Each of us peabrainers has an individual blog (actually, we each have two) else where on the interweb. Only one of mine is even slightly active due to the HSC, but i thought we could list them (or at least one) here anyway.
The P: Cursory Glance and PaulVaartjes.com
The E: Review.
The A: Blog of a Girl and Alyssa’s Books
This week I found a beautiful image. The visualisation below shows all the cross-references in the Bible. (click to see it in a larger size)
Visualising the Bible - By Chris Harrison
Here is how the image’s creator, Chris Harrison explains it:
The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.
Yesterday, 9000 people were evacuated from Grafton due to floods. Yesterday, the same number of people died from malaria.
In the past 60 days, 80 people have died from the swine flu. In those very same days, 6 000 000 people have died from hunger. That’s 75 000 for each swine flu death. It’s also over one quarter of the population of Australia. 960 000 of those deaths were innocent children.
On Wednesday, a petrol station in Sydney lowered petrol prices to 41.8c for one hour. That same day, 100 people died in a plane crash in Indonesia. They were pushed three ad-breaks later.
While you’ve been reading this, just in our own country 100 000 people are living on the streets.
While you’ve been reading this, 100 babies were killed in abortions.
While you’ve been reading this, 250 babies were born. 125 of those were born into poverty. Of those 125, about 25 will not live to see their 5th birthday.
I’ve long been frustrated by the new age Jesus that is so predominant in emerging mega-churches. Here’s a challenging quote from a conservative calvinist on such a Jesus:
“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.”
—Mark Driscoll, Relevant Magazine[10]
Can i highly recommend Driscoll’s podcast on dating and relationships here (click on downloads -> direct link to audio. It’s not big, and it’s awesome.)
Eric.
So for those of you who may not know, Emerson Spartz from Mugglenet is engaged as of a few days ago. Anyway, on the site, he posted some photos from the proposal, which happened to occur at halftime during a basketball game with over 20,000 people looking on. Brave man.
“Here’s what happened: I told Gaby I “pulled strings” and she was going to get to do a contest at center court during a time out at the Chicago Bulls/Philadelphia 76ers game. She was blindfolded, spun around, and told she had to “find” Benny the Bull in 30 seconds. The crowd cheered and booed to help her out as she blindly made her way around the court in front of 22,000 people.
But she didn’t find Benny… !”
There’s some pics on the site, but i’ve gone to the effort of putting them here for you. I aww-ed, which i don’t do. so make sure you view them in order:
Hopefully I get to post before 4.15, but if I don’t, tune in to On the Voddy at that time. For now, hi from ipod touch, later dudes.
I subscribe to a daily email called “A Word A Day.” Yes, quite a nerdy thing for a 17 year old to do but, i am that. Now, about a week or so ago I recieved the first for the week, which usually describes what the theme for the words that week are and how he arrived there. This particular week’s theme was Words from Darwin and Linlcoln because its both of their 200th birthdays this year, or something like that. So the dude running the emails says, “you’d think 200 years would be enough time for people to accept the evidence that evolution is true,” and I thought ouch!Because I don’t believe in evolution, and I know like, tonnes of people who don’t. It was really, i think, quite insensitive of him (who I’d learned to respect). And then I thought (too late to send an angry email back about it) that I should have replied with something like, “well you know what, people thought there was evidence to believe that the earth was flat and then, when that was disproven, that it was still the center of the universe.” And then he would have probably got angry at me, but it’s true! Scientific theories are just that, (ERIC WAS HERE ON HIS IPOD =P) despite the fact that I’ve heard many say that a scientific “theory” is as good as a scientific law but can’t be proven. People who claim that evolution is 100% true, have no doubts and are absolutely scathing to any other beliefs are, i think, arrogant in that they think they know enough to say what’s been happening on the world for at least 6000 years when you just can’t know. And now people will say, ah but you christians, you’re 100% certain that you know where we came from and i would say that it’s because we have a God figure we believe knows everything and has told us what we need to know (creation being one of those things) so we can be 100% certain of creation. What I don’t like is people who don’t believe in a god elevating themselves to the status of one by thinking they know all possibilities and narrowing it down to one they’re certain of. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but that’s me. Personally, I won’t put absolute trust in scientific theories (even laws depending on which one it is) because there ahve been so many that have been disproven over the years that we just can’t know. Flat earth, geocnentricism, plum pudding atoms and more I can’t think of right now. So yes. That’s my thoughts, deal with them.
Alyssa – condemner of society
Today, if you’re in Australia, you should be (hopefully) aware that at least 50 people have been killed by bushfires in Victoria. As this toll continues to rise, i sit here thinking of how lucky we are to be unaffected, and how much we take for granted in our lives. Every night, i load the dishwasher, brush my teeth, use a flushing toilet, and have to decide which pen to use whilst doing my homework on fresh paper with a calculator next to me (it ok, i don’t do things in such a strange order). In the mornings i have a shower, again brush my teeth, eat, and go off to receive an education, which in my mind is an incredible privilege (yes, you heard it here first – the HSC is none other than a privilege). This is when i begin to feel guilty.
However, we can remove such a feeling of guilt. Being thankful for what we have, rather than taking it for granted, highlights just how blessed we are to live in Australia and also emphasises just how little some others have. Anyway, im struggling to lead this anywhere, but i trust you can all be thankful for what you have too, and be willing to sacrifice your own comfort to help those who have much less. Feel free to suggest ways we can do this in the comments (of course it doesnt mean packing up and going and living overseas – take the time to pray for them, be content with what you have and spend more wisely, or make others aware of how rich they are in Australia).
So as i try to help pea brains recover from it’s own little bushfire, and try to make my avatar change on the main page (it changed everywhere else!) i bid you good day, and i shall see you all sometime in the near future (and feel free to correct the abundant misprints i have probably left in my wake).
Eric, a good man who was in the navy 7 years.
In a week (less even) I and my fellow peabrainers are going to start the HSC course. Everyone always plays it up so much that we can develop this kind of fear of the last year of our schooling. We think it’ll be hard or beyond us. Well it’s not. I really don’t think it is.
We’ve been slowly taught this our whole lives, through each learning experience we have. At once being told to not-look-forward-to-something and how to cope with and approach that thing. This is the basis of the various tests we’ve been sitting for years and the exams we’ve been doing since we were 13 or 14. We all dread them, but they are slowly building us up to be able to tackle our external finals in yr 12.
Its great how it all works out. This simultaneous process of instilling fear and equipping with skills seems to be the basis of all learning, even if the instilling of fear is done unconsciously by a teacher. I learnt pretty quickly to dread music exams not from experience but from what i knew of them from my teacher. I learnt extremely quickly how to lose sleep over the speeches we were to give in yr7 and to sit at my desk with my heart beating while i listened to others speak as soon as the teacher simply explained what we had to do.
With the hsc on the other hand, it’s the way it’s played up and exagerated by so many people that makes lots of people fear it. It’s the way people tell (either subtley or not, unconcsiouly or not) us that it is the be all and end all in determining your entire life. And the thing about the school in generalis that I used to always worry about how hard the work would be at the end of it. I used to watch my babysitter do her maths homework and wonder how I could ever do that. Now it seems simple – well not simple, but it’s certainly easier than I thought. The bottom line is, teachers of any kind (if they’re any good) are able to start from the bottom and work up, building foundations and then building on them, so that slowly, unknowingly, the student reaches the previously revered top, wondering when they gained the skills to get there. It’s a subtle process, and one that under closer examination, has been worked out beautifully and ultimately, I believe, by God, who constantly teaches us throughout our lives.
Alyssa – i sign off lots.
Ok, so here’s the much anticipated guest blog… may i add that these thoughts are those of the editor and not those necessarily held by myself or the other pea brainers =P
It may seem spaced out, because i copied and pasted. for those who don’t know, a ‘frag’ is a kill in a video game.
~ ~ ~
Gamers Frag in games, not in the real world
A few weeks ago, I heard about an incident in Taiwan, in which a 19 year old boy murdered and robbed a taxi driver, because he wanted to see if it was as easy in real life as it was in Grand Theft Auto IV; a game which he was addicted to.
Being a gamer myself, I was interested. A Google search led me to the London Times website, where I found out that the teenager had freely confessed his motives during questioning and had shown no signs of mental problems.
Excuse me? He’s just killed a taxi driver and robbed him in order to get more money for gaming at an arcade; because that’s really normal and people do that all the time, and there’s no reason at all to doubt his sanity!
A glance at the related links column told me that the London Times was just another media organisation that shows prejudice towards gamers; all the links were to articles about the detrimental effects of violent games and making the UK rating system tighter. Read the rest of this entry »
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