2007 August | jordoncooper.com

Archives for August, 2007

Photo Friday: Insignificant

My submission for Photo Friday’s Insignificant.

08/31/2007 | photography | 1 Comment

10 Most Dangerous Toys of All Time

Radar Magazine offers up a list of the ten most dangerous toys of all time. For some reason I expected own more of them but I only owned lawn darts and Battlestar Galactica Vipers which shot real missiles. The only one of the list was the toy set made with uranium. via

In 1951, A.C. Gilbert introduced his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a radioactive learning set we can only assume was fun for the whole math club. Gilbert, who Americanmemorabilia claims was “often compared to Walt Disney for his creative genius,” had a dream that nuclear power could capture the imaginations of children everywhere. For a mere $49.50, the kit came complete with three “very low-level” radioactive sources, a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson Cloud Chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a Spinthariscope (to see “live” radioactive disintegration), four samples of Uranium-bearing ores, and an Electroscope to measure radioactivity.

How could that possibly be dangerous? Any one out there own in particularily dangerous toys? If you did, let us know in the comments.

Tags: energy

08/31/2007 | design, history | 8 Comments

Founders at Work

The book Founders at Work arrived in the mail yesterday and I dived right into it. The book is a series of interviews of founders like Blogger, SixApart, Adobe, Apple (Woz!), Hotmail, and a bunch of other startups that changed the way we live and interact. The underlying narative is: entrepreneurship is all about tactics, guts, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. In other words there are a lot of lessons for church planters in this book as well.

Some thoughts from the book.

Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.”
Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.”
Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’”
Paul Graham (Viaweb): On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”
Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”

08/31/2007 | business, technology | 1 Comment

45 Amazing Blog Designs

All can be found here. via

08/30/2007 | blogging, design | No Comments

Contextless Links

The Ikea Badge of Merit
For a position only second in importance to the Prime Minister, the Canadian Curling Association names a new CEO
Republicans, weary of fighting with Democrats, turn on one of their own.
Live and Let Live: It is a process that can be characterised as the deliberate abstaining from the use of violence during war. Sometimes it can take the form of overt truces or pacts negotiated locally by soldiers. At other times it can be a tacit behaviour - sometimes characterised as “letting sleeping dogs lie” - whereby both sides refrain from firing or using their weapons or deliberately discharging them in a ritualistic or routine way that signals their non-lethal intent.
The Saw Is Working: Home Depot employees on the other hand…

08/30/2007 | Contextless Links | No Comments

On The Take

I finally read On the Take by Stevie Cameron the other day. I had bought the book years ago at a used book sale and had never felt motivated to read it before but I wish I had.

As Amazon.ca says about the book

When On the Take came out in 1994, it made author Stevie Cameron a household name in Canada. Her book’s revelations about the rampant corruption and petty greed of Brian Mulroney’s decade in the prime minister’s office reverberated for many years in the Canadian political landscape and helped destroy his Progressive Conservative Party. (The party, one of Canada’s most venerable, never recovered from Mulroney’s stewardship and eventually merged with the Canadian Alliance Party.) Cameron, one of the country’s leading investigative reporters, was one of the few reporters to consistently question and probe the corruption of the Mulroney years. She has a wonderful ear for storytelling, which helps make On the Take a page-turner. Cameron seems to rejoice in recounting the numerous unseemly episodes of the Mulroney administration and depicting all its seedy characters and hangers-on. Mulroney comes across as having been most comfortable in a powerbroker’s backrooms, surrounding himself with dodgy bagmen and devious lobbyists. Cameron suggests that the country was “open for business,” with a “for sale” sign on the front lawn. She writes that even in their final official act, as the Mulroneys departed from office in disgrace amid record-low popularity ratings, they tried to stiff taxpayers into buying their used furniture.

I am not sure why I read it but I kept thinking of Larry Lessig’s change in focus from intellectual property issues to the larger issues of corruption in culture. It made me ask three questions

How did Mulroney find the nerve to do the things he did.
How did he get away with it. (some of it made Adscam look minor league)
How does a government pretend to represent all Canadians (or Americans) when only those that have money have access or influence on the decisions that are being made.

In the end I am torn. I know some very good people in public life. People I respect and like on both sides of the political spectrum who don’t believe in the political spectrum as much as they believe in solutions and helping people but at the same time they are generally footnotes to history. As Will Ferguson says, “the boneheads” while the country is often ruled by “bastards” and at the end of On the Take, you see which one of them was Mulroney.

Tags: ethics

08/29/2007 | ideas, politics | 2 Comments

Attack Dogs of Christendom

Christianity Today on those websites to attack other elements in the church. David Aiken asks, “Is this how to bring grace and savor to a crumbling civilization?”

The angriest websites are those belonging to small, but disturbingly visible, fundamentalist Protestant groups outraged that fellow Protestants appear to be holding out a welcoming hand to Catholics or Orthodox Christians.

Leading the charge against alleged ecumenists is Apprising Ministries (AM), a New Hampshire-based group whose leader is Southern Baptist pastor Ken Silva. Rick Warren, according to AM, is a “milquetoast.” Schuller and the late Norman Vincent Peale are “the devil’s duo.” Richard Foster (a leading Quaker writer on Christian spirituality), Brian McLaren (a leader in the emerging church movement), and Joel Osteen (pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston) are “vipers of new evangelicalism” and “whitewashed tombs.” Through the Web, such commentary gains a global audience—Christian and non-Christian.

via

(note: I updated the wording at the link. Explanation in the comments)

08/29/2007 | Christianity, politics | 3 Comments

Truscott Aquitted

One of the best arguments for keeping the death penalty abolished in Canada

The Ontario Court of Appeal has acquitted Steven Truscott of murder in the death of Lynne Harper 48 years ago, saying the conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

In a ruling Tuesday, a five-judge panel unanimously decided to quash the conviction stemming from the rape and strangulation of the 12-year-old girl near a town in southwestern Ontario.

“The court unanimously holds that the conviction of Mr. Truscott was a miscarriage of justice and must be quashed. The court further holds that the appropriate remedy in this case is to enter an acquittal.

“The court thus orders that Mr. Truscott should stand acquitted of the murder of Lynne Harper,” the court ruled.

Truscott was sentenced to hang in 1959 at age 14 for Harper’s murder in Clinton, Ont., becoming Canada’s youngest death-row inmate after one of the most famous trials in Canadian history.

The CBC has an excellent indepth page on the case as well.

A quick question? Anyone have any idea why the religious right in North America is the main voice in favor of the death penalty? I was reading how the religious right in Canada felt betrayed by Mulroney over his lack of support for it in the 80s and I have no idea what drives that desire for capital punishment other than a reading of the Bible that elevates the Old Testament (sans a certain 10 commandment) over the New.

08/28/2007 | justice | No Comments

The Dave King Road Trip

On Labour Day, Dave King will be in town and to celebrate some of us are hanging out at our place. If you want to join us, feel free. Some more stuff will be posted on the when and where later this week.

08/28/2007 | friends | No Comments

Legality

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

08/28/2007 | quotes | 2 Comments

Virus

Okay, it looks like I have a virus. Not my computer but me. Doctor suggested it may be a mild case of this but am waiting for more blood work and now I need some more sleep. I am also not ruling out the dog is somehow behind this in her effort to get more space on the bed.

Update: I have been sleeping in 20 to 24 hour chunks at a time since Thursday so I am not at the top of my game and it is West Nile but not the serious I am going to die version, just the annoying flu like symptoms and overwhelming fatigue. I had more energy when I had mono and now even sleeping is tiring me out.

How did I get it? Well I live in Saskatchewan and am kind of used to getting bitten by a mosquito or 50. I don’t put on bug repellant that often which may be a habit I may want to change. The good news is that yesterday I was up for a whole 6 hours and only had to sleep about 14 hours to recover.

08/26/2007 | Saskatchewan | 1 Comment

Wisdom Wants To Be Free

I remember reading with great interest about the idea of the Disseminary when AKMA and Trevor started posting about it a couple of years ago. As the idea evolved, I started to think more and more about new ways of theological education in my local context and in many ways, it influenced the formation of Resonate as well as some articles I have written over the years. Those thoughts also came up in conversations with the Church of the Exiles as a way of thinking about theological education. This spring I had some conversations with a couple of other churches about starting an alternative seminary to make quality theological and Biblical teaching available to those who want to explore that in Saskatoon for free. As summer came, those conversations got lost in the excitement of a hot Roughriders start, a couple heatwaves, and escapes to the nearest lake but as the weather has cooled and summer comes to an end around here, we are looking at seeing it happen. Of course we are not the only ones to have done this. The Alternative Seminary in Philadelphia, the Invisible College in Kingston, Underground Seminary in Ohio and even City Seminary of New York have all explored how to bring contextualized theology to their cities.

It will look quite different in Saskatoon and my partners in crime and thinking of a January 2008 launch. If you are interested in learning more and would like to offer some feedback, drop me a line at coop AT exileschurch.org and I’ll keep you informed.

Tags: seminary

08/25/2007 | Saskatoon, education, theology | No Comments

How Twitter Will Change How Business Communicates (again)

Robert Scoble on how Twitter is changing how we communicate with each other.

Twitter’s basic idea has proven so popular that others have copied its premise and added features. Jaiku lets me include blog posts, my link blog, and more along with my mini posts. Pownce users can send files to one another, as well as calendar events. At Facebook, I can add such information as my favorite music and the syndicated Web feeds I’ve shared in Google Reader.

All this adds up to a new way to share information about yourself. Although the content of the messages can vary wildly from voyeuristically interesting to terribly
dull, a frequent stream of updates can strengthen your brand. My 4,000-plus Twitter “followers” can get my blasts online or via text message, and each one is also its own Web page, which means that Google can see it and let people search for it. When you’re traveling frequently and working from coffeehouses or the backseat of a cab, these services are great to keep in touch with coworkers back at the office and with customers nearby. “I post where I travel and arrange user meetups,” says Betsy Weber, an evangelist with software firm TechSmith.

I just use Twitter for play more than anything but a couple of projects I am working on will use it much more heavily. Both John Edwards and Barack Obama use it quite well keeping people up to the minute on what the campaign is doing.

08/25/2007 | communications, media, technology | No Comments