Christianity ‘could die out within a century’
More than half of Britons think Christianity is likely to have disappeared from the country within a century, according to a survey.
Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish found that just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years’ time.
Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.
Buddhism however, proved more attractive than both Islam and Judaism, and was chosen by nine per cent of those questioned.
Aish UK’s executive director Rabbi Naftali Schiff said the results of the YouGov poll of 2,000 people were alarming.
“It clearly demonstrates that religion, including Judaism, is becoming unattractive to the British public.
“At Aish we know that Judaism provides real meaning and enrichment to one’s life. Whilst we have attracted many disinterested Jews back to Jewish identity it is clear there is much work to be done.”
Research published earlier this year suggested that church attendance is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation.
According to Religious Trends, an analysis of religious practice in Britain, the huge drop off in attendance means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable.
In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims is predicted to increase from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.
Improve your photography with classical art.
Adjusting your photographs to get the color ‘just right’ can be a chore. Think about this: The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?
When Photoshop entered the CS series it included a new tool called ‘Match Color.’ This tools was made so that you could match a series of photos to one another.
But there is another thing you can do with ‘Match Color’ that is much cooler: You can match the colors in your photos to those in famous paintings.
I keep a directory of about 30 of my favorite paintings and anytime I need to do color correction, I just scan through them to find the one that gives the photo I’m working on the best look.
This technique can be used in other ways. For example, use the color from a scanned-in 1970’s Kodachrome snapshot to give a recent photo a vintage look. Need to make a picture more menacing? Use the color from a picture of a storm.
Categories: Classical Tags: Classical, photography
The Top 50 Classical Blogs, Using 4 Different Methods
Some of you will probably have noticed that a couple of days ago ACD decided to release his own list of the 50 top classical music blogs (which incidentally should more properly be called the top 53, using his current dense-ranking method) based on the number of incoming links according to the god of the internet, Google. In the process he somewhat pissed off a few people, notably Scott over at Musical Perceptions who has been compiling his own rankings for the last couple of years (using the Technorati authority number) but whom ACD neglected to credit with prior art (there is a rather bitter exchange in the comments over at Musical Perceptions here). Also myself (though I’d say it’s irritated then pissed off) due to refusing to use the URL which everybody actually links to in their blogroll to determine the number of incoming links. However, it is his blog, his screening choices, his rankings list.
Well, it occurred to me that since I spend every day managing large chunks of data and automating stuff I could probably whip up a script which automatically calculates my own classical blog rankings, according to my own choices. So I did exactly that. There may be a couple of bugs still, if you find anything in error please let me know so I can patch it up. I was particularly interested in trying to perform this in the most scientific way possible, so I’ve used four distinct methods of ranking. There is the Google incoming links method (as ACD uses), the Technorati authority method (which Scott uses) but additionally I use Bloglines RSS feed subscribers (which Chris Foley did once) and a completely new method, which is the number of Google Reader subscribers.
Now, I’m considering this a bit of a beta-test since I probably missed a few blogs which should have been included (I tried to combine ACD’s list and the Musical Perceptions list, along with a bunch of others, the complete list I used is here, add yours if I’m missing it please!) and there might be a couple of mistakes. While the program I use obviously has a larger chance of having a bug then a human does (depending upon caffeine ingested), the huge advantage is that it only takes around five minutes to collect and analyze all the data for about 100 blogs. What I’d like is for people to suggest improvements, for example, should I combine the results together to produce a super-ranking? Should I combine the RSS feed data with the Technorati authority to give a “current readership” number? If people are interested I’ll polish it up and analyze it differently.
So without further ado, here are the “top” 50 blogs as of yesterday using four different ranking methods, the first number next to each blog is it’s rank, the number in parentheses is the total number of subscribers, number of incoming links, etc.
Google Reader Subscriptions
Technorati Authority
Google Incoming Links
Bloglines Subscribers
Cool! For the Bloglines subscriptions, can you alter the program to grab numbers from alternate subscription types (e.g. Atom vs. rss2) and add them together? That’s what Chris did in his original list. I think one good combination would be to add the Google
Readers and Blogline readers for a total number of readers (at least for those two major rss readers). Have you looked to see if other readers’ numbers can be grabbed, like Kinja? Or also add the number of favorites from Technorati, since those are basically using Technorati as a reader.
One interesting combination would be to normalize each value and then calculate an average. This would acknowledge that some blogs are more influential by the number of regular readers, and some by the number of links from fellow bloggers.