Author: Glen

Bored at 3am trying to get a paper done? Divert yourself with this smattering of optical illusions.

My favorite is the biological motion illusion.

I just ran across a cool site: KwMap. In their own words KwMap.com is a complex keyword refining tool, aiming to help you discover new keywords. It is a fact that search engines can only help you in finding something if you know the right keywords.

The results look pretty neat. Here’s a search on Stanford and here’s one on Chi Alpha.

If you prefer a more timely search, here’s one on Iraq.

The New York Times just ran an interesting article about how the same textbooks you’re using at Stanford sell for half as much overseas. As a result, some students have started ordering their textbooks from England (or even Singapore) and having them shipped here.

Many students, individually, have begun to compare the textbook prices posted on American sites like Amazon.com, with the lower prices for the same books on foreign sites like Amazon.co.uk.

The differences are often significant: “Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Third Edition,” for example, lists for $146.15 on the American Amazon site, but can be had for $63.48, plus $8.05 shipping, from the British one. And “Linear System Theory and Design, Third Edition” is $110 in the United States, but $41.76, or $49.81 with shipping, in Britain.

Read the whole story.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything totally random, so prepare to be entertained and informed:

1) Hollywood Meets the Pews: In the middle of it all was Jonathan Bock, a unique Hollywood publicist who keeps underlining one big statistic for studio leaders — week after week roughly five times as many people go to church as attend movies. In the past three years, his Grace Hill Media operation has helped promote 30 mainstream movies in religious media, from small films such as “A Walk to Remember” to epics such as “The Lord of the Rings.”

2) Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants (no, really): At first, Nicolelis said, the monkey kept moving the joystick, not realizing that her own brain was now solely in charge of the arm’s movements. Then, he said, an amazing thing happened. 

“We’re looking, and she stops moving her arm,” he said, “but the cursor keeps playing the game and the robot arm is moving around.” 

The animal was controlling the robot with its thoughts. 

“We couldn’t speak. It was dead silence,” Nicolelis said. “No one wanted to verbalize what was happening. And she continued to do that for almost an hour.” 

3) Martial Arts Expert Kills Two Raiders: Chinese martial arts expert was in custody yesterday after turning the tables on four burglars armed with knives, killing two of them and seriously wounding a third. The 28-year-old man, known as “the doctor” for his practice of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, managed to seize one of the two knives carried by his assailants and saw off the entire group with the ferocity of his reaction. The moral of the story: you just never know whose house you’re breaking into…

Anyway, I found those fascinating. I hope you do, too.

I was on campus today when all of a sudden the greenspace between Tresidder Union and White Plaza became a combat zone.

It was pretty cool.

The martial arts clubs were out recruiting by demonstrating their slickest moves.

I learned something important today–don’t mess with the Kempo Karate club at Stanford. They scare me.

The other groups were pretty impressive too, especially the Wushu Club.

Side note: people sometimes wonder why there are so many Christian organizations on your typical campus when they all agree on the basics. One might as well ask why there are so many martial arts organizations when they all focus on the same things (wearing funny clothes and fighting one another). We disagree on some techniques and a few philosophical premises. Differentiation is not a big deal, nor is it unique to religious organizations.

In Campus Collisions, Christianity Today tells the story of the recent troubles Christian organizations have had on campuses.

The lead paragraphs: THE HARVARD UNDERGRADUATE COUNCIL was working its way through a night of routine business last November when sophomore Jason Lurie, an officer of the Harvard Secular Society and a member of the council, dropped his bombshell. Did the Undergraduate Council realize, he asked, that it was approving grants to openly discriminatory organizations?

The organizations were the more than 50-year-old Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship (HRCF) and the much newer Harvard Asian Baptist Student Koinonia (ABSK). Clauses in their constitutions specified that their leadersthough not their membersmust affirm an evangelical Christian statement of faith.

Really well-written article by a former InterVarsity staffer.