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The Episcopal site is hosting a gallery of images called "Faces of Christ".

I like how this one shows Christ reaching out to embrace the viewer. And while I'm not one for passion plays, "Christ Falls" is rather compelling....

Corps & Blogging

This Fortune article discusses how corporations can use blogging to get their word out - and how to cope with their employees blogging. One quote:

Don't shut down existing employee blogs. If they are positive about the company, Rubel suggests turning these evangelists into a voluntary sales force. If they are negative, you might have a larger morale issue that needs to be addressed.

This is so NOT the experience of people I know. But then,

The most important question to ask is whether your company should even blog at all. "There are some corporate cultures where blogging is not going to go over very well," says Sifry. Cultures where blogging thrives, he says, are ones that "have faith in their employees, rather than fear."

Trust is part of it - but so is an organization that's organized enough to know what it wants & how to do it.

What's a good night's sleep?

From the New York Times : Should humans really expect to sleep through the night?

It's a question that Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health asked himself in the early 1990's. He conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. He let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted during the experiment.

The first night, the subjects slept an average of 11 hours a night, probably repaying a chronic sleep debt.

By the fourth week, the subjects slept an average of eight hours a night — but not consecutively. Instead, sleep seemed to be concentrated in two blocks. First, subjects tended to lie awake for one to two hours and then fall quickly asleep. Dr. Wehr found that the abrupt onset of sleep was linked to a spike in the hormone melatonin. Melatonin secretion by the brain's pineal gland is switched on by darkness.

After an average of three to five hours of solid sleep, the subjects would awaken and spend an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness before a second three- to five-hour sleep period. Such bimodal sleep has been observed in many other animals and also in humans who live in pre-industrial societies lacking artificial light. ( Read more... )

This also ties in with the recommendation I read in Woman's Day: don't look at the clock once you're in bed. Set the alarm and turn the clock to the wall. Why? Watching the clock makes you aware that you're awake and how long you've been awake, which can make you anxious, which makes it harder to get to sleep. Personally I love drifting in and out of dreamy not-awake-not-asleep states...when I don't have to be anywhere soon.