Weekend Reads 12/12/15

The Race to Create Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Heats Up

As you sit down in an engineless pod the size of a bus, your seat remembers you and adjusts the entertainment settings. The pod accelerates to 760 miles per hour, a velocity made possible by the near-vacuum inside the tube. There’s no engine noise—the nearest thing to an engine is the tube, a smart tube that measures speed and location. The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces; the trip is as comfortable as a flight. All of this is solar-powered.

There won’t even be time for beverage service.

The Bush presidency was my fault: I am so sorry my work stopped the Florida recount

Specifically, Judge Wells wrote, “I agree with a quote by John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, when he wrote that, ‘the margin of error in this election is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins.’ Further judicial process will not change this self-evident fact and will only result in confusion and disorder.”

How corporates co-opted the art of mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable

Slowing down, tuning in and radical acceptance have been molded into low-cost tools to increase our ability to speed up, tune out and drive ourselves harder than ever before.

What Donald Trump gets wrong about Christian theology

“He goes into the bathroom for a couple of hours, and he comes out, and now he’s religious…Give me a break. It doesn’t happen that way,” said Trump.

In Christian history, it has often happened that way. Around A.D. 35, a nasty character named Saul got knocked from (and to) his ass on the road to Damascus and became the utterly transformed Paul. In A.D. 386 , Augustine heard a child’s voice chanting, “Take up and read,” opened a Bible randomly to Paul’s letter to the Romans, was convicted to the core and abandoned the life of a hard-partying pagan.