Nick's Dead Air

Nickelodeon is giving kids permission to look away from the TV and go out and play tomorrow.

The three hours of dead air the children's network will begin broadcasting at noon (EDT/PDT) is part of its fourth annual worldwide day of play, an encouragement to kids to get outside and work on getting in shape.

I think it's a cool way to make the point that kids need to move away from the couch once in a while. If the weather's bad here, I'm planning to Tivo it so I can go out and play later in the week.

YouVersion

Cool new online Bible study community journaling site. Still very beta. Needs lots more translations, commentaries, etc., but I like the idea of the place.

Quote: "Get Wisdom!"

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”

--Immanuel Kant

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”

--Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”

--Jimi Hendrix

“Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.”

--Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“Get wisdom, get understanding. . . . Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”

--Proverbs 4:5-7

Cheating Scandal

Have you heard about the Hanover, New Hampshire cheating scandal? Nine students broke into the school to steal some exams. The school called the police. The local authorities investigated and brought criminal charges against the students for the B&E and theft. If the students accept the felony charges, they’ll pay their fines and the issue will be resolved. If they force a trial, the prosecutor has promised to take the charges up a notch to a level that would require some serious jail time.

What I’m surprised about is all the news coverage describing how divided the town is over whether the school should have called the police, whether the students should have been charged with a felony. The parents are complaining right out loud in public about the “draconian” consequences their kids are facing:

"What's frightening as a parent is that a 17-year-old makes one little mistake and he's going to have a potential prison sentence," said Jim Kenyon, a columnist for The Valley News, whose son is also accused of acting as a lookout and now attends private school.

And reporters are worrying right out loud about whether the kids are under too much academic pressure. “Why else would they go to such extreme measures?” Check out the end of this hard-hitting ABC news video (in the upper right corner).

If I were 17, I’d be kind of insulted by this controversy. If they don’t charge 17-year-olds for criminal activity -- or if they excuse it by talking about all the pressure -- what does that say about the rest of the 17- and 18-year-olds who are making good choices. If people won’t hold you responsible when you blow it, they can’t really give you credit when you do well, can they? Basically, they’re saying you’re still a child unable to handle real life.

Curious what you think. Should teens get a pass for criminal activity just because they're teens? Is this crime "not as bad" as breaking into a gas station to steal money? Does it matter if these kids are from wealthy or poor families? What does wisdom say about this?

Bloxorz

Someday games like this will be illegal except for prisoners and the terminally ill. People will pass them around in back alleys. "Psst. Hey, buddy. I've got one guaranteed to make you obsessed for days on end. Hours will vanish in moments. Your brain will gorge on the new challenges while deadlines pass and assignments go undone. You'll love it."

Until then, have you played Bloxorz?

(HT: The entire Internet!)

Boredom v. Contentment: A Ponder

Are you bored with school, yet? If you're following the traditional school year, you've been back at it for about a month. That's just long enough to get past all the "new" feelings and fall into the routine of classes and practices and studying and all the social joy and ugliness. My guess: Some of you are tired of the whole thing already.

I get bored in the daily sometimes. And it's not about not having enough to do. In fact, sometimes it's about having way too much to do. I get mentally and emotionally itchy. My mind won't sit still long enough to trudge through what must be done. You?

"But godliness with contentment is great gain." (1 Timothy 6:6)

A lightbulb went on recently: Boredom is a contentment issue. Maybe that's a no-brainer, but I didn't get it. I thought of contentment as being okay with being broke or sick or rejected. "Life on the rocks? Let God help you push the contentment button." And He does help us trust Him and be okay in those moments.

But I give myself permission (sometimes) to be discontent with the moments when everything is okay -- just not all that interesting. "I'm bored!" I'd rather blame my boredom/lack of focus on the pile of tedium in front of me instead of the lack of trust inside of me. Yes, lack of trust. I don't really believe that God has given me everything I need in this moment to be content. I need more. Or I need less. But this moment is broken. That's a lack of faith in this promise:

"His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness . . ." (2 Peter 1:3; click for the whole mind-blowing paragraph)

It's a wild idea to me. You mean every moment -- even those I use to force myself to study or clean something or listen to someone -- comes from God packed with everything I need to be content? By trusting Him to provide in a boring moment, He can turn mundane into meaningful? Apparently. I don't understand it, exactly, but I think it's worth figuring out. I'd love to hear what you do with your boring moments.

German TV Ad

I never saw it coming. Oddly moving and very creative.

Senator Sues God

A Nebraska state senator/publicity hound has filed a lawsuit against God. No fan of Christians, this senator is known for pulling outrageous stunts. He claims this one is to make a larger point about another frivolous lawsuit. But that's not what's going to make headlines.

From the AP story:

Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants."

On the one hand, I hate to give the guy the pub he so eagerly craves. On the other, I've known lots of people who'd love to be able to hold God accountable for His actions. Even those who claim He does not exist often seem angry with Him. And I've heard friends, true believers and lovers of God, express outrage toward Him on occasion. How can a loving God allow so much evil, pain, death? Check out this week's devo for more about that.

It's a question raised, debated, and hotly argued for 30+ chapters in the book of Job. Then God Himself shows up, and your skin goes clammy as He turns the tables and asks Job and his friends endless and impossible questions. As I read chapters 38 - 41 again, any anger I felt for this senator turns into fear for him.

God says, in part, "Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?" (Job 40:8)

It's one thing to ask the hard questions about God's justice, to look to look to a loving Creator for wisdom and understanding, even to honestly wrestle with His trustworthiness. It's another to attempt to condemn Him. God will not be mocked. He will defend His name. In the end, we must all admit that He is God and we are not. And in the end, we all will.

Statetris

I have a giant, state-sized hole in my education called "geography." Maybe Statetris will help. It's like Tetris, but with states and countries and provinces, etc. It's just educational enough not to feel like a time-waster.

I did fine on the U.S. version, but I'll need some serious map time to be competitive placing countries in their proper spots in the rest of the world. And forget about landing any of the counties in South Carolina. Hope that's not on the final.

(HT: Kottke.org)

Just Say No to Snowmobiles

Heal Your Church Website (via diaphero.org) makes an excellent case for why Christians should avoid getting mixed up with that whole snowmobile culture. A great read if you've been flirting with the idea of motorized winter sports. It's a slippery slope, brothers and sisters.

Madeline L'Engle

Author Madeline L'Engle died last week at the age of 88. For a lot of kids, her classic book A Wrinkle in Time was an introduction to huge ideas about the universe, as well as an example of impressive storytelling built around a Christian worldview.

Love this Q & A with her over at ChristianityToday.com, especially this quote about using analogy to help herself past an atheist boyfriend's limited view of life after death.

My father died when I was seventeen, my last year in high school. That Christmas I had a date with a sophisticated young man—or so I thought.

He said that death was death and that was that. That we are our cerebral cortex. We think through it. When it's gone, we're gone. My outrage brought me an analogy. I'm extremely myopic. If I take off my glasses, there are no stars in the sky at night and all faces become vague little pink blurs. I said to him, "I can't even see you without my glasses. Are they doing the seeing? No. I am. I'm seeing through them. My brain isn't doing the thinking, I am. I'm thinking through it." That's analogy. Now, an analogy is never a provable fact. An analogy is something that opens the door or the window and gives us a glimpse of the truth that gives meaning to lives.

If you're a fan of her work, the whole interview is worth checking out. And here's an NPR story with a video of a physicist explaining (along with computer animation) the concept of tesseracts and the 4th dimension, an idea L'Engle built on to allow her characters to travel the universe.

Footwear of the Future

Movies and marketers have been joining forces for years to bring us a corporate branded vision of the future. In fact, they've been doing it long enough now that the promised future is nearly here -- and the folks at McFly2015 want their self-lacing moon-boot Nikes. Come on, Nike, you promised!

If you've never seen the 1989 film Back to the Future 2, you probably don't know what I'm talking about. Honestly, I only vaguely remember it. Apparently, Marty (played by Michael J. Fox) finds himself at one point in 2015 sporting an excellent pair of high-tech Nikes.

As pointed out over at the Mental Floss blog, the clock is ticking. Will Nike pony up the futuristic gear in time for Marty to have a pair to wear in eight years? Will said Nikes cost more than a year's allowance? Will anyone want to be caught dead in them? Only time will tell (unless you have a flux capacitor on ya).

Colbert v. Behe

Thanks to The Point blog for pointing to this online clip from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report in which Colbert interviews Michael Behe. You might remember Behe is the author of Darwin's Black Box and now The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Behe has become controversial as one of the leading thinkers of the Intelligent Design movement. (Note: He's not universally loved among more conservative creationists, either.)

Colbert has made a name for himself by imitating self-promoting, conservative cable news types like Bill O'Reilley by pretending to agree with conservative, religious viewpoints while really mocking those who believe them. I find him both funny and frustrating.

What I like about this clip is that Colbert fails so grandly at making Behe out to be a fool. The likable doctor refuses either to be defensive or to back down from his position and scores several rational points (given the limits of a three-minute comedy news interview). Colbert is the one who ends up looking more silly and frustrated than funny, at least to me.

This interview repeats the tone of almost every ID v. Darwin debate I hear these days. The IDer says, "Here's some evidence that points to problems with Darwin's theory and suggests the need for a designer." The Darwinist smirks and says something to imply, "Look at the all the smart guys on my side; you must be a loon." Increasingly, those in the media who feel it's their job to represent "science" in the perceived battle between God and reality have seemingly decided they will be most persuasive by adapting a smarmy, condescending tone when forced to discuss Intelligent Design. I hope they keep it up.

Homemade Hubble

You've got to love someone with a big, crazy idea and the passion to pull it off. What if you could send your own digital camera up into space to take pictures and then retrieve it to see how they turned out? These folks did exactly that, building a payload box containing a Nikon Coolpix set to take one image every minute. Then they attached the box to a huge weather balloon and set it free to soar until it reached, space, burst, and dropped the camera back down to earth.

All of the images are awesome, but the story is even better. Check it out.

And if that gets you hankerin' for some bigger budget space pix, head over to the gallery at hubblesite.com.

(HT: Youth Specialties' YSMarko blog)

Hebrews 9-10

This has been around for a while, but I just came across it over at the always awesome Between Two Worlds blog. It's a longish Google vid -- 11 minutes -- but it's the clearest presentation of a difficult passage of Scripture I've seen. And it's riveting. Think of it as a devotional.

Ryan Ferguson presents a "dramatic memorized recitation" of Hebrews 9-10 from the ESV Bible at a conference called WorshipGod06:

Rock Paper Solitaire

How bored are you? Think about it for a minute. Are you bored enough to play rock paper scissors with a web site? Then you'll love this high-tech marvel of the future that is now.

For a more challenging take on the classic decider of who really gets "shotgun" or the last slice of pizza, here's a version (mentioned here a month or two ago) of the game guaranteed to use up all that mental capacity you should now be applying to your back-to-school studies.