Inbflat collects musical pieces in B Flat from YouTube and allows you to create your own aural arrangements.
Mythbusting in the Kitchen
Kenji Lopez-Alt is an online cooking superstar. He’s the guy who reverse engineered Maccas fries and so owns a special place in all our hearts.
He combines science and cooking and writing like a chef combines ingredients…
So when he says “these are the six biggest myths in food preparation” then I believe him. And I post a link to them.
Some surprises, like the idea that you can flip steaks over and over again during cooking (I’m of the only flip once school).
Common backyard know-how dictates that burgers and steaks should only be flipped once, half way through cooking. But has anyone ever bothered questioning why we do this? Does it actually create a noticeable improvement in the way your meat comes out?
Turns out the answer is an emphatic no! Flipping your meat multiple times produces meat that’s noticeably more evenly cooked (there’s about 40% less overcooked meat in a burger flipped every 15 seconds vs. one flipped once), browns just as well (just don’t expect distinct hash marks), and to top it all off, ends up cooking in about 2/3rds of the time. Faster and better? You betcha!
Females of Fiction Flowchart
This Overthinking It flowchart is cool. Maybe slightly PG.
What Greek Teachers Won’t Tell You
When it comes to the Greek Language (at QTC at least) David Allen Black wrote the book. Literally. We use his introduction to Biblical Greek as our textbook. So I enjoyed this post of things your Greek teacher won’t tell you. If you haven’t got a Greek teacher then they’re still interesting. Sort of.
I think there’s some sort of double negative going on here. The list is a mix of Greek fallacies, and truths that you might not have heard. Anyway.
Here’s one of my favourite things from Greek (and Hebrew) this year.
“Greek words do not have one meaning. Yet how many times do we hear in a sermon, “The word in the Greek means…”? Most Greek words are polysemous, that is, they have many possible meanings, only one of which is its semantic contribution to any passage in which it occurs. (In case you were wondering: Reading all of the meanings of a Greek word into any particular passage in which it occurs is called “illegitimate totality transfer” by linguists.)”
Mad Skillz Round Two
Getting other people to write content for one’s blog is an awesome strategy for blogging regularly, and before Ben’s book review Wednesday there was Mad Skillz week.
I’d urge you to contribute a book review for Ben’s sake (I haven’t told him yet, but I’m going to review something really exciting).
But I’m also wanting to tap into your repository of awesome, but possibly as yet undiscovered, skills that can be of benefit to others. Have a read of some of the old posts – examples included how to take low light photos, how to play roller hockey for Australia, how to argue with me, how to survive in regional ministry, how to write Christian parody songs, how to be poetic, how to supply teach, how to do graphic design, how to appreciate opera, and how to make an animation story board.
So if you’ve got a niche skill, or just something that’s generally awesome, that you’d like to share with a very small segment of the world, and google, and you’d like to write a guest post, just hit me up by email at nm dot campbell at gmail.com.
Calling all blogs
Are you in my blogroll (it’s down the bottom of the page). If you’re not, you should be. And now’s your chance. If you are, then this post is for you too.
I’d like to be more Web 2.0 (which means more “social”) with this little corner of the web. And I’d like to include a little one or two sentence bio/description of your site in my list of links. But I’d like you to write them for me and leave them in the comments on this post.
I’ll also do nice things for you if you’re in it – like posting links to you from time to time and visiting your site. I’ll even comment there.
Apparently (in an article I read today) the one sentence bio (or 140 character bio) was the foundation on which such Web 2.0 luminaries like Facebook and Twitter were built on. So it is an exercise in webness for all of you.
As an incentive – if you don’t participate I’ll probably relegate you to some impossible to find corner of the site (I won’t remove you, because if you’re there already I like what you have to contribute).
iTypewriter
Want an iPad but prefer a tactile experience? Don’t want to pay for a MacBook? These reconditioned USB typewriters from etsy are interesting if not practical.
Did I mention that they’re $US700.
Mapping the Internet
This XKCD map of the internet is cool. Click it to make it bigger.
Ikea recipe book brings Allen key to the kitchen
Good news for those looking to completely assemble their lives IKEA style. Everybody’s favourite Swedish retailer has produced a cookbook. Here are some of the photos of the ingredients for dishes therein.
Stuff White People Date
Online dating service Ok Cupid has a blog. A lot of users. And truckloads of data on those users. They also have a pretty gifted statistician/interpreter who makes that blog one of the most interesting things online.
This post explores the preferences of various racial groups, collated from the data on public profiles and presents it in little interactive graphics. I’ve included the white people graphics as images for your viewing pleasure, but the post itself is worth a read.
As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It’s also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid’s user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.
If I had to choose over-arching themes for white people’s lists, for men, I’d go with “frat house” and for women, “escapism.” Whether one begot the other is a question I’ll leave to the reader.
White Men:
White Women:
Mario Furniture
If I had this Super Mario theme in my house I’d spend a lot of time running around bashing my head against bricks and trying to jump into drain pipes. So it’s probably a good thing I don’t…
Why Cycling is incredibly cool
It looks, to the uninformed, like an individual sport. But check out these quotes from the Aussie guy who came fourth at the Commonwealth Games after essentially sacrificing his energy, and his lead, to help a fellow Australian take gold. Chris Sutton won’t get paid for his sacrifice, nor does he get a medal.
“I never got a medal, but I came here to lead Allan Davis out and that’s what we did, he won,” Sutton said.
“I was so happy when he won because that means we did our job perfect.
“The reward is to represent your country, it’s such an honour, and to be part of a gold medal like that is incredible. Allan Davis, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
This would be an awesome photo, though it has to be described in words because I can’t find it on google images, or any of the stories…
“I saw him put his arms up and I put my arms up and looked to the sky and just went ‘that’s great, that’s what we came here to do’.”
Here’s the SMH story. The SMH seem to understand cycling a little better than the ABC who ran this picture with the story, cropping Sutton out…
Insanity prevails
The internet is atwitter (it’d be abuzz if Google’s social networking effort didn’t suck quite so much) with news that the Insane Clown Posse, famously shocking shock rockers who fuse professional wrestling, abhorrent lyrics about sex and gangster violence with clown make up and circus garb, have been covert Christians for 20 years, trying to bring people to Jesus through the power of gangster. If true they are the poster boys for “contextualisation” gone wrong.
Read a couple of articles… like this one, and this one, tell me what you think. There are lyrical clues in some of their songs. But they are alongside such gems as:
“She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes”
Which is apparently satire.
Or:
“Barrels in your mouth/bullets to your head/The back of your neck’s all over the shed/Boomshacka boom chop chop bang.”
Here’s their testimony in a newly released single to clear up years of “mystery” surrounding the clues they’ve dropped over the course of their career, including a six album series.
“F*** it, we got to tell.
All secrets will now be told
No more hidden messages
…Truth is we follow GOD!!!
We’ve always been behind him
The carnival is GOD
And may all juggalos find him
We’re not sorry if we tricked you.”
Interesting. Undercover gangster rapper agents might not have been quite what Paul had in mind when he spoke of being all things to all men. But here’s the rationale from the two insane clowns:
“You have to speak their language. You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them and show you’re one of them. You’re a person from the street and you speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them: God has helped me.”
Even the journalist writing that article could spot a problem with the logic:
“Of course, one might argue that 20 years was, under the circumstances, an incredibly long time for them to have pretended to be unholy, and that, from a Christian perspective, the harm they did while feigning unholiness may even have outweighed the greater good.”
If you’re curious to see what undercover Christian gangster rappers look and sound like, here’s a video from one of their more overtly “Christian” songs. I haven’t listened to the words yet, but doubtless it needs a language warning (as do those links).
Systematics and the system
I was thinking this morning, sitting in church as Andrew preached a topical sermon, that the fruit of a generation of people faithfully preaching expositionally with sound exegesis is a generation of people who have had some of the hard work of exegesis done for them – at which point it’s much easier to systematise. Provided you trust the people who have taught you. It’s much easier to draw connections between different books and doctrines if people have done the hard work on those books and taught you from that platform already. Sometimes it can even feel intuitive when it seems to have been so hard won by that previous generation.
So my generation has to maintain the balance of faithfully working through the Bible and doing the systematics stuff too. It’s a luxury of not having to function as a corrective.
So. Thanks oldies.