What Rhymes With Orange?

Hilary Price, nation­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed car­toon­ist, majored in Eng­lish at Stan­ford.

I just ran across this fact on The S‑Files: the author of the nation­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed com­ic strip Rhymes With Orange is a Stan­ford alum­nus!

That’s right: Hilary Price grad­u­at­ed from Stan­ford in 1995 with a degree in Eng­lish. She sold her first car­toon to the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle for $35.

What Should Christians Think About Illegal MP3s?

It’s clear that most of today’s stu­dents view music as a fun­da­men­tal right. It should be as free as oxy­gen: indeed, for most of our lives it has seemed that it is. Any­where there’s oxy­gen, there tends to be music!

As such, when the MP3 file for­mat, file-shar­ing tech­nolo­gies, and the CD-Burn­er all con­verged to cre­ate mas­sive repos­i­to­ries of free music (and movies), it was a ver­i­ta­ble gold mine for col­lege stu­dents.

Should Chris­tians par­tic­i­pate? For a provoca­tive answer, check out the Robin Hood com­plex.

My Mom is Coming to Visit

My mom is com­ing, and so we get to be tourists!

Also, my mom will be vis­it­ing with us from today through next Tues­day. We get to be tourists and see all the cool stuff that we’d nev­er see oth­er­wise. I’ll be sure to post some trav­el­ogue info!

San Francisco is a Madhouse

San Fran­cis­co is a crazy, pot-lov­ing place with poor pub­lic health stan­dards.

On a non-Stan­ford relat­ed note, this area is a mad­house. San Fran­cis­co is plan­ning to vote on whether to grow pot (mar­i­jua­na) on pub­lic lands. This is because Propo­si­tion 215 legal­iz­ing med­i­c­i­nal mar­i­jua­na has­n’t flown at all with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. I sup­pose the city fig­ures that if they grow the pot on pub­lic lands the DEA is less like­ly to come in and arrest gov­ern­ment employ­ees.

Advo­cates say that this leg­is­la­tion has the addi­tion­al ben­e­fit of pro­vid­ing job train­ing for the unem­ployed. Train­ing unem­ployed peo­ple to grow and dis­trib­ute drugs just does­n’t seem like a help­ful social strat­e­gy to me…

This, of course, is the same city that just now made it ille­gal to poop in pub­lic, and the deci­sion was hot­ly con­test­ed. No joke.

In my mind, not poop­ing in pub­lic is just basic cour­tesy (not to men­tion good pub­lic health pol­i­cy).

Stanford Hosts Major Sporting Events

In anoth­er demon­stra­tion of Stan­ford’s world­wide influ­ence, Stan­ford just host­ed the 2002 World Pen­tathalon Cham­pi­onships and is cur­rent­ly host­ing the Bank of the West ten­nis cham­pi­onship fea­tur­ing play­ers such as Venus Williams, Mon­i­ca Seles,and Anna Kourniko­va.

To top it all off, Stan­ford will be the loca­tion of sev­er­al of the 2012 Olympic games, should San Fran­cis­co win its bid to host them. In par­tic­u­lar, swim­ming, div­ing and archery, track and field, soft­ball, bad­minton and the pen­tathlon. Plus Stan­ford would be the site of the open­ing and clos­ing cer­e­monies. Read a relat­ed arti­cle here.
Sweet!

Know Any Christian Entrepeneurs?

A link to a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about the respon­si­bil­i­ties of Chris­t­ian busi­ness­peo­ple on Pastors.com

I just ran across this neat arti­cle on Pastors.com called Chris­t­ian Entre­peneurs Should Finance King­dom Work. Love the arti­cle, but he did­n’t list the names and phone num­bers of any Chris­t­ian entre­peneurs. 🙂

It sort of reminds me of the con­tent on The Haver­sham Lead­er­ship Forum, although he also focus­es on spe­cif­ic ways in which Chris­t­ian busi­ness­peo­ple should be dif­fer­ent from their sec­u­lar coun­ter­parts (and seems to be devel­op­ing an online church for Chris­t­ian busi­ness­peo­ple. Sad­ly, he does­n’t list any con­tacts either. 😉

Supper with Stanford/MIT Physicist Ray Cowan

Our enlight­en­ing con­ver­sa­tion with an illus­tri­ous mem­ber of the Stan­ford research com­mu­ni­ty.

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.

When Imitating Christ Is a Bad Idea

Mark Gal­li has a neat lit­tle edi­to­r­i­al in Chris­tiantiy Today talk­ing about
when imi­tat­ing Christ is super­fi­cial the­ol­o­gy, using the book What Would Jesus Eat? as an ster­ling exam­ple of good inten­tions gone loopy.

While I have to con­cede his basic point (what would Jesus eat?????), I think he dis­miss­es the con­cept too quick­ly. Dal­las Willard and John Ort­berg (who does­n’t seem to have a web­site) do mar­velous jobs of demon­strat­ing how it is pos­si­ble to imi­tate Christ in a thought­ful, pro­duc­tive man­ner. In fact, I high­ly rec­om­mend Dal­las Willard’s book The Spir­it of the Dis­ci­plines as a life-chang­ing guide to the imi­ta­tion of Christ.

Colleges Teach Truth Is Relative

75% of stu­dents say that their pro­fes­sors teach that moral truth is rel­a­tive.

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!

A Mystery Worshiper Visits Stanford’s Memorial Church

What hap­pens when a Mys­tery Wor­shiper from the Ship of Fools vis­its Stan­ford’s Memo­r­i­al Church? Read on!

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.