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.

On the flipside

Have you been reading Tim and Amy’s blog (a misnomer if ever I’ve heard one… Tim has posted once). It’s pretty awesome. Like this post with a little map tool that lets you figure out where you’d end up if you were to drill a hole right through the earth.

If you were to do that, and you dropped a rock down the hole – would it get stuck in the middle or shoot out the other side? Ignoring all the effects that lava might have on the composition of the rock…

Here’s where you’d end up if you lived in Townsville. Somewhere off the coast of Mauritius.

A comic you can believe in

The question now – should I duck for cover? Wouldn’t want to go saying anything that the people binarily opposed to me from a philosophical standpoint may find offensive now would I…

From here.

Candid camera

Here’s another addition to the myriad passive aggressive signs posted for our viewing pleasure. A public service reminder not to document your misdemeanours on camera and leave it in a public place…

From here.

Downward mobility

How many mobiles have you owned? Me, I’ve had six (plus my two current iPhones). That’s a lot. But I didn’t really feel guilty until now…

Via here.

Join the (right) queue

A perennial frustration of mine is picking the wrong lane on the highway, or the wrong queue at the shopping centre. You make a choice only to realise, minutes later, that you’re stuck in the slow lane.

I can’t help you out with the highway scenario. It’s a mystery. But I can point you in the right direction for the shops – thanks to this Lifehacker post which links to this little mathematical analysis..

“When you add one person to the line, you’re adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that’s “tender time” added to “other time”) without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you’d rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person!”

I don’t have to worry about this quite so much now that our local Woolies has a self service lane. I think people are scared of the technology, I haven’t had to queue for it yet.

More Hollywood learning experiences

Today we’ve learned a couple of lessons about Hollywood plot devices – cool guys not looking at explosions and the Willhelm Scream… continuing in that vein we have the current horror movie plot device of choice – mobile phones that don’t work (contains some rude words).

You just don’t see that happening in the classics…

Motown for the single ladies

It’s sad how many of the guys in this montage of clips from a dating agency have moustaches. I would suggest that the first step to not being single is to lose the mo.


Dating Montage
by smithy00101

YouTube Toosday: Willhelm Scream

I thought I’d mentioned the Willhelm Scream before. It’s a sound engineer’s joke in movies. A reoccuring scream sound effect from 1951. It has a life of its own. Here’s a little video documentary about it… apparently the scream was quite possibly produced by the guy who sang the Purple People Eater song.

YouTube Twosday: the second coolest thing you can do on a skateboard

The coolest thing you can do on a skateboard is fall off and hurt yourself.

The second coolest thing you can do on a skateboard is strap neon shapes to your head and create a scene from Tetris.

You get less points for getting the geometry of Tetris wrong – but style points for trying…

YouTube Tuesday: Explosions

So it’s Wednesday today – but Tuesday was a bit of a write off thanks to a stomach bug and an endless stream of comments to moderate…

But I’ll make up for it. Promise. With this song that points out a particularly interesting cinematic phenomena – I’d never noticed it before. But I’ll leave it to the band to explain…

Two types of people

There are two types of people in this world – those who think Dropbox is awesome and those who don’t know what it is.

You can now get Dropbox on your iPhone. Awesome…

For the uninitiated – Dropbox is a file syncing program with 2GB of online storage space.

Reality bites

Simone and Ben are continuing their love affair with vampires.

I’ve got bad news for them… Vampires are mathematically impossible.

Problem solved.

Seriously, these researchers have conclusively demonstrated (PDF) that vampires would wipe out the human population in just two and a half years… It’s pretty similar to the zombie study I posted a while back.

Let us assume that a vampire need feed only once a month. This is certainly a highly conservative assumption given any Hollywood vampire film. Now two things happen when a vampire feeds. The human population decreases by one and the vampire population increases by one.

Sounds like a reasonable assumption right… Here’s the conclusion…

“We conclude that if the first vampire appeared on January 1st of 1600 AD, humanity would have been wiped out by June of 1602, two and half years later.”

It seems this study was deemed quite controversial by other mathematicians and an economist who argued that other factors should have been considered. You can read about that where I found it – here.

Collision course

Back when I was casting all sorts of aspersions on Rugby Union I was told I needed empirical data to support my opinion that Rugby League is the superior sport… how bout this… from the SMH… regarding Fui Fui Moi Moi and just how much force he generates in a tackle.

“Imagine standing looking up at the sky. From a leaning tower someone drops a 20 kilogram bag of cement from a height of 22 metres. Dr Nicholas Armstrong, a physicist, says that when you try to catch the cement it will have the same energy as Moimoi generates when he surges into the defensive line.

Moimoi is able to accelerate from jogging pace to 26 km/h within two seconds. His top speed on a treadmill is 31.2 km/h and he has been measured at 32km/h in game situations.

Of course, it is nothing like Usain Bolt, the world record holder for the 100 metres, who reaches 43.9 km/h, but combined with his mass, Moimoi is a deadly weapon. He is one of the three fastest Parramatta players in a 40-metre sprint.”

The secret, apparently, is that he eats horse.

More geek v nerd data

It turns out that even an awesome venn diagram won’t solve the nerd v geek debate for some people. So here you go. Empirical data. From Library Thing.

On angry mobs

I love how in online debates people think volume equals victory.

Somehow the fact that 200 angry commenters at the world’s biggest atheist blog all disagreed with me makes them correct.

And atheists are the first to suggest that majority rule does not make a position automatically correct. When it suits them of course.

This tactic is up there with giving a phenomena a name (eg “Godwin’s Law”) and thus making the use of long held positions and ideas somehow laughable. It’s name it and shame it rather than name it and claim it. It’s odd. Similarly, having some sort of well known theory like Pascal’s Wager “debunked” by people who disagree with it… I’m glad atheists have rebuttals for every position put forward by Christians. It probably helps them to sleep at night. The issue really rests on that which separates theists from atheists… if theists are correct then every rebuttal atheists make on the basis of “logic” or “science” will be shown to be incorrect, and vice versa.

This is the problem I was trying to address in my list also… the question of whether God exists divides down the line of people who think everything came from nothing and the people who think that everything came from God. Either the universe came first, or God did. That’s the complexity I was referring to in my list. While some atheist philosophers think a watch in a field lends itself to chance – other philosophers think a watch in a field lends itself to the idea of a watchmaker.

Just because you’ve made up your mind on that issue doesn’t make the other answer any less rational. It’s probably more rational – because the simplest answer is to assume a creator, not the other way around.