
• [Wikipedia] Text of Pale Blue Dot Excerpt

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