Proverbs 14:26-27 w/ Amanda Idleman - Crosswalk PLUS Video Devotional

5 Lies Christians Believe about the Unpardonable Sin

Is there really such a thing as the key to happiness? Well, no. However, there are always things we can do to make our lives better and more fulfilling. Who better to ask for advice on that front than the people who have been through it all before? One Reddit user decided to turn to previous generations for their best tips on living well. “People who are 40+ and happy with their life, what is your advice to people in their 20s?” they wrote. Some of the responses were really helpful, not just for young people, but for anyone! For example, one person replied that the “key to happiness” is found in long-term friendships. They emphasized the importance of investing in personal relationships rather than passively letting people in and out of your life. “Friends are essential but they require work,” they advised. “Don’t be alone just because you don’t want to be the person who reaches out to others.” Screengrab from Reddit Another person believed that the key to happiness is being open to different experiences and opportunities. It’s good to prepare for the future, but it’s also important to recognize that life doesn’t always go according to plan. The way they summed it up was truly eloquent! “Don’t try to make your life into a novel, make it into a book of poems.” Can we get that on a t-shirt? Screengrab from Reddit One of the best responses in this Reddit thread came from someone who learned that it’s never too late to start over. “All in my 20’s I thought I couldn’t just restart my career or dump a useless boyfriend or go back to school because I was already on a certain trajectory,” they wrote. Eventually, they realized that they didn’t have to settle. If they weren’t happy, then they needed to make a change! They continued, “When I figured this out, I found the man of my dreams, had a kid in my late late 30’s, dropped my entire career in my late 40’s and starting a new one at 50 and it’s awesome.” That’s really inspiring, isn’t it? You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Strangers Share Their Advice About The Key To Happiness For The Next Generation appeared first on InspireMore.

Did you have to take it out on an innocent dugout cooler though

LaMelo Ball is being hit with a lawsuit after a family is making allegations

Inhaler is an Irish rock band formed in Dublin.  The band’s origin begin in 2012.The band consists of four members and has released two studio albums to date. They have gained significant popularity with their energetic performances and melodic rock sound. Inhaler’s debut album, It Won’t Always Be Like This, was released in 2021 and received critical acclaim, reaching number one on the Irish Albums Chart and the UK Albums Chart. Their follow-up album, Cuts & Bruises, continued their success, solidifying their presence in the rock music scene. Elijah Hewson Elijah Hewson is the lead vocalist and guitarist of Inhaler. The post Complete List Of Inhaler Band Members appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Science is great for innovation and improving our lives, but let’s face it: there are some things we’ve pretty much got down pat. You wouldn’t expect, for example, that we could improve on something like… like counting.So it may come as a surprise that a group of computer scientists have done just that: found a new way to solve a decades-old problem that asks what, on the face of it, looks to be a very simple problem – how many distinct things are there in front of me?It’s a harder problem – and a smarter solution – than you might think.The Distinct Elements ProblemComputers can be very smart, but they can also be very, very… not-smart. Just look at the recent explosion of AI chatbots for evidence of that: they’re great at sounding intelligent, but put ‘em to the test and you might just find yourself in an ouroboros of bullshit.And sometimes, it’s the things that seem almost laughably simple to a human that cause the most trouble. Take counting, for example – specifically, counting distinct objects. For us, it’s easy: we look at the collection of objects, and our brain just kind of automatically sorts them into groups for us. We barely have to work at it at all.For computers, on the other hand, it’s a fundamental and decades-old problem. And it’s one that really needs to be answered, since its applications in the modern world span everything from network traffic analysis – think Facebook or Twitter monitoring how many people are logged in at any given time – to fraud detection, to bioinformatics, to text analysis, and much more.Now, obviously, we’ve been able to do those things for a while now, and that’s because this counting question – properly known as the Distinct Elements Problem – does have answers. They’re just not very good ones. “Earlier known algorithms all were ‘hashing based,’ and the quality of that algorithm depended on the quality of hash functions that algorithm chooses,” explained Vinodchandran Variyam, a professor in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's School of Computing, in a statement last year. But, together with colleagues Sourav Chakraborty of the Indian Statistical Institute and Kuldeep Meel of the University of Toronto, he discovered a way to massively simplify the problem: “The new algorithm only uses a sampling strategy, and quality analysis can be done using elementary techniques.”How does it work?The new method, since named the CVM algorithm in honor of its inventors, drastically reduces memory requirements – an important advantage in this modern age of big data – and it does so using a neat trick of probability theory. To illustrate the concept, consider the example studied by Variyam and his colleagues, as well as a recent article in Quanta Magazine: imagine you’re counting the number of unique words in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but you have only enough memory to store 100 words at a time. First, you do the obvious: you record the first 100 unique words you come across. You’re now out of space – so you take a coin and flip it for each word. Heads, it stays; tails, you forget it.At the end of this process, you’ll have around 50 unique words in your list. You restart the process from before – but this time, if you come to a word already on the list, you flip the coin again to see whether or not to delete it. Once you reach 100 words, you run through the list again, flipping a coin for each word and deleting or keeping it as prompted.In round two, things are a tiny bit more complex: instead of one head to keep a word in the list, you’ll need two in a row – anything else, and it gets deleted. Similarly, in round three, you’ll need to get three heads in a row for it to stay; round four will need four in a row, and so on until you reach the end of Hamlet.There’s method in the madness – and it’s a smart one, too. By working through the text like this, you’ve ensured that every word in your list had the same probability of being there: 1/2k, where k is the number of times you had to work through the list. So, let’s say it took you six rounds to get to the end of Hamlet, and you’re left with a list of 61 distinct words: you can then multiply 61 by 26 to get an estimate of the number of words.We’ll save you opening your calculator app: the answer is 3,904 – and according to Variyam and co, the actual answer is 3,967 (yes, they counted.) If you have a memory that can store more than 100 words, the accuracy goes up further: with the ability to store 1,000 words, the algorithm estimates the answer as 3,964 – barely a rounding error already – and “of course,” Variyam told Quanta, “if the [memory] is so big that it fits all the words, then we can get 100 percent accuracy.”A simple approachSo, it’s effective – but what makes the algorithm even more intriguing is its simplicity. “The new algorithm is astonishingly simple and easy to implement,” Andrew McGregor, a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told Quanta. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this became the default way the [distinct elements] problem is approached in practice.”Indeed, since its posting in January 2023 – and barring a few minor quibbles and bugs in the meantime – the algorithm has attracted attention and admiration from many other computer scientists. That means that, while the paper detailing the algorithm has not been peer-reviewed in the official sense, it definitely has been reviewed by peers. Indeed, Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming and so-called “father of the analysis of algorithms,” wrote a paper in praise of the algorithm back in May 2023: “ever since I saw it […] I’ve been unable to resist trying to explain the ideas to just about everybody I meet,” he commented.Meanwhile, various teams – Chakraborty, Variyam, and Meel included – have spent the last year investigating and fine-tuning the algorithm. Some, Variyam said, are already teaching it in their computer science courses.“We believe that this will be a mainstream algorithm that is taught in the first computer science course on algorithms in general and probabilistic algorithm in particular,” he said. Knuth agrees: “It’s wonderfully suited to teaching students who are learning the basics of computer science,” he wrote in his May paper. “I’m pretty sure that something like this will eventually become a standard textbook topic.”So, how did such a breakthrough algorithm evade notice for so long? According to Variyam, it’s not as unlikely as it sounds.“It is surprising that this simple algorithm had not been discovered earlier,” he said. “It is not uncommon in science that simplicity is missed for several years.”The paper is posted on the ArXiv and appeared in Proceedings of the 30th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2022).

The planet Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, give or take, and it’s changed a lot in that time. What started as a ball of molten, churning magma eventually chilled out and developed a few small tectonic plates; a few billion years later or so the planet was bedecked in various formations of supercontinents and crawling with life.But the Earth is still young, cosmologically speaking. We’re barely more than a third of the way through its likely lifespan, and there are plenty of changes left to come.Unfortunately, it seems we’re not likely to survive them. According to a study published last year, which used supercomputers to model the climate over the next 250 million years, the world of the future will be one once again dominated by a single supercontinent – and it will be virtually uninhabitable for any mammal.“The outlook in the distant future appears very bleak,” confirmed Alexander Farnsworth, Senior Research Associate with the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol and lead author of the study, in a statement.“Carbon dioxide levels could be double current levels,” he explained. “With the Sun also anticipated to emit about 2.5 percent more radiation and the supercontinent being located primarily in the hot, humid tropics, much of the planet could be facing temperatures of between 40 to 70 °C [104 to 158 °F].”The new supercontinent – known as Pangea Ultima, in reference to the ancient supercontinent Pangea – would create a “triple whammy,” Farnsworth said: not only would the world be coping with around 50 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere than current levels; not only would the sun be hotter than it currently is – this happens to all stars as they age, due to the evolving push-and-pull between gravity and fusion going on within the core – but the very size of the supercontinent itself would make it almost entirely uninhabitable. That’s because of the continentality effect – the fact that coastal areas are cooler and wetter than inland areas, and the reason why summer and winter temperatures are so much more extreme in, say, Lawrence, KS, than in Baltimore.“The result is a mostly hostile environment devoid of food and water sources for mammals,” Farnsworth said. “Widespread temperatures of between 40 to 50 degrees Celsius, and even greater daily extremes, compounded by high levels of humidity would ultimately seal our fate. Humans – along with many other species – would expire due to their inability to shed this heat through sweat, cooling their bodies.”And here’s the kicker: that’s kind of a best-case scenario. “We think CO2 could rise from around 400 parts per million (ppm) today to more than 600 ppm many millions of years in the future,” explained Benjamin Mills, a Professor of Earth System Evolution at the University of Leeds, who led the calculations for the study. “Of course, this assumes that humans will stop burning fossil fuels, otherwise we will see those numbers much, much sooner.”So, while the study paints a foreboding picture of Earth many millions of years from now, the authors caution us not to forget the problems just around the corner. “It is vitally important not to lose sight of our current Climate Crisis, which is a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases,” warned Eunice Lo, a Research Fellow in Climate Change and Health at the University of Bristol and co-author of the paper. “We are already experiencing extreme heat that is detrimental to human health,” she pointed out. “This is why it is crucial to reach net-zero emissions as soon as possible.”The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

President Biden made a well-publicized commencement address on Sunday morning, May 19 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black college. The networks touted the speech, but didn’t put any “fact checkers” on it. It contained at least four fibs. In an echo of his 1987 lies that crumbled his first presidential campaign, Biden claimed, “I was the first Biden to ever graduate from college.” A newspaper obituary for his maternal grandfather Ambrose Finnegan noted he graduated college. He repeated his story that his son Beau died of a brain tumor after he spent “a year in Iraq as a major – he won the Bronze Star —living next to a burn pit.” In 2019, FactCheck.org noted the science on cancer from exposure to burn pits in Iraq was “insufficient,” but Biden tells that story often. Then Biden uncorked his typical race-baiting: “Today in Georgia, they won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election.” Georgia’s legislature passed a bill in 2021 that said no person should “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” within 150 feet of a polling place. It doesn’t mean you can’t have water! Biden also claimed, “there’s a national effort to ban books – not to write history, but to erase history. They don’t see you in the future of America.” The leftists all said that “erasing history” bunk about Florida’s education standards, when it was crystal clear that black history was mandated, not erased. None of these fact-check moments made the front-page New York Times story gushing over the Morehouse speech. They mentioned Biden spoke of deaths in his family, and left out the “burn pits” part. Biden’s recent lie that inflation was at nine percent when he became president was so blatant that most of the liberal “fact checkers” called it out: AP, CNN, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, and The Washington Post. (Lead Stories and Reuters did not.) We’ll see if these latest Biden falsehoods get checked (again). They could also check Biden’s four whoppers in remarks the day before at a campaign fundraiser in Atlanta. The president told his backers, “I wasn’t going to run again after my son died because of being in Iraq for a year in those burn pits.” He said “We were supposed to lose in 2020.” He claimed Trump told Time magazine, “States should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate the abortion bans.” Trump did not say that.  Biden also claimed Trump said there were “really good people on both sides” in Charlottesville protests, implying he praised neo-Nazis. That's an ongoing hoax. At a Sunday afternoon campaign event in Detroit, the president again dragged out the line, “I’m the first in my family ever to go to college.” A Sunday night speech at the Detroit NAACP brought more of the tired-brain gaffes. Biden claimed he was vice president “during the pandemic.” He said Obamacare was “saving millions of families $800,000 -- $8,000 a year in premiums.” The White House transcript adjusted it down to $800. Then he returned to “folks wanting to ban books” and “erase black history, literally.” He misquoted Trump as saying “I’ll be dictator on day one” and “just inject bleach” to cure Covid. He bungled in claiming Trump said if he lost, there will be “bloodshed.” Trump implied an economic “bloodbath.” The more Biden mangles the facts, the more you can be sure that national TV coverage is going to edit out the embarrassing parts. Call it “erasing history as it unfolds.”