Glen Davis

We had supper tonight with Stanford physicist Dr. Ray Cowan (also check his work homepage). He’s another person God has connected us with. Ray is on the advisory board for Stanford Chi Alpha, and is a nice guy to boot.

I say he’s a Stanford physicist, but it’s a little more complicated than that: he’s actually paid by M.I.T. yet works at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Evidently there are only three or so real sites in the world you can do high-energy particle physics at (SLAC is one, Fermi is another, and CERN is the last of the really big ones). So many of the people who work at these research facilities are actually research physicists for institutions in other parts of the world. Interesting, no?

Ray’s a pretty neat guy: his hobbies include reading, geology, ham radio, local history, generic outdoorsy type activities, and serving as a volunteer reserve police officer when he gets the chance (he’s had to stop that because of his research schedule).

Also, Ray shared a unique method of calculating a 25% tip with me. Multiply the pre-tax bill by 10 and divide it in half 3 times. That comes out to be the same as 10/8 (or 125%) and is pretty easy to calculate. How cool!

Finally, Ray informed that it would indeeed be possible to cook a chicken using the Stanford dish, so I’ll have to pass that on to Andrew and Kwasi as an add-on to our discussion about it.

According to a survey sponsored by the National Association of Scholars, 3 out of 4 college students report that their professors teach that morality is determined by individual and cultural differences (as opposed to universal moral principles to which we are all accountible). The poll was conducted by Zogby, and the detailed results are available here.

This study only underlines the urgency for campus ministry and for solid, intellectually responsible discipleship!

Thanks to the Stanford Christian Faculty for finding this funny review of Stanford’s Memorial Church.

This is part of the Mystery Worshiper series at the Ship of Fools website, wherein someone walks into a church service and then posts an online review of it.

I mention the link because
a) it amused me and
b) I think it reveals something about the state of religious life at Stanford.

God has really been opening up some neat doors for us. We just had one of Andrew’s friends, Kwasi Adu (rhymes with greasy shampoo) over for supper. Kwasi is from Ghana, and his name means “Sunday.” Evidently every Ghanian (or at least every male Ghanian) is named for the day of the week on which they were born. How interesting…

Anyway, Kwasi and I have read a lot of the same books, so we had a really good time talking. He, Andrew, and I also had a fun time trying to figure out whether or not you could cook a chicken with a sufficient density of radio waves. We decided that you probably couldn’t actually cook it, but you could do some pretty unhealthy things to it.

Afterwards, I gave Kwasi a ride home and met one of his roommates, Nathan, who seemed open to checking out Chi Alpha. How cool!

I’ve been getting the Stanford Chi Alpha website ready for launch, and now it’s ready! You can visit it at http://www.xastanford.org/.

Here’s what I’ve posted so far:
*What Is Chi Alpha?
*What’s Important To Chi Alpha?
*What Does Chi Alpha Believe?
*What Does The Name Chi Alpha Mean?

One thing I’m very excited about is that the students will be able to make posts as well, so this will be a true representation of our community!

Donald Knuth, a retired computer science professor at Stanford, undertook a project many years ago to analyze every chapter 3 verse 16 in the Bible. It’s supposed to be quite fascinating, although I’ve not read it yet.

In any event, I just ran across the coolest thing on his website: John 3:16 in beautiful PDF calligraphy. The translation is pretty neat as well.