Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

Bulletin Bored

A while back I wrote about how church announcements can be really boring. Here’s one church’s attempt to alleviate the announcement induced slumber.

I can’t decide whether or not this is funny or stupid.

Cardboard cut out Transformers

These cardboard box Transformers costumes will not effectively disguise you as a robot. But they’re cool.

How to get in the news

You’ve no doubt spent years trying to fake a news clipping to give your bizarre scar a fitting explanation.

Well. Here you go. A press clipping generator.

Look at meme – Autotune

The Know Your Meme Team recruited Weird Al to explain the Autotune trend taking the world wide web by storm.

Best of YouTube

How well do you know your YouTube hits? Here are 100 in four minutes.

Get elfed

Elf Yourself is a cool viral Christmas greeting card generator. You should check it out.

You should also check out the Flash Mob inspired ad the service put together…

Guilty pleasures

Some readers may know that I occasionally enjoy watching wrestling – especially with Tim.

I also enjoy a good tilt shift time lapse.

Here are these two interests combined at Hulk Hogan’s recent Australian tour.

Hulkamania from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Cutting a pizza – it’s easy as pi

A bunch of mathematicians (no doubt uni students) have attempted to solve the dilemma of distributing pizza slices evenly to people who have made equal contributions to the pizza buying cause. This article explains.

The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?

It’s complex. Apparently. If you have two diners, and the pizza is cut an even number of times, the trick is to take alternate pieces.

It has been known since the 1960s that when N is even and greater than 2, an answer to the first question is for Gray and White to choose alternate slices about the point P of concurrency.

The conclusion – from the paper that’ll cost you $20 to buy – was this:

It was conjectured by Stan Wagon and others, that for N=3,7,11,15,…, whoever gets the center gets the most pizza, while for N=5,9,13,17,…, whoever gets the center gets the least. We prove this Pizza Conjecture by first showing its equivalence to a (pretty wild) trigonometric inequality. This inequality is proved with the aid of a theorem that counts lattice paths. Our main theorem is sufficiently general that, as a bonus, results concerning the equiangular slicing of other dishes are obtained.

One can only assume all this would be easier with one of these plates.

Good coverage: Sometimes cover songs are better than the original

I’m a sucker for badly sung covers of popular songs. I remember discovering Grum Lee’s now defunct website of purposefully bad acoustic covers sung with a French accent and thinking it was terrific. The site is dead – but Grum lives on, immortalised in YouTube…

Here he is singing a Dandy Warhols number.

The reason I post this is because I just watched this video Dave Miers posted today of a kid on a ukelele murdering the lyrics to that annoying Jason Mraz song.

Breakfast flowchart

If the question of what cereal to eat in the morning is something you can’t tackle without a decent breakfast – thus creating an infinite loop of hunger – then you need this great flowchart. It even takes into account the fact that Australians have a more limited range of cereals to choose from (and perhaps less inclination to make a choice).

The problem with the liberals

You might be thinking, on the basis of the title, that I’m going to talk about politics. If you want to know what I think is currently wrong with the Liberal Party read here.

Today’s rant is about “liberal” Christians.

I don’t think there has been anything more harmful to evangelism than the watering down of the gospel. There are plenty of things atheists could say about what the Bible actually says that would be grounds for choosing to reject God. But nothing annoys me more in the dialogue than those weak kneed Christians who try to apologise for God’s behaviour. Especially when it comes to that archaic ban on gayness (which is a genetic trait so can’t be wrong) or those cultural ideas of marriage and family. Read any forum where gay rights are being discussed (and I’m not actually opposed to gay marriage necessarily) and you’ll see the type of people I’m talking about.

It is important to place the Bible in historical context and to understand what the text meant to the original readers. But these liberals need to go back to reading their Bibles. They’re kind of missing the point. Right from the nation of Israel to instructions for Christians the idea is that at some point God has to be counter cultural – or there’s no point? How are the people of God to be different if everything that’s natural is fair game? It just doesn’t make sense.

Liberal Christianity is less logical than atheism. Atheism functions on a type of rational and logical framework. Liberalism takes a bizarre mix of the supernatural element of Christianity and the emotional anything goes morality of Atheism and tries to blend them. It stinks.

We should expect sin to be natural. In fact, I’d go as far as to say we should have an inherent distrust for anything that seems natural to us, as humans, because human nature is sinful.

I can see where they come from, sometimes, we are called to love people. Loving the sinner but hating the sin can be pretty confusing. But to suggest that certain behaviour is ok for Christians just because it’s instinctive isn’t just a slippery slope. It’s a fireman’s pole. Straight down.

The fundamental assumption of Liberal belief – from what I can gather – is that somehow we, in the 21st century, are better qualified to understand the mind of God than those primitive disciples and their apostolic proclamations – and heaven help anyone who tries to base a worldview on the Old Testament.

Science, culture and psychology have helped us understand our sinfulness better – they do nothing to turn that which God calls sinful into something pure.

That is all.

Things that are of the Devil

  1. Pokemon
  2. Video Games
  3. Bad Preaching

I believe that one of the three items in that list is actually a tool of the devil. This guy disagrees.

The Links effect

It’s been a while since I last shared some significant link love. And I like doing these posts – it reminds me how much fun the blogosphere is…

I’m looking forward to working at a church that cares about the small things – like fonts – next year (not that our current one doesn’t – it’s just I don’t work for it). Simone is writing a new series of Sunday School material on 1-2 Kings.

Jeff’s sermon on evangelism prompted some interesting application of his application. He also posted on the gender pay issue that cropped up in the comments of Benny’s last (or second last) post.

Ali noticed that conversation starter cards are springing up everywhere.

Kutz designed a cool shirt and perhaps started a sub-movement.

Ben created a word game.

Tim posted some good analysis of the World Cup bid (and other Football goings on) via YouTube – Play Fair,
NIKE: TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL (high quailty), Balanced view of the world cup

Stephy at Stuff Christian Culture likes covered the wardrobe choices of “relevant” preachers in the US. But before that she took on two of my favourites – prayer requests as gossip and oversharing via prayer request. What’s worse than oversharing via prayer request is oversharing via prayer request on Facebook.

Lee who has turned into a regular comment in these parts has a couple of blogs – I guiltily enjoy Lemon Harrangue Pie more than the serious one about being a Contemporary Calvinist. But both are good stuff and I commend them to you.

Dave Miers has a great list of books people should read in their first year out of highschool – at the very least you could put them on your holiness shelf.

Andrew managed to pick a fight with some atheists on Tumblr. Having first picked one on Twitter.

Stuss reviewed Australia. She didn’t like it. I haven’t seen it. I don’t plan to. It’s a bit like the Passion. I know all the good bits so a movie is only going to cheapen the experience.

Conference blogging was all the rage – Izaac shared some thoughts on NTE talks.

Over at Christian Reflections Mikey liveblogged the Geneva Push’s In the Chute conference. There were lots of posts. Here were 24 I enjoyed.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the good stuff around the blogosphere but it has, for now, exhausted me.

If you’ve got something you wrote or read that is worth sharing – put it in the comments for all to see.

High steaks art

Steak Filter v0 – init from AKA MEDIA SYSTEM on Vimeo.

I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.

Pac Mug

When this mug gets hot the ghosts disappear.

Need I say more…

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