Superfun Party

Yes­ter­day was cool. We had our on-cam­pus sum­mer Bible study and then we decid­ed to have a par­ty to wel­come Andrew back to Amer­i­ca after his jour­ney abroad.

We fig­ured few things are more Amer­i­can than BBQ, so we had a BBQ par­ty (after which most folk left) and then the guys who remained played XBox with me until mid­night.

I love my job.

Inci­den­tal­ly, one of the XBox games that we played is called Blood Wake, a birth­day gift from my younger broth­er.

I men­tion that because the plot of the game is a younger broth­er try­ing to slay his evil old­er broth­er.

Thanks, Greg. 🙂

Simulation Argument

Many of you have seen this before, but Hec­tor just for­ward­ed me a link to Are You Liv­ing In A Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion? is a site that argues that at least one of the fol­low­ing is true:

(1) The chances that a species at our cur­rent lev­el of devel­op­ment can avoid going extinct before becom­ing tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mature is neg­li­gi­bly small

(2) Almost no tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mature civil­i­sa­tions are inter­est­ed in run­ning com­put­er sim­u­la­tions of minds like ours

(3) You are almost cer­tain­ly an artif­i­cal enti­ty in a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion.

The author leaves off option 4 (or rather, dis­miss­es it in his set­up).

(4) It is not pos­si­ble to run a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion of a mind like ours.

Any­way, it struck me as a Chris­t­ian that my response is that num­bers 1 and 2 (and pos­si­bly num­ber 4) are true. The world will end via divine inter­ven­tion before our civ­i­liza­tion is capa­ble of such a feat (and once in heav­en we will pre­sum­ably have no inter­est in run­ning such sim­u­la­tions even if they prove tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble).

Fun­ny how Chris­tian­i­ty affects your repons­es to everything–even bizarre aca­d­e­m­ic papers. 🙂

Mission Accomplished!

I final­ly whit­tled my inbox down to where all my mes­sages are vis­i­ble on one screen. Par­don me while I throw a lit­tle par­ty…

Reaching Leaders

I was blown away by this arti­cle from The Ori­gins Project newslet­ter (Emerg­ing Lead­ers part 1). I believe it was writ­ten by Alex McManus, but I’m not alto­geth­er cer­tain of that.

Alexan­der Hamil­ton was 19 years old when George Wash­ing­ton appoint­ed him as an aid. Impres­sive enough, except when com­pared to the fact that at 14, Hamil­ton set the rules for the sea-far­ing cap­tains who trad­ed with his employ­ers on St. Croix Island.

In 1381, Richard II walked onto a field and faced off against Wat Tyler and his mob. Lat­er that same day, after four­teen year old Richard 11 had Wat Tyler behead­ed, the young king addressed the mob of peas­ants with enough sen­si­bil­i­ty to calm and end Wat Tyler’s Peas­ant Rebel­lion.

Few of us are aware of the way his­to­ry and cul­ture ‑not to men­tion our per­son­al age — influ­ence our feel­ings about youth­ful­ness and lead­er­ship. In order to cre­ate an ethos con­ducive to includ­ing emerg­ing lead­ers, we’ll need to ask our­selves the ques­tion, “At what age does some­one have capac­i­ty to lead?”

Recent­ly I spoke on a Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus and was star­tled at the youth­ful­ness of the stu­dent body. This hap­pens to me every year. In truth, the stu­dents are the same age under­grad­u­ates have always been. I’m just one year old­er. Every year, as our church lead­ers age, the young look younger. The cor­re­spond­ing dan­ger is that we may over­look many of our ablest lead­ers.

His­to­ry is sprin­kled with tales of the exploits, achieve­ments and lead­er­ship of young adults, even teenagers. Colum­bus and all the explor­ers of the new world relied on hard work­ing teens to man their crews. Think about this: Mid­dle school age chil­dren set­ting off on adven­tures that many adults would lack the courage to under­take. In times past, teenagers could lead armies in bat­tle and young pages could be made knights as ear­ly as age 12.

Con­trast this to the head dea­con who said of his new “young” pas­tor, “We’re let­ting him stretch his wings a lit­tle.” Many emerg­ing lead­ers won’t stretch their wings with­in a cage of past accom­plish­ments and exist­ing insti­tu­tions. Emerg­ing lead­er­ship will go where it can fly. One ques­tion we must ask our­selves is, do we real­ly want young lead­ers? Or are we only look­ing for some­one to serve in and man­age a pro­gram we’ve cre­at­ed.

A tip of the hat to Jor­dan Coop­er for find­ing this.

I keep describ­ing the stu­dents at Stan­ford as “future lead­ers.” I ought to know bet­ter, but I some­times nail them into a box that I ought to be rip­ping apart on their behalf.

I will say one thing though–while some stu­dents are ready to lead some­thing major from the moment they set foot on cam­pus, oth­ers aren’t ready even years after grad­u­a­tion (this isn’t just at Stan­ford, this is every­where I’ve been). I guess a huge part of my job ought to be fig­ur­ing out which ten­den­cy a giv­en stu­dent has…

And The Moral of the Story Is

THE emi­nent Russ­ian physi­cist Andrei Linde once found him­self on a long flight seat­ed beside a busi­ness­man nose-deep in A Brief His­to­ry of Time.

With­out hav­ing been intro­duced and before the usu­al small talk, they struck up a con­ver­sa­tion about it.

“What do you think of it?” Linde asked.

“Fas­ci­nat­ing,” said the busi­ness­man. “I can’t put it down.”

“Oh, that’s inter­est­ing,” the sci­en­tist replied. “I found it quite heavy going in places and didn’t ful­ly under­stand some parts.”

At which point the busi­ness­man closed the book on his lap, leaned across with a com­pas­sion­ate smile, and said, “Let me explain.…”

Sto­ries like this keep me from say­ing every­thing I think…

source (the above excerpt is actu­al­ly a con­fla­tion of two sources, the first was from Sun­day On Scot­land, but I can’t find a link that works. Any­way, their open­ing sen­tence was much bet­ter than the sec­ond source I found so I kept it)

Stanford Goes Open-Source With Sakai

I thought this was kind of cool: Stan­ford is one of the four key uni­ver­si­ties spon­sor­ing a new open source course man­age­ment sys­tem (the oth­er three are MIT, Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, and Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty). The new project is called Sakai and Stan­ford’s ver­sion will go live on cam­pus in 2005.

Relevant Network Strikes Again

I’ve just received my third install­ment of resources from Rel­e­vant Net­work. I reviewed my first box, meant to review my sec­ond but got a lit­tle bit busy, and now want to tell you what came in my third (and also allude to the sec­ond when appro­pri­ate).

In both the sec­ond and third box­es I received 5 copies of the most recent issue of Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine. Nice for hand­outs to students–I gave away the last ones and I’ll give these away as well.

In both of the last two box­es I received the lit­tle mag­a­zinelet Rel­e­vant Leader, which seems to be devel­op­ing into some­thing a lit­tle more than the anno­tat­ed resource review it was in the first box.

As in the pre­vi­ous two box­es I received a good mix of books and CDs.

The CDs include:

The books are:

My crit­i­cism of the first box (that it con­tained almost no min­istry resources) has been tend­ed to, inci­den­tal­ly. The last box, for instance, con­tained a High­way Video DVD and a Blue­prints CD from Crave Resources. I was­n’t as impressed with the Blue­prints CD as I want­ed to be, by the way.

This box car­ries on the resource trend with a DVD called That’s My King from Ver­ti­cal Sky Pro­duc­tions. There is also a jour­naly kind of Bible-study thing to accom­pa­ny the Miles to Cross book.

All in all, I still think Rel­e­vant Net­work is the best bang for buck any min­istry to col­le­gians or twen­tysome­things is like­ly to run across.