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.

What I should have titled that last post…

Palin comparison – that would have been a phonetically funny pun.

October 2, 2008

Anti-thesis

Sarah Palin is kind of starting to make sense as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate – she is the complete opposite of Barack Obama. It’s a race of binary oppositions – he’s a black, she’s white, he’s a man, she’s a woman, he’s allegedly a fundamentalist muslim, she’s allegedly a fundamentalist Christian, she’s a republican, he’s a democrat – and the clincher he’s a master of the english language and oratory – she’s barely an apprentice.

Her interviews with TV networks have been heavily regulated – and here’s why – a mapping out of her sentences – and then the chance to conduct your own interview* with Sarah Palin based on actual interview answers she’s given.

*In the “Choose your own adventure” novel sense…

October 2, 2008

My friend Ben.

My friend Ben hates puns, analogies, arguments by example, hypotheticals or in fact anything he can’t taste, touch or hold – and he doesn’t like most of those things. He’s a very rational person. But I’ve decided he pretty much hates everything I stand for… oh, and the point of this whole post is to direct your attention to his answers to my questions on the bail out that I have posted in the comments – and to alert him to the fact that I’ve done that. He’ll probably hate this post.

October 1, 2008

Art imitating life

This is a very very cool site. With a lot of very cool social commentaries as installation art. Including the improvised empathy device that plunges a needle in the arm of the wearer every time a US soldier is killed and transmits name, rank and serial number to its screen, a tea party with blow up fast food mascots racing to explode based on actual consumption in actual stores, a coke detecting robot that identifies coke puddles, sucks them up and coats itself with coke – thus acidically eating through itself, and a pot plant that literally lives or dies on the reputation of the company that sold it.

October 1, 2008

Optimum prime

From the SMH…

“Mathematicians at the University of California, Los Angeles have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $US100,000 prize.

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.”

This number would be a 13mb .txt file on your computer.

From the ABC:

“Most people in Queensland don’t know what a prime number is”

…after SEVEN straight callers failed to answer the question in the afternoon quiz.

For those of you who forget:

“Primes are numbers like three, seven and 11 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and one.”

September 30, 2008

Out on bail

How bout that sub prime mortgage bail out – or not. I see the ASX is down 5.4% already after what I reckon is a good decision from Congress.

My questions about the bail out are:

why is the government stepping in to assist failing companies rather than failing taxpayers and their mortgages?
why is the government responsible for the economy anyway? I know it’s universally accepted that that’s the case – but why is it so? Why aren’t businesses and industries responsible for the economy? Why is the government blamed when it tanks but ignored while companies take the credit when it grows?
who would be an executive of a global company now when a failure leads to mass losses – perhaps that’s why the salaries and payments are so high…
whose idea were NINJA loans (no income no job)? whose idea was it to call them that? Where did the “A” in the acronym come from?
why would congress pass a bill that the majority of the public think is a bad idea? who does this decision benefit politically?

Lots of questions, no real answers.

September 30, 2008

Coffee Dominion in Townsville …

Coffee Dominion in Townsville just gave me a new pump for my coffee machine. It’s second hand – but new for me. They are tops.

September 25, 2008

I’m heading off to a pirate th…

I’m heading off to a pirate themed team retreat tomorrow – and contemplating a software pirate costume… what would that look like?

September 25, 2008

I just bought a new camera for…

I just bought a new camera for work – it will arrive next week. I used http://myperfect.com.au/ to choose what type to get. It was useful.

September 25, 2008

Obama meets Bartlett

A while back I suggested that Obama was the closest thing to Matt Santos (West Wing President number 2) running in this campaign.

Here Obama meets Bartlett in an interesting fact meets fiction interview with West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin.

Obama is creating a great degree of angst in some Christian circles because of his stance on abortion – I’m not going to enter that debate here. I just think his other policies (and there are many) are better than McCain’s – and Palin just plain (nice anagram use there…) scares me. Obama’s oratory skills are still enough for me to tip my ineligible vote in his direction.

September 24, 2008