Sunday Seven
- ATMs (Automatic Tithing Machines) at church. Sure it sounds crazy. But church is one of the last three or four places where I still pay (er, give) by check. We need new methods. From Out of Ur.
- The man who saved the world by doing nothing. 23 years ago last week, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov
decided NOT to launch Soviet missiles against the U. S., though he had good reason to. From Wired. - Seventies design. Cars, clothes, furniture and other 70s goodness. Via Signal vs. Noise.
- Everyone needs a place to belong. For a select few, the place is Gym Jones, an invitation-only, no frills gym (with a great name) for the toughest of the tough. The main page description is worth reading and may make you wish you could join. Which you can’t.
- Emoticons turn 25. The digital smiley-face
actually has an inventor and a birthdate. ROFL. From Wired. - Panoramic views are so cool, and here’s a collection of them from around the world. From ViewAT.org via eHub.
- A new record for the marathon. 2:04:26, or 4:45 per mile for 26.2 miles! From ESPN.
Sermon: Change #2 - What Works
#2 - Change: What Works
September 30, 2007
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He is not here.
I visited a beautiful church building last night - really pretty, in a high-church-yet-contemporary way. They had a pipe organ AND drums, and although the drums are well-hidden, they’re a gorgeous set of maple wood Pearls that match the sanctuary nicely.
Anyways, I saw a banner in the loft above the sanctuary with the message: “He is not here. He is risen.” I understand the Easter implications, but do you really want a banner in your sanctuary announcing that Jesus is not here?
The hot new trend in blogging is quitting
Ted Olsen, one of the original bloggers at Christianity Today, has posted a bitingly witty article on how blogs are passing away.
As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol’s famous aphorism was modified to read, “In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.” Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.
Olsen cites a study saying that 200 million people have given up blogging this year! Try naming anything else that 200 million people have done.
One of the more profound quotes comes from Alan Jacobs who says that “the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought” (but Jacobs has two blogs!) Maybe blogs are the CB radio of the 2000s. We can broadcast our message and make it look pretty, but we find we don’t have that much to say.
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On a personal note, my friend Summer (who always had a lot of worthwhile content) is, as usual, on the bleeding edge of this trend. She completely and suddenly dumped her blog last week. I dreamed last night that she brought it back, with no explanation too! No such luck. Ah, Summer-breeze, you made us feel fine…blowing through the collective jasmine of our collective minds!
Sermon: Change or die 1 - The heart of repentance
September 23, 2007
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The End of Summer
I always look forward to the end of summer (and I don’t mean this). I love the semi-cool air that finally moves in after a long, humid, HOT summer…weather like we’re having now. I think of it as “September 11 weather” because it was just this sort of day six years ago when the world got knocked off its axis - sunny, a little hot, bluebird sky. It is the kind of day where I ALMOST wish I was back in my old office at the old building where we could open the windows and breathe the fresh air.
It is amazing how a change in the weather can affect my perspective. Problems don’t seem as big when it’s 70 degrees, and possibilities seem bigger. We are a strange body-soul combination, and the physical realm can have a huge impact on the spiritual.
I think a key indicator of spiritual and emotional growth is when we act according to our most deeply-held beliefs in spite of the physical circumstances.
I have a long ways to go. But it’s easier when the weather is nice.
Sermon: Suffering #4 - Home
Sermon #4 - September 9, 2007
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Sunday Seven
- How Google became Google. An interesting half-page summary of how Google really got rolling. From Wired.
- Notable deaths in Christendom. D. James Kennedy founded one of the early mega-churches and authored an influential curriculum for personal evangelism. Madeleine L’Engle wrote strange fantasy novels from a Christian perspective (we read A Wrinkle in Time in my public elementary school). From Christianity Today.
- Blogging hits the mainstream and more women blog than men. Just check my links for confirmation. :) From Tech.Blorge.com via Slashdot.
- Americans see Hillary and Rudy as the least religious candidates and Romney (a Mormon) as the most. And most of us think that a president should hold strong religious beliefs. Does it matter what they are? From Yahoo! News via Relevant.
- Baseball’s most recent feel-good story falls apart. Rick Ankiel was a washout pitcher who came back this summer as a hard-hitting outfielder. How did he get so good? Human Growth Hormone, apparently. From Fox Sports.
- Fixing baseball umpires. Chipper Jones compared MLB umps to the Little League guys (an insult to LL). Is technology the answer? Dayn Perry at Fox Sports thinks so.
- Alex Rodriguez has 516 homers, has homered in five straight games and has 52 for the year. And he’s only 32. He’ll catch Bonds and do it without steroids. Until he gets caught, I mean. From ESPN.
Are we living in a computer simulation?
Philosopher Nick Bostrom says it is possible that we are all part of a computer simulation. I don’t believe it. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t believe it. It’s his logic that fascinates me. From a NY Times article:
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems…If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
Bostrom’s logic says that if this is possible, there is a chance that it has already happened and WE are the product of it.
In this short (15:29) interview on the Buzz Out Loud podcast, Bostrom says that, were we to discover that we are living on some guy’s laptop, it shouldn’t make much difference. We would simply have realized that reality is different than we thought, and our basic ideas about how to live life would remain the same.
WOW. That’s easy to say if you don’t believe in anything.
If you’ve seen The Matrix, The 13th Floor, etc., you know that the simulation paradigm can be used to explain anything we regard as supernatural (miracles, angels, even deja vu). I wonder if the simulation idea will become a new “irreligious religion” for nerds?
(The NY Times article is here, but requires a free registration at the site).
How you can lend to the poor (soon)
Let me make it clear at the outset that I haven’t personally tried the site described below, but it sounds great.
One of the more interesting and practical ways to assist the working poor around the world is via “micro loans” - small loans of as little as $25 to people (mostly in the developing world) who want to start small businesses. Kiva.org seems to be a well-thought-out way to do this. Kiva connects you to a specific business person (pre-screened) who needs a small amount (by our standards) of money to empower him/herself to escape poverty. The idea has been around for awhile, but Kiva masterfully handles the details.
I first heard of Kiva this week on Signal vs. Noise, but they’ve apparently gotten so much recent publicity from Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton that every pre-screened businessperson has been funded - for now. They promise more soon. In the meantime, you can donate to fund Kiva’s operating expenses (which are monetized separately from the loan money so that 100% of your loan goes to the intended businessperson). Cool idea.
