Comments for Table Conversations

Comment on Truth and Tolerance by Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:11:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment. I like the emphasis on getting priorities straight, with deference to God and focus on family. Family prayer, scripture reading, and moments of thoughtful reflection and dialog with family members are all important and heavily emphasized in the Mormon community too, http://mormon.org/family/.

To learn more about my faith, you can click around the link above. The official name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While we very much respect all the good that protestant and catholic churches do, we believe in the restoration of important truths and are therefore distinct in our religion, http://mormon.org/restoration/.

Comment on Truth and Tolerance by Lukasz Miroslaw

Lukasz Miroslaw — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 20:23:00 +0000

I fully agree. The family is the priority. I know this sentence: “If God is in the first place everything else is in the right place”. That actually works. Me and my wife are active in so called “Light-Life” movement (Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-Life) which gathers families together. 4-7 families meet each month in one of the houses. Kids are playing around and the parents are having a chat with some cakes and salats. Afterwards, we pray together and read the bible. And then we chat again There are also so called gifts that everybody tries to implement in their daily life such as prayers with the whole family, a prayer with your wife, a prayer in solitary. There is also a gift called “a dialogue” where you talk with your wife once a month for 2-3 hours with a candle and a prayer to the Holy Spirit. Jesus is of course invited as well. After a prayer you discuss all the problems that bother you, i.e. about your kids, or about relations between both of you. This is the finest gift for the marriage as usually you do not have time to talk when two small kids are around.
I wonder how your community looks like. BTW, is this a part of protestant or catholic church?

Comment on Truth and Tolerance by Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 03:03:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment. My approach rests on the assumption that the most important work I can do is within the walls of my own home. Raising a strong, virtuous family will have a greater impact for good than anything else I can contemplate. An essential component of raising a good family is teaching service within the community. While my family is still very young, it is my experience that as a family serves its community, others take note and it rubs off.

Other more organized approaches are also very important. For my family, it is through our church that we enjoy this.

Comment on Truth and Tolerance by Lukasz Miroslaw

Lukasz Miroslaw — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:38:00 +0000

I am glad not to be the only one who thinks in a similar way. Indeed, we are loosing our morality as a society and nobody seems to be worried about that except minor discussions among people or in the Christian gathering (I may be wrong of course). The problem is that those who influence the ordinary people are united and powerful. They are gathered in left-winged organizations funded by the government or they are supported by the media.
People are simply not aware about the thread of being careless. The new generation is coming to the conclusion that if we do not care then why should they? IMHO, we should do something about it. The question is “what”?
I have thought about it with my collegues here in Poland and do not see a gold solution except forming an informal community. Once people are aware of not being lonely they could something about it.

Comment on What sport(s) should my 6-yr-old son play? by trainergal

trainergal — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:16:00 +0000

I’m trying to decide this same thing for my coming 5yo son. In our case, he has a great deal of drive to golf (he golfs with me once a week) and I have a gal I trade horse riding lessons with to teach him gymnastics. Both are great, and at four, he has a great deal of focus and determination! He tries really hard at both, and he doesn’t get upset when he makes mistakes, most times he finds a great deal of humor in them (look mommy! I made my golf ball go through a tree!) but he tries hard to improve constantly.
As a parent, my goal from sports with a child his age is to encourage good sportsmanship, discipline, and an ability to listen, comprehend and take instruction. I’ve been thrilled with his progress so far, not many children can make the leap of understanding that aligning thier legs in a certain manner affect their balance because they were told that, they have to learn it by trial and error, I am literally watching my son develop common sense!
Now, as he is getting older, I want to sign him up for a team sport, so he learns to apply that knowledge to others, and learns how to help encourage other kids, congratulate them when they do well, not judge their ability, or be disappointed that someone else does better at something then he does. I see these as issues he has with his freinds already (tommy runs way faster then me, why can’t I run that fast? ect) and he gets very bossy when he tries to be helpful with other kids, if they don’t listen, he gets mad! LOL! And he gets frustrated in shared events (relay races, ect) when his team mate doesn’t do well. I really think he needs a team sport to learn how to deal with these kind of things, hard concepts at his age, but I can see other kids who deal with brothers and sisters have better skills in this area then my only child!
I’m actually considering doing basketball, they have a free youth team here, his step father can volunteer as a coach to help the team, and that is definately a sport everyone has to communicate and work together on! Specially at his age. But then when that season is over, we will probably do pee wee baseball, and then flag football for the next season, each here last about two months with a month break between, and our town is so small, he will most often have the same set of team mates. And then if one of those sports proves not to be something he enjoys, we will try the soccer and feild hockey teams! When he shows a definitive interest in one or two sports, those will be what we let him run with (as it were). I already know gymnastics will only last another year or so, he’s mainly still trying at that because I told him if he proved he could work at it, I’d let him do some for of karate/kickboxing in a year or so. gymnastics is free I will not be surprised if later on, he settles on loving individual sports more, like running, cross country, golf, swimming, but right now, I want him to learn to be a team player!
For me as a parent, I know my son will decide later on which sports he wants to follow, and while learning the skills (running, catching, throwing, ect) is important, I am more concerned with the other skills he gains, ones which he will use if he becomes a pro golfer, business man, or foreman at a construction company, or to make freinds at a new school. And those will be the things which drive me to keep him in group activities. I don’t care if he wins or loses, I care about how he does it. I don’t care if he can slam dunk or run a touchdown, or make a great slapshot, I care how hard he tries, how he handles it when he doesn’t do as well as he expects/wants, and how he behaves when he does great.

Comment on Innovation in Family History by Ken Atwell

Ken Atwell — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:13:00 +0000

I dug into my family history about five years ago and came to the same conclusion. We should be working collaboratively, not reinventing the wheel and littering http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ with hundreds of identical sub-trees.

I’m hoping for not only collaborative tree-building, but collaborative and open document access. LDS has some of the right idea, by crowd-sourcing at https://www.familysearch.org/. But it has a long way to go to be a viable alternative to the proprietary databases at ancestry.com. I keep wishing the Google would step up and begin placing historical documents (census, tax roles, etc.) on-line as they have with Google Books (which, by the way, can be a good source if you happen to have ancestors of even minor distinction). Electronic access to original documents (including the ability to upload new sources), collaborative annotation/mark-up of those documents, and collaborative (wiki-style?) single-truth tree creation would be the Holy Grail of genealogy.

Best of luck to http://www.youwho.com/, I’ll be sure to keep my eye on them.

Comment on Bring Back Dangerous, Risky Playgrounds by Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:03:00 +0000

MSNBC just posted a similar article: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/43810459

“His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by
some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds.
Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence
for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt
emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that
are ultimately worse than a broken bone.”

Comment on One Piece Flow by Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Yeah, I think Henry Ford might take issue with this concept. But, I can see that for some problems, the “one piece flow” may make more sense than mass production.

Comment on One Piece Flow by Sara R

Sara R — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:54:00 +0000

Can you explain this to someone not in business? I thought that the assembly line and mass production was a historical innovation that dramatically increased productivity. “One piece flow” sounds like the way people generally manufactured things before the development of the assembly line. What am I missing? How do “one piece flow” proponents explain history?

Also, does it depend on the complexity of the steps? Piano players know that when you do something repeatedly, muscle memory takes over and you can complete that task more quickly without conscious effort. Muscle memory will help you more with the individual discrete tasks. With “one piece flow,” your conscious mind still has to remember each step, which makes it more prone to error (as this guy shows with the stamp he almost forgot).

Comment on One Piece Flow by Sara Rands

Sara Rands — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:25:00 +0000