HTCPCP, a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots
Is the Internet hospitable to the preaching of the gospel? To Christian fellowship? Or, is virtuality hostile by its nature to authentic human interaction? [Coffeehouse at the End-Of-Days: The Gospel Online]
Some of today's chips already produce more heat than a 100 watt light bulb, and their power supplies draw as much current as your car battery supplies while starting the car! [The Harrow Technology Report for Nov. 24, 2003 - Personal Fabricators.]I didn't know this.
Bb's photos and narrative are a delight. Thank you so much, Shelley
From the link on Meme:
So I use the word "meme" when the connotations I'm looking for include (a) a fairly trivial but specific idea, (b) one that's confined to a specific community, and (c) one that has spread rapidly. I don't know of any other word that gets all this across so succinctly, and the concept seems like a pretty useful one in an era of widespread instantaneous communication and short attention spans. [Calpundit: Meme](“trivial but specific” sounds too much like the things I focus on—best shower and get off to a day of manual labor at work, moving cubicles around. Hmm, the dog wants his share of the day, too: wash, walk, then work.)
From the link on Metaphors (discussing Thomas Friedman's dependence on a wheeled-vehicle metaphor):
I have a parenthetical observation about the Summers quote. Friedman uses it a lot. In fact, he has used it four times in the last year. Once, he even referred to it as one of his "two favorite sayings." (The other was a Native American saying, which he called an "American Indian saying," to the effect that "If we don’t turn around now, we may just get where we’re going.") My observation is that it says an awful lot about you if one of your two favorite sayings is a quote by Lawrence Summers about a rental car. I mean, humankind has produced quite a lot of literature in the past 5000 years or so. Tacitus? Coleridge? Gandhi? "The course of true love never did run smooth?" No. Instead: No one has ever washed a rental car. [NYPress - Cage Match - Matt Taibbi - Vol. 16, Iss. 46]
In the next 12 months, I may meet one or two people who will end up being a close friend for the rest of my life -- or I may realize that I've already met the person and have just not experienced the epiphany of the act. We may be sharing a coffee or a beer and I'll look at the person and think how lucky I am, how much richer my life is because I had a chance to get to know them. [Burningbird: A song on my 49th birthday]Thank you for reminding me how precious my friends are.
What is it about domain registrars that causes them to be your best friends while enticing you to use their services, then immediately turning into sociopathic creeps once they have your business? Is this really a viable model for long-term success? [The Fire Ant Gazette - A Midland, Texas Blog Published Continuously Since '02 | Archives]
Well, as I recall, when we (a large computer company that was once second-largest, until we slipped up on PCs and were eaten by Compaq) viewed this matter, you were a customer until you bought a system...then you were just a user. (I don't know that that was ever the real view, but it may have been a cartoon-strip parody of what it sometimes felt like.)
For the first time, I think I'm in disagreement with Dr. Leithart, or maybe only Jordan. While I think that translations are permissable and perhaps helpful, I think that working from the original language is best and I do have grave suspicions about translations. When you work with a translation, you are interacting with a translator, not the text or original writer. The more I read of Paul's letters the more I think that most translations miss a tremendous amount. Even the "scholarly" NRSV is crap. In reading the Greek or Latin (for other church writers, e.g., Augustine), you can see the words which become weighty theological terms. Also, what authority does a translation have? In regards to Jordan's point of Daniel 2-7 being written in Aramaic, what's the point? And the NT was written in Greek ... ooh. Maybe this means we won't live Hebraic, covenantal lifestyles, but I don't see how a portions of scripture being written in different languages is a mandate for translations?
I recall a professor pointing out that God's giving commands to Adam and Eve was a translation from God's thoughts into human language; the stories of Adam and Eve (unless they were Hebrew speakers—not impossible, I suppose) were translated into Hebrew. From one perspective, the whole of history is about the translation of God's word into every language, and the translation of his commands and promises into lives transformed.
I've no objection to working from the originals when possible, but I won't call my aching friends to learn Greek before they can hear the good news of purpose and freedom and wholeness.
And as for the “scholarly” NRSV being crap: strive for the best translation you can…and realize that God does amazing things through people who barely lisp his name aright, but seek to serve him nonetheless: if we see the sort of jars he carries his treasure around in, we'd be thankful for any word at all.
Yes, something like this
is what I think I have in mind. I'm not expecting blogging to replace fellowship with blogging. But for encountering others, it certainly spreads the "Welcome" mat wider than anything else.I believe that if the creation of the "participatory church," one that exists only in the blogosphere, is successful, it will still ultimately prove to be unsatisfying (and thus will not last). However, Tim's post includes a number of very good points about the strengths of blogging as an alternative medium for presenting the Gospel. If you're interested in how the evolution of blogging might be used for this purpose, you'll find much in his essay worth considering.
[The Fire Ant Gazette - A Midland, Texas Blog Published Continuously Since '02 | Archives]
There isn't a sense of place in Grapevine anymore. Or Colleyville, or Hurst-Bedford-Euless, or Dalworthington Gardens for that matter.
Grab hold of Ray Oldenburg's Great Good Place and get another view on how God calls people together, even (perhaps) in Grapevine. Then go there, and see if you can tell a Good Story in a strange place.
On the off chance: anybody among my few readers know of an instrument repair shop in Boston open on a weekend (or, by the time you read this, early on Monday morning)? Comment or trackback, I'll find out...thanks.
A sample:
Eeyore's wisdom is philosophical or speculative wisdom; hethought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself Why?, and sometimes he thought Wherefore?, and sometimes he thought Inasmuch as which?, and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about (W 4.39-40).This is arguably the best account that has ever been given of the nature of philosophical thought. [New Directions in Pooh Studies]
A final note for readers: check the footnotes.
But what about those on the other side of the coin? Lots of Charismatics are coming over to Reformed theology, too. I propose a sister program for Sonship -- Slaveship. It'll be designed for "recovering Antinomians."
Oh, look! There's a Part Two, also...
Back in seminary, one of my professors told us that the Christian position could not comfortably fit on a continuum from economic left to right, nor from authoritarian to libertarian, but would be off the continuum somewhere, because our wisdom comes from outside the world (if I remember correctly).
Thus, with The Political Compass, which attempts to locate one on a grid (with the axes being the two mentioned above, economic left/right and authoritarian/libertarian), I suppose—if the professor is right—I am hovering above or below the plane of the grid. However, the point I'm hovering above (the projection of my position on the plane) is also somewhere between the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, I guess.
I ask my friends with theological interests in the Orthodox if they have comments…I may one day end up eating my words. I told Wayne Olson that if the Catholics and Orthodox could united together and condemn the theology of the Reformation, I would really have to reconsider my believes.
Apparently, they have come together to agree on filioque. I haven't taken the time to read it, but I did read the news report from Touchstone and the discussion between a Catholic and an Orthodox regarding the statement.
[This Classical Life]
I have friends in the OT department who will want to see AKMA's links.
Ah, the hyperlinking is list-based, not text-based. Still valuable, but really needs the book in hand for additional text, I think.
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even lessWe the church have often stood at the dividing of the ways, the signposts Change and Irrelevance offering us our choices. We rightly say, “We dare not change our message!” and, “Our message is forever relevant!” and then march down the road to apparent or effective irrelevance.—General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army[cited in Movable Theoblogical: Change and Irrelevance]
We sense dimly that we are like Tolkien's “Elven-wise, Lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas.” We “who [dwell] in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against Seen and Unseen [we] have great power.” But we forget that we must speak the language of men (and women), and that language is in flux. Our message is unchanging and ever-relevant: but we must translate it into the language (and culture) of our times, or appear to be irrelevant.
Movable Theoblogical: Change and Irrelevance goes on to sayThere may be no “easier response”, but we I'm not sure we're called to an easy response. We have to sweat, and pray, and ache, to become a “safe place” to enter: to remove every obstacle to our hearers' receiving the message except the scandal of the cross.When Churches and , worse, agencies of the Church charged with providing resources for those churches, flat out fail to acknowledge the need and desire of people to connect on issues and share rants and all manner of "passionate involvements", then irrelevance rules their approach.
Old Saint George has recognized the "time" ; the "kairos" represented in the possibilities for online community, and that it is undoubtedly TIME now to engage in projects that respond to this. To be a "Great Good Place" requires of us that we become an "easy place" to be heard. And there is no easier response than to jump in and build applications which emanate "exploration" and "invitation" and "affirmation". This is much of what it means to be Church. To be a place in which passions which emanate from a sense of CALL are explored and are the source of dialogue about what can be done, and how our God-given gifts equip us for it.
So, where does blogging come in? The web? We are called to be communicators, a picture book that leads people to the Living Book by way of the written book. If we can find a way to engage our contemporaries through a weblog, and it does not pull us away from caring for the poor and afflicted and enslaved (“But…my blog is my ministry!”)…then blog on!