I don’t know that I could work for this guy (or the cartoon version for that matter)… but I do like untoonings.
Your semi regular Social Media infographic feature
Need further proof that social media is big… and pointless. Here are two nice little infographics providing stats you can bring up at your next dinner party or marketing strategy meeting…
This one has some sites I’ve never heard of…
There are eight more here.
What to do when the plumbing industry dries up
When the bottom fell out of the plumbing industry Mario and Luigi went into hospitality.
Via Geekologie
The equation of life
The inverse graphical calculator creates a graph out of words you input then gives you the equation to generate the graph.
Here is the equation for Jesus.
Here is one I prepared earlier.
YouTube Tuesday: Iron Man
I am really looking forward to this movie. Here’s the new trailer.
Ducklings for cover
This Duck Hunt wall decal is brilliant.
Especially because it’s essentially made of pixels.
As a bonus – courtesy of the designer – is this flash version of the original Duck Hunt.
How to cook bacon
How do you like your bacon? Crispy? Squishy with the delicious fatty bits? Chocolate coated? There are hundreds of ways to cook bacon, hundreds of ways to eat bacon, and hundreds of ways to serve it to your guests.
You could buy this recipe book.
Master the art of bacon bowls.
How to plot a blockbuster movie
We were all outraged when we figured out that Avatar was Pocahontas – but not so many of us have complained that so many of our favourite blockbusters are essentially exactly the same story. Star Wars, Star Trek, the Matrix and Harry Potter are all just about exactly the same. The full plot outline is here… below is an abstract.
Once upon a time,
Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry
was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by
Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid
and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his
birth | birth | birth | infancy
he was meant for something greater. Deciding to leave with
him | him | her | him,
Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry
is taken to
Mos Eisley | Starfleet Academy | the real world | Hogwarts
where he meets lots of new, fascinating people. For the first time in a very long time, life is exciting, and
Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry
explores the new life that has opened up for him. With his new friends, he starts to work hard to become the sort of man that
Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid
said he could be. Although
Han | Spock | the Oracle | Draco
challenges his abilities, things go relatively well until suddenly,
Alderaan is destroyed | Vulcan is attacked | Morpheus is captured | Voldemort returns.
What this post doesn’t include is the obligatory montage that occurs in the bit where the main character is learning his mad skillz.
Lattea art
This latte art is actually tea art. Cool huh. A while ago (in 2008 I think) I posted a link to this Rooibos that you make like an espresso. I didn’t think much of it until I spotted this the other day.
Pretty cool.
How to introduce yourself better
Don’t ever introduce yourself by your job title. Job titles are terrible and should be scrapped. Unless they’re really literal. There is only one thing worse than someone who introduces themselves by their title – and that’s someone who introduces themself with an obtuse and confusing buzzy weasleword description that requires a follow up question.
First impressions are important. Especially if you’re a conference speaker, or somebody it is important for the people meeting you to know. Don’t start a conversation with an obtuse statement unless it’s a joke that you explain straight away, and even then… don’t do it.
It was refreshing listening to the guest speaker at our camp over the weekend introduce himself and speak passionately about his new role – “campus evangelist” – by itself this would be buzzwordy and unclear – but he told us what it looked like and spoke with genuine passion about the task. This was cool. If you must use your title do it properly.
Occam’s razor and theology
I’ve been thinking about my approach to the Bible. The first five weeks of college have been pretty intense for me – but probably not as intense as they have been for other people who possibly feel like the rug has been pulled out from under their feet a little when it comes to the way theologians treat the Bible and the interaction between the historical context and theological truths. Here is my thinking…
My overarching understanding, or first principle, is that the Bible is the clear word of God, our job is to make sense of it based on what we know of the original audience, the way God communicates, and ultimately the work of Jesus. This understanding colours my understanding of everything from Genesis to Revelation, and each form of biblical literature.
Theology is like science – we’re constantly moving to a more perfect understanding of each part of the Bible as we build our picture of the lives of the original hearers and readers of the word. We’re unlikely to ever completely overturn our current “theories” based on this evidence, but we will gain a slightly more nuanced picture of the meaning of different writings if we learn something new about what was going on in the first century (NT) or in the history of Israel.
So understanding that “this current distress” that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 7 may refer to a massive famine in the Corinthian region means we don’t have to assume that Paul was a failed apocalyptic prophet who thought the world would end in his lifetime, but rather that he thought it wise for couples not to marry if they couldn’t feed likely offspring. Revelation makes more sense if you understand that Nero was on the scene around the time it was written, that the number 666 was particular to Nero, and that Rome was persecuting Christians around the time it was written… this makes more sense to me than some sort of dispensational premillenialism.
Which leads me to this point of applying Occam’s razor to every “theological” position. If there’s a better explanation that requires less jumps, that is consistent with the rest of scripture, and preferably magnifies the work of Christ – then I’ll be pretty prepared to take that explanation quickly – rather than fighting to hold on to ingrained presuppositions.
Again, I don’t think this is rocket science or revolutionary – it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
Leave of absence
Dear readers,
I will not be blogging much this weekend. I have an essay to write, a church camp to attend and a debut to make for Kustard FC – the Baptist League’s most brilliantly coloured football team. That is roundball football. I am very excited.
I look forward to catching you on the flip side. I trust that you won’t feel withdrawals as much as I will.
A rasher decision
Bacon toilet paper*. I’m not sure there’s anywhere I can go with this. Except to say that if you’re going to print something on your toilet paper it may as well be something awesome.
If you’re trying to understand why I talk about bacon so much perhaps you should read point four from this Slate article.
*not made from bacon.
Overthinking Sandwich Aesthetics
I love Overthinking It. They truly raise the stakes of analysis to amazing levels. Take this post on sandwiches. It opens with a rather spectacular chart of the relationship between ingredients and preparatory skill.
They also get points for knowing about coffee.
Coffee is in the top middle. The ingredients do matter here, some, but not nearly as much as the preparation. It’s very easy to take some high-end small-batch free-trade shade-grown hand-roasted Ethiopia Harrar, and turn it into something that tastes like cat piss by messing up the brewing process. Its opposite number is breakfast cereal. This is all but impossible to screw up: your culinary experience is determined entirely by which brand of cereal you buy…
But it’s their take on sandwiches that really deserves to be considered.
The atrocity at left [above] is the “Bacon Whoopee,” available at the Carnegie Deli for a mere $22. As a bacon-delivery vector, this is superlative. As a sandwich, it is completely incompetent. A properly calibrated sandwich is all about balance. It is an exquisitely tuned chord. Allow any one element to overwhelm the others, and the sandwich is ruined. Ruined! You need to be able to taste every component. At the Carnegie Deli, this is not going to happen. This is also the problem with the sandwiches at Subway. It doesn’t really matter what you order at subway: they basically all taste like the bread, with a little crunchiness from the lettuce. (This is why when I have to eat at Subway, I just get the vegetarian sub. It tastes the same, and it’s cheaper.)
The solution… summarised.
Cheese: The slices should be very, very thin, and no more than two layers… If you want more cheese, don’t put the layers next to each other. I list cheese first because it’s the sandwich’s limiting factor.
Meat: About two to three times the size (by thickness) of your cheese layer. Thin slices are important here too: this is the one thing that the standard deli sandwich gets right. But it’s not so much because of the flavor. It’s because a thick slice of meat is hard to bite through…
Lettuce, Tomatoes, Pickles, Cucumbers, and the like: The combined [vegetable] layer, though, should be exactly the same size as the meat layer. Obviously if you’re using something very strongly flavored… you want to use less…
Condiments: Less than you think… Spread thin, using just enough to moisten the surface of both slices of bread, and let it go. Grinding a some fresh black pepper onto the bread after you apply the condiments is often a nice touch.
Bread: …firm enough to hold the sandwich together… not be so coarse as to scratch the roof of your mouth. The two slices, together, should be about the same thickness as the meat layer…
A map of Christianity in America
I wonder what an equivalent would look like in Australia.
Probably a lot of empty, nominally Catholic space.
