Category: Of Random Interest

Sci­en­tists at the Stan­ford Lin­ear Accel­er­a­tor recent­ly trans­mit­ted the equiv­a­lent of a 4 hour movie to Ams­ter­dam in less than one minute.

Now THAT’S what I call band­width!

The team trans­ferred uncom­pressed data at 923 megabytes per sec­ond for 58 sec­onds from Sun­ny­vale, Calif., to Ams­ter­dam — a dis­tance of almost 6,800 miles, or about one-quar­ter of the way around the world. This trans­fer speed is more than 3,500 times faster than a typ­i­cal home Inter­net broad­band con­nec­tion.

Read all about it.

It’s fun to hang around a place where records are being set and the world is being changed…

Side note: leg­endary prog­nos­ti­ca­tor Punx­sutawney Phil has weighed in: we face six more weeks of win­ter.

For­tu­nate­ly, I live in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ve for­got­ten exact­ly what win­ter is like…

Here’s a sea­son­al joke for your amuse­ment:

Over break­fast one morn­ing, a woman said to her hus­band, “I’ll bet you don’t know what day this is.”

“Of course I do,” he answered as if he was offend­ed, and left for the office.

At 10:00 a.m., the door­bell rang and when the woman opened the door, she was hand­ed a box of a dozen long stemmed red ros­es. At 1:00 p.m., a foil-wrapped, two-pound box of her favorite choco­lates was deliv­ered. Lat­er, a bou­tique deliv­ered a design­er dress.

The woman could­n’t wait for her hus­band to come home.

“First the flow­ers, then the choco­lates and then the dress!” she exclaimed.

“I’ve nev­er had a more won­der­ful Ground­hog Day in my life! (source)

I woke up this morn­ing to the news that the Space Shut­tle blew up on re-entry.

I had two thoughts rush through my mind imme­di­ate­ly:

1) Wow–I vivid­ly remem­ber the last time this hap­pened. It shocked me deeply–the idea that our sci­ence was­n’t per­fect and that Amer­i­ca could make a mis­take and that heroes could die.

2) The first Israeli astro­naut was on the shut­tle, and it’s such a high-pro­file Amer­i­can sym­bol: it sure would be an attrac­tive tar­get to ter­ror­ists… Acci­dents hap­pen, and I hope that’s all it was. If it was ter­ror­ists, it would have to be some sort of sab­o­tage before the shut­tle took off (that, or some­one on the shut­tle would have had to turn traitor–something I con­sid­er extreme­ly unlike­ly).

I have intense sym­pa­thy for the fam­i­lies of the astro­nauts: may God com­fort their hearts with His peace.

[update: my wife men­tioned that it looked as though I actu­al­ly sus­pect ter­ror­ist activ­i­ty. Not so! I’m report­ing the first two thoughts that flashed through my mind, not giv­ing my cur­rent opin­ion. For the record, I think it’s improb­a­ble that ter­ror­ist activ­i­ty caused the Space Shut­tle to dis­in­te­grate.]

I just thought I should men­tion that Stan­ford rocked Ari­zona in bas­ket­ball this week­end. They may out­rank us, but we beat ’em!

For the record, we’re not ranked in bas­ket­ball. We do, how­ev­er, dom­i­nate the aquat­ic sports (along with wom­en’s ten­nis and men’s cross-coun­try).

Lawrence Lessig, a Stan­ford law pro­fes­sor, just lost his case in Supreme Court.

He was argu­ing that the Con­gress has over­stepped its Con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty through its abuse of the copy­right sys­tem.

As an edi­to­r­i­al aside, I’d like to say that I’m pret­ty dis­ap­point­ed by the defeat. I’m no expert in the law, but min­is­ters are con­sid­ered to have some exper­tise when it comes to moral­i­ty (which ought to under­gird the law).

The laws gov­ern­ing copy­right in our soci­ety are exces­sive. First and most impor­tant­ly, we are los­ing a pub­lic domain. Lessig’s (non-legal) argu­ments about the hypocrisy of Dis­ney are very compelling–Disney keeps its copy­right on Mick­ey Mouse despite mak­ing most of its mon­ey off rein­vent­ing char­ac­ters that have passed into the pub­lic domain (Beau­ty & the Beast, Cin­derel­la, Snow White, etc).

But that just deals with the longevi­ty of copy­right in Amer­i­ca. I also con­sid­er that my fair-use rights are being infringed upon by rigid copy­right schemes. To my knowl­edge, every empir­i­cal study has shown that elec­tron­ic redis­tri­b­u­tion of prod­ucts increas­es sales. You can read more about it.

For the record, I urge every­one to obey the law as it is writ­ten and to agi­tate for change in the mean­time.

Lessig will prob­a­bly nev­er read this, but I think he’s fight­ing a good fight.

I just redesigned the site nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tem using Flash. It should degrade grace­ful­ly (mean­ing that if you can’t run Flash, you should still be able to use the site).

Now that the site nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tem is in Flash, I can do some pret­ty cool things with it. I’ll try to restrain myself from doing any­thing too obnox­ious (but I’d like to do some cool stuff that still loads quick­ly… feel free to post links to sites that you think use Flash well in the com­ments).

I’m still hop­ing to post some book mus­ings soon. We’ll see…

This is so cool! I waxed nos­talig­ic last week, and so I vis­it­ed my old church’s web­site to see how things were going. While there I hap­pened to glance at their ‘What We Believe’ page, and I noticed that it looked very famil­iar.

You see, when I began talk­ing to Stan­ford stu­dents about Chi Alpha many were curi­ous about our beliefs. I quick­ly real­ized that I need­ed a more stu­dent-friend­ly way of explain­ing our beliefs than the for­mal Assem­blies of God state­ment of faith. So I thought about it and decid­ed to revise and expand the one that we used to use back at SMS Chi Alpha.

In any event, I wound up writ­ing a con­cise state­ment of faith for Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford. Lo and behold, it’s iden­ti­cal to the one on my old church’s web­site! I emailed Cal (my old pas­tor), and he said that he saw it and liked it so much that he decid­ed to adopt it. Fur­ther­more, he’s shared it with two oth­er church­es (Tim­ber­creek and Tim­ber­line) that are con­sid­er­ing adopt­ing (or adapt­ing it).

Since one of the things I get most excit­ed about is shar­ing resources that help oth­er peo­ple be more effec­tive, I’m pret­ty hap­py about it! I’ve want­ed to be a mean meme machine for the King­dom…

I’ve done some tweak­ing of the site. Basi­cal­ly, I’ve changed the lay­out of the front page slight­ly, and I’ve updat­ed the way I cat­e­go­rize infor­ma­tion on the site to reflect a refine­ment in my think­ing.

For sev­er­al months now I’ve been explain­ing to peo­ple that there are three key ways they can be a part of mis­sions (aside from becom­ing a voca­tion­al mis­sion­ary), and I’m redesign­ing the site so that infor­ma­tion is cat­e­go­rized accord­ing­ly. Most of my entries fall into one of four cat­e­gories:

1. Inter­ces­sion: Pray­ing for Mis­sions
My basic thrust in this sec­tion of the site is to encour­age peo­ple to pray for us, and espe­cial­ly to pray what I con­sid­er to be the core bib­li­cal prayer for mis­sion­ar­ies.

2. Invest­ment: Giv­ing to Mis­sions
This sec­tion of the site invites peo­ple to part­ner with us finan­cial­ly, which is actu­al­ly giv­en more promi­nence in the Bible than is pray­ing for mis­sion­ar­ies. Many of the entries revolve around anwer­ing peo­ple’s ques­tions about giv­ing to mis­sions.

3. Involve­ment: Work­ing for Mis­sions
In addi­tion to pray­ing and giv­ing, peo­ple with­out a call to full-time mis­sion­ary work can fre­quent­ly do things to help out. With­in the Assem­blies of God, this includes work­ing with such mis­sion­ary aux­il­liary min­istries as Light for the Lost, Speed the Light, Boys and Girls Mis­sion­ary Cru­sade, and the Wom­en’s Min­istries Mis­sion­ary Bou­tique. This is a new sec­tion of the site, as I real­ly did­n’t have any­thing up about this pri­or to yes­ter­day when I post­ed prac­ti­cal ways peo­ple can help.

4. Infor­ma­tion: Learn­ing about Mis­sions
Final­ly, I added one cat­e­go­ry for entries that were rel­e­vant, but just did­n’t seem to fit the above clas­si­fi­ca­tion.

I haven’t com­plete­ly fin­ished revamp­ing things yet, as I’m still think­ing about how to han­dle the remain­ing cat­e­gories and whether or not I should launch a per­son­al blog (where­in I actu­al­ly express opin­ions) in a sub­di­rec­to­ry of this site. I express more of my per­son­al inter­ests and obser­va­tions over at http://www.xastanford.org/, but there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t put there because that blog, like this one, is a blog with a pur­pose.

To give cred­it where cred­it is due, I got the cat­e­gories from First Assem­bly of God in Des Moines, Iowa. I don’t know if it’s orig­i­nal to them or not.

Who are Wal­lace and Gromit, you ask? They’re wacky, they’re British, and they’re back! Find out all about them at the Wal­lace and Gromit Appre­ci­a­tion Page (or see the offi­cial W & G site).

One of the films is avail­able online (the film is about two min­utes long)!

Vic­to­ri­an super­sleuth Sher­lock Holmes has become the first fic­tion­al char­ac­ter to be grant­ed an hon­orary fel­low­ship by Britain’s pres­ti­gious Roy­al Soci­ety of Chem­istry… The Soci­ety award­ed Holmes a medal, which they hung around the neck of a stat­ue of the detec­tive. The man cho­sen to con­vey the hon­or was Doc­tor John Wat­son, a present day fel­low of the soci­ety and name­sake of Holmes’ hap­less side­kick. (full sto­ry)

Inter­est­ing, but I won­der how the flesh-and-blood chemists who can’t gain entry feel now…