Some pictures

This is how they do it in Turkey:

See the original photo, uploaded on 27th February, 2006.

I’ve been slowly uploading some of the better pictures I took on my trip to Greece and Turkey last year to my Flickr account (talk about taking your time…). You can see the whole set here.

What is the emerging church?

You may have noticed that I am intrigued by what is known as the ‘emerging church’. There is button on the right side of the page that says “Friend of Emergent,” and emerging church even has its own category for posts. But what the heck is it?

Scot McKnight wrote an article for The Covenant Companion titled “The Future or Fad: A Look at the Emerging Church Movement” (download .pdf) that is the most concise and articulate description of the emerging church I’ve read to date. If you are a Christian that has no idea what the emerging church is, I suggest you take a few minutes to read this short article; you might be surprised how much you resonate with it (and if you don’t, that’s okay, too). Here’s a quote from the article to whet your appetite:

The EM [Emerging Movement] prefers global theological affirmations and the classical creeds rather than denominationally shaped theological creeds, and the reason for this is clear: the EM is a missional shaped ecclesiology that seeks to unite Christians for the sake of unleasing the gospel to change the world, rather than a theological movement designed to demand conformity on specific theological issues.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

A facebook birthday

Screenshot of my Gmail inbox, circa 12:45pm. Click here for an enlarged version, taken at 10:15pm, with 46 messages (the image is 300k, so give it a second to load).

In the picture above, every single message in my inbox is a message from Facebook notifying me that someone has written on my wall. And every message on my wall is in one way or another related to my birthday. Facebook notifies you of any of your friends’ upcoming birthdays on the main login page. All someone has to do is see that you have a birthday, click your name, and leave a “happy birthday” on your wall. The notification of upcoming birthdays is a very useful feature; I have used it several times to bid someone “happy birthday.”

I knew that I would probably get alot of messages on my wall, and to some extent I was actually looking forward to it. I went to bed last night knowing that I could check my Facebook account after my first class and see several birthday messages. Some of the people leaving me messages, though, I rarely - if ever - speak to… even through Facebook.

Facebook itself is very impersonal; everybody knows that. After my first day of class, I had two “friend requests” from people with whom I will never have a conversation outside of the class. But, according to the laws of Facebook they’re still my friends, and they still get a notification from Facebook that the 22nd is my birthday.

I think the obvious reason we like getting so many birthday messages is that it is such an affirmation. “Yes!” we say, “it is my birthday, and I’ll be damned if it’s not happy!” The more friends one has on Facebook, the more potential messages on the wall and the more affirmations of existence.

It works like this: you request friendship with someone and this friendship is accepted. This is recognition. I know you (or know of you), and I recognize that I know you by accepting friendship. Now, if that person then writes on your wall, that is affirmation. Not only do I know you (or of you), but I affirm that I know you by writing on your wall. Writing on someone’s wall (usually) implies a more personal connection - there has to be something to say that both parties know about.

I realize now that I am rambling, and that someone who is more knowledgeable in the area of communication (read: communication major) could analyze this far better than me. I just thought that there was a little bit of irony and perhaps hypocrisy in the fact that I enjoy getting “happy birthday” messages from many people through a medium as impersonal as the Facebook.

Thanks, Peter

For the best birthday present ever.

To everyone else who thought of me on my special day: don’t be angry with me, your gifts are wonderful, too.

Twenty two

22 feels old.

I am now beyond most of the big birthday landmarks: 13 (becoming a teenager), 14 (driver’s permit in Iowa), 16 (driver’s licence), 18 (”legal” age, smoking and other “adult”-related matters), 20 (leaving the teens and entering twentysomethings), 21 (alcohol). I guess there is still 25 (renting a car).

I’m not really saying that I believe myself to be “old”, rather, 22 is the oldest I have felt. That sounds obvious, but look at it this way: I felt older when I turned 18 than I did when I turned 19. I think we all know what I mean.

I am going to go do something adult now. Like reflect upon the immaturity of teenagers.

Champagne birthday

This coming Wednesday the 22nd, I turn 22. That makes it my golden birthday.

Wikipedia says: “One’s golden birthday, also called a champagne birthday, is the day when the age one turns and the date of birth coincide (e.g. someone turning 20 on September 20th celebrates his golden birthday).” Hallmark even offers special golden birthday cards which “celebrate the once-in-a-lifetime birthday when the age and the birth date are the same.”

I tried to find a history of the term golden birthday but it was fruitless. Someone suggested that a silver birthday should be when your age and the year you were born match. That’s nice, but what if you were born in 1999 or 2000?

Shows this weekend

I am playing a show this Saturday night in Cedar Falls, Iowa at the Lampost Coffeehouse/Theatre. Much thanks to local Cedar Falls band Clockwork for inviting me to share the stage with them.

The show starts at 8:30 (I told a few people 8:00) and is free of charge. From what I can tell, Clockwork’s shows are well-attended; they have attracted a good-sized following. I know a few people are making the trip to see the show, but if you’re one of the two people in Cedar Falls that reads this blog, y’all should consider coming.

I made a flyer that you can download and print if you feel so inclined. Just click below the picture on “flyer.doc”. It’s a pretty big file, so excercise some patience.

(flyer.doc, 12.8mb, Microsoft Word format)

I’ll be playing an acoustic set with Zach Booz, hand drummer extraordinaire, and Clockwork will follow. For those at Luther, I am playing for the BSU Talent Show on Friday night, and so is Dr. Thunder & the Generic Sodas. It’s like a mini northeastern Iowa tour, huh.

This is getting old, but…

I must say one more thing about the plane and the conveyor belt.

Whether you think the plane will take off or not doesn’t matter. I was talking with Shawn during lunch today about this little riddle, and we had the idea of submitting it to the television show Mythbusters.

Well, as it turns out, many people have already submitted the idea (2, 3), and some believe it will be tested next season.

I can’t wait to see the look on people’s faces when the plane takes off. Although, I have no reason to believe I’ll be watching the show with one person, let alone many.

Four things

I’ll pretend kottke tagged me. I’m not usually one for things like this, but what the heck. It’s a blog thing.

Four jobs I’ve had:
1. Burger King
2. Iowa State Fair
3. Camp counselor
4. Youth ministry intern

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. School of Rock
2. Rounders
3. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Four places I’ve lived:
1. Van Meter, IA
2. West Des Moines, IA
3. Decorah, IA
4. Dayton, IA

Four TV shows I love:
1. 24
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. SportsCenter
4. Family Guy

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen:
1. Lost
2. The Sopranos
3. Grey’s Anatomy
4. Desperate Housewives

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Orlando, Florida
2. Ft. Collins, Colorado
3. Cedar Point, Ohio
4. Greece & Turkey

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Pepperoni pizza
2. Buffalo wings/buffalo chicken sandwich
3. Almost any mexican dish
4. Ranch dressing

Four sites I visit daily:
1. relevantmagazine.com
2. flickr.com
3. digg.com
4. kottke.org

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. In bed
2. Hanging out with the youth at Valley Church
3. On stage
4. Greece

Four bloggers I am tagging:
1. Barker
2. Ryan
3. The Vis
4. Peter

The plane and the conveyor belt, pt. 3

This will hopefully be the last post on this, although it has certainly been fun.

Take a second to read this follow-up post to kottke’s original post, which is where i received the initial inspiration to pose the question here. He cites this explaination from a guy with a Ph.d in Physics from MIT.

The guy takes the time to reply to all of the comments that were left, and on one of his own comments, he says:

As an exercise, take a billiards ball and roll it very slowly across a piece of paper. Then try to get the billiards ball to stay in place by pulling the paper out from under it in the opposite direction. The friction is insufficient to overcome the inertia of the heavy ball.

Go, plane, go.

The plane and the conveyor belt, pt. 2

Like I said, I did a bunch of reading about this riddle after I thought about it for a while. My brain ended up hurting pretty badly, but a few key quotes helped me significantly. One of the best (and, ironically, simplest) explainations was by a commentor named Jason on kottke’s post. He says:

The point of the riddle is that the motion of the wheels exerts only a minor frictional force opposing the forward movement of the plane. The major force being supplied is from the plane engine, and that force is a forward force. The net force is equal to the forward force minus the negligible frictional force. This obviously produces a net forward force. Therefore, the plane moves forward, regardless of how much the wheels are spinning. The plane is not remaining stationary on the conveyor belt becasue there is a force acting on the plane that is not dependent on the motion of the conveyor belt.

Another good explaination of why the plane will take off can be found here. An excerpt:

The difference between a car and a grounded airplane is that a car uses its wheels to propel itself forward, and an airplane moves itself forward by moving air. They assume that the runway moving backwards would move the plane backwards. This is what would happen with a car (that is in gear), so why not for an airplane? Well, because an airplane’s wheels are free rolling. There is obviously some friction, so there would be some small backwards force, but it would be infinitely small as compared to the forward thrust of the airplane.

Yet another place explains why the plane will take off, although it would initially seem otherwise:

A thought experiment commonly cited in discussions of this question is to imagine you’re standing on a health-club treadmill in rollerblades while holding a rope attached to the wall in front of you. The treadmill starts; simultaneously you begin to haul in the rope. Although you’ll have to overcome some initial friction tugging you backward, in short order you’ll be able to pull yourself forward easily.

So, now do you believe?

The plane and the conveyor belt

I saw this on kottke and I’ve been thinking/reading about it since. Here’s the question:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

I talked about it with a couple of people at dinner and I’ve been reading other people’s thoughts on it, and I’ve concluded that the plane will take off (my initial reaction was of course it won’t take off, you idiot). I’ll follow up tomorrow with how I reached this conclusion.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

To Own a Dragon recall/delay

For the past week I have been visiting the Amazon page for Donald Miller’s To Own A Dragon and I have seen this message every time: “THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE. If you would like to purchase this title, we recommend that you occasionally check this page to see if it has become available.” The book was released on February 5, and I simply did not understand why it was unavailable.

From donmillerfans.net:

Well, the good news is “To Own a Dragon” was printed and shipped to stores! About 45,000 books were printed, and 37,000 of those shipped to stores right away. However, there is bad news. The bad news is we quickly discovered a “rough draft” chapter had been printed in the book instead of the actual chapter. The chapter mistake was the last chapter of the book, where I reveal the butler did it (stink, I cant believe I said that.) The timing on going to press was incredibly fast after I wrapped up the book. While the book took more than a year to write, I didnt finish it until the week before it went to press (normal lead time is around 6 months) and because of this, the copy-edit system broke down a bit. The books were recalled and we are hoping that all 45,000 will be donated to a prison ministry of some sort. New books have already been printed and are being shipped. This bumped back the street date on the book by about a week. All that to say, if you already have a copy, you have a collectors item for sure. And if you have one on order, you should be receiving it shortly.

Hopefully this will do an end to the rumor that the books were recalled because of extreme profanity and heretical theological views. THIS IS NOT THE REASON THE BOOKS WERE RECALLED! The extrememe profanity and heretical views had nothing to do with it, nor does the center foldout picture of me in only boxer-shorts seductively licking a spoon covered in peanut butter. That is a perfectly reasonable picture, people.

Don

Man, I wish I had one of the misprints.

Podcasts

No, this post is not an announcment of a new Jake & Tom Podcast. No, we haven’t quit doing them. Yes, we’re still friends. No, I don’t know when the next podcast will be.

For the past week, I have been searching for and compiling a select list of podcast subscriptions. Listening to and subscribing to podcasts is convenient because I can listen to them while sitting at my computer or on the go (via iPod), and I don’t have to be looking at anything as with television. They are several criteria a podcast must meet in order to be deemed worthy of a subscription by myself:

1. Good sound quality. Sounds obvious, but after listening to a Des Moines news podcast, I decided not to subscribe because the sound quality was so poor.

2. Quality over quantity. My 7am NPR news summary is 5 minutes long and is more valuable to me than an hour-long Democracy Now! podcast. I can listen to the former while I am getting dressed in the morning… the latter just takes up too much time.

3. Personalized. I’d rather listen to a Cubs podcast than a podcast about all of Major League Baseball, you dig?

With those criteria in mind, here are my current podcast subscriptions (links take you to iTunes Music Store):

• Cubscast: Chicago Cubs Podcast: A semi-daily talk show about the Cubs baseball team that is a little over 10 minutes long on average. My favorite tagline of theirs is “One more thing invented since the Cubs won the World Series.”
• Adobe Photoshop Killer Tips: A daily video podcast with (obviously) Photoshop tips. I’ve already learned several really helpful things.
• CNETnews.com daily tech news podcast
• CNN News Update: An hourly updated podcast with the current U.S. and world news. Very convenient.
• NPR 7am News Summary: My favorite podcast because it is short and sweet (5 minutes), and because I can listen to it every morning before my classes and feel like I know what is going on in the world. They offer several other summaries throughout the day, also.
• The RELEVANT Podcast: The official podcast of Relevant Magazine. Weekly.

Is anyone listening to an awesome podcast I might not know about? If so, please let me know. I’d love to find a couple of really awesome Christian ones but haven’t yet.

Bonhoeffer centennial

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Diettrich Bonhoeffer, one of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian thinkers.

From PBS’s website:

He was born into a comfortable, upper middle class family and he risked it all to join the German Resistance. He had deep respect for human life, but he committed himself to joining plots to assassinate Hitler. Facing the death sentence in prison, he wrote some of the most compelling theology of the 20th century.

There is better and more lengthy summary of Bonhoeffer’s life here. It’s worth reading, believe me. He was an amazing man.

To commemorate the centennial of his birth, PBS is airing Martin Doblmeier’s documentary, aptly titled Bonhoeffer. I won’t get to watch it tonight, but my class is watching it in March.

I salute you, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The world is a better place because of you, your works, and your commitment to Christ.

For more information, check out these websites:

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Wikipedia entry
• International Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society

JakeBouma.com is 'Pressed and Minted, too.
All content on JakeBouma.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.