Instant Hero

In twenty minutes Ross Lovegrove has become one of my new heroes. His approach to life and design reminds me of Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard who, in his book Let My People Go Surfing, describes his approach to designing rock climbing hardware for his company Black Diamond. Chouinard's primary focus in designing climbing hardware is to simplify, simplify, simplify. He believed that the strongest and most functional designs were also the simplest and most elegant. While other designers were adding features and gussets for strength, Chouinard was removing material that did not contribute a specific purpose. The result: the stongest, simplest, most elegant climbing hardware available. (Photo is of a typical piece of Black Diamond gear from their website. Notice the beautiful organic design).



Enter Lovegrove who, in his incredibly motivating presentation at TED, applies the same principles to his organic designs. Lovegrove's presentation is incredibly inspirational as it draws on the best source in the universe for efficient, beautiful optimized design: God's own handiwork.

I have no idea about Lovegrove's spiritual leanings, so what follows is not a commentary about him, but it is amazing to me how a typical naturalist - one who does not believe that the universe is designed by a personal God - can work feverishly for months, years, decades on developing a style or a paradigm or a method of interpreting the world, drawing on the abundance of design that occurs in nature, and still deny that it required a designer. Designers themselves create things that required intelligent input and effort yet they deny that the designed universe and everything in it that contain design and information required a designer, and instead has come about strictly through chance.

How could science, design and life in general advance if we all focused on God as the ultimate scientist/designer/author and emulated his methods and styles?

A Modern Tower of Babel?

The concepts that Ray Kurzweil discusses in his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology are mind-bending to put it mildly. But one can't help but agree with his premises that life as we know it will be unrecognizable a mere ten years from now. His benchmark is a $1000 laptop computer. In 2010 it will have the capacity of a human brain. A few years later it will have the capacity of all human knowledge that has existed throughout history.

His description of existing nanobots that can cure diabetes in rats is fascinating. These are nano-engineered devices about the size of a red blood cell that can release insulin in a controlled fashion that have already been tested in animals. Star Trek is upon us!

This presentation is a good synopsis of his shtick, and I have to admit I am quite convinced. Our present rate of increase in knowledge is exponential and in a few short years we will see the stuff of science fiction becoming reality. What does this mean for life on planet earth?

Comments are welcome...

Be More Productive!

In this world of stress and increasing knowledge, the fact is most of us need to learn to take it easy. We hear on the news all this talk about how fast things are changing and how difficult it is to keep up with all our responsibilities...well, I for one have already rebelled against such things. I try very hard to keep my levels of peace as high as possible, and I like a lot of down time.

However...

There always comes a time when we wish we could be more productive, especially if it means I can have more quality downtime. So I've been diggin' the website 43 Folders. By his own definition, "43 Folders is Merlin Mann's site about personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better."

If you plumb the depths of this website I guarantee you'll find at least a few life hacks that will greatly improve your quality of life. A bold claim? Check it out...

Those @#!*&% Evangelicals!

Here's the problem with Christians today: their off-the-scale unhealthy emphasis on what we do over what we believe. This is precisely the reason evangelicals - especially fundamentals, with the emphasis on "mental" - have become so irrelevant in today's culture. What words of condemnation did Jesus have for the woman at the well or the gal caught in the act of adultery (an offense punishable by death back then)? Jesus did not have a single word of condemnation for either woman.

Then why are evangelicals so ready to point out what's wrong with the world? Their entire agenda has become what Christians are against when we instead ought to be preaching to the world what we are FOR. There is a huge difference. Everyone in the world can point out what evangelicals are against - homosexuality, abortion, divorce - but how many non-Christians can tell us what Christians are for? By emphasizing what Christianity is against we have bred an entire culture represented by Christopher Hitchens in his new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Fortunately any thinking Christian can easily shoot Hitchens out of the water since his arguments are the same old weak garbage we incessantly hear from his type: look at all the evil wrought in the name of religion, you can't prove God exists, why is there evil in the world, blah blah blah...very tired arguments wrapped in tired intellectual language making it appeal to those spoken of in Romans: "although they claimed to be wise, they became fools." These same tired old arguments - peppered with a strong dose of contempt for anything that might hint at a personal and loving God - also litter the pages of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. I expected much more from such an accomplished intellectual as Dawkins but his book is (or certainly should be) a sore disappointment to fellow atheists. Lots of ranting, accusations often unsupported by references (making them toothless and meaningless), and lots of poor argumentation...the same old same old.

Even though these anti-God books are laughably inadequate in accomplishing their goals, yet us Christians bear a lot of the responsibility for their existence since these authors and millions like them look at all the stupid things we spend our effort on and rightfully reject a God that could support these crazy notions. When Christians make the greatest commandments their focal point - to simply love God and love people - then these God haters will have no more arguments left to stand on.

Is this not what's going to eventually happen? Will not every human being one day stand before God and realize the truth about who he is? So why are we not trying to accomplish this here and now? Let's show the world a God who loves with an infinite and perfect love. That will disarm them and help them take a quantum leap forward toward acknowledging who God really is and who he wants to be for them.

Times they are a changin'

Just realized I owned a blog! Whod've figured? Forgot all about this handy little communication tool, even though cousin Roy recently started his blog and has posted some very good stuff on it. Well, maybe it's time to start communicating again. Some good stuff has been happening...

For a while now - oh, roughly the last several decades - I've been mostly concerned about what's right and wrong. In my walk with God, I've been primarily trying to figure out what God is doing, how I fit into that plan, how all the events and activities in the world fit into that plan, and other such ramblings. Now I see I've been totally missing the point.

What God wants most is relationship, plain and simple. All that other stuff is by comparison crap (I have a better word - different spelling, same smell - but I probably shouldn't use it here even though it's the same word the Apostle Paul used for "dung" - as in "I count all my grand accomplishments as dung"...bet you didn't know Paul was a potty mouth eh?). All this other stuff only gets in the way of my loving God with all my heart, soul and mind.

What does the uprising in the middle east and its supposed implications for end time prophecy have to do with my loving God and loving my neighbor? Precisely zero. No matter what kind of hell or high water is going on around me my mission remains the same - to love, period.

So here I am on this new journey, one in which I feel totally out of place and unsure, but I know somehow that it's the right thing. For example, I saw Tim LaHaye (author of the Left behind series) on a cable news show the other night and just couldn't stomach listening to him. Don't get me wrong, he's got his place in this world and it's not my place to either condemn him or give accolades. It's just that such things really matter so little anymore that they have become totally meaningless. There are much bigger fish to fry than to stare dreamily at my future in heaven. Jesus wants us to be His kingdom HERE and NOW. So I for one am going to just get on with that goal, whatever it looks like.

Graham Cooke has been an incredible inspiration to me, easily the most influential teacher in my entire life. Please give a listen, download a couple MP3s, order a few CD sets and let me know what you think. He is running way out in the lead, and I for one am trying hard to join him. Here's a great place to start with Graham Cooke: on his website, go to store, choose MP3s, and download any of the Permission Granted talks. They're cheap, they pack a whallop, and I guarantee you'll learn something new and fresh about who God wants to be for you.

Please read this excerpt from a biography I recently read:

“ 'Perhaps we must abandon the ideas of national or mass churches…It is likely that there lies before us a different epoch in the history of the church, a new epoch in which Christianity will find itself in the situation of the mustard seed, in tiny groups apparently without influence which nevertheless live intensely bearing witness against evil and bringing good into the world. I see a great movement of this type already underway.'

What hope for renewal does [the speaker] see? Not in the revival of an 'ancient and sclerotic system' but in the recognition of the Church as 'something fresh and desirable, something truly grand.'

But only those who have succeeded in 'transcending the experience of modernity' will be able to see this.

[His] vision is of a future when 'modernity' no longer sets the intellectual or spiritual agenda, the framework for conceiving of alternatives (“faith” vs. “reason,” “science” vs. “religion”), but is left behind entirely.

In this sense, [his] vision is a truly radical one: “modernity” and “post-modernity” are no longer concepts on his intellectual screen; “modernity” is already surpassed by the Christian worldview that is emerging out of the depths of the post-conciliar crisis. “We must ever become more aware of the fact that we no longer know what Christianity is…to give an example: how many images within a church no longer mean anything to most people? No one knows any more what they signify. Even concepts which were still familiar a generation ago, like ‘tabernacle,’ have become foreign.”

What is needed in this situation? 'A new curiosity about Christianity, a desire to understand what it really is.' And what is Christianity, really? Not a theology, a collection of ideas, but an event, a fact: the Incarnation and the death of Christ on the cross.

'The essential is not that Christ announced certain ideas – something that he in fact did, of course – but that I become a Christian in the measure to which I believe in this event: God entered the world and acted.' "

Who might be the author of these ideas? Some cutting-edge proponent of postmodern Christianity? Brian McLaren maybe? No, this excerpt is from a book entitled “Let God’s Light Shine Forth” which carries this subtitle: “The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI. Yes, the new Pope (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger) is a Christian postmodern! I think this bodes very well for the Catholic Church and I trust that God is using their new leadership to affect lasting positive change.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385507925/sr=8-1/qid=1140315123/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-5335217-2843105?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Future Grace

John Piper's book Future Grace is one of the most refeshing I have read in a very long time. I have been reading and thinking a lot lately about God's grace, its depth and breadth, and exactly what it's supposed to look like in action. This book is the best I've found so far to answer my questions. But in doing so it also challenges my very concept of who God is, how he operates, and how I ought to be living my life.

Piper emphasizes the future-oriented aspect of grace, and challenges the reader to find anywhere in the bible where gratitude toward God is supposed to be our motivation for living a good life. The emphasis on grace and the challenge to live by faith is always future-oriented, and God gets much glory when we look forward to a future full of his grace and mercies. On the other hand, if we believe it is out of gratitude for something God has done for us, then we succumb to a debtor's ethic, which states that I owe God something for saving me, thus I will do everything I can to pay him back. But that robs grace of its quality as a gift - something we simply cannot earn.

Piper's credo is "God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him." This is emphasized what feels like hundreds of times in the book, but it is true, and it is consistent with a comment Don Miller makes in his book Searching For God Knows What: "The most selfless thing a perfect being who is perfectly loving could do would be to create other beings to enjoy himself."

The link shown does not specifically discuss John Piper's book Future Grace, but the content is similar. The book was published in 1995 (Multnomah Publishers) and the synopsis on the web site shown was copyrighted in 1999, so I'm thinking he sumamrized the book on the web site.

Highly recommended.

Donald Miller's Latest

Don Miller's first book Blue Like Jazz was great. Heard him speak at the Cornerstone Festival in 2004 and had to go get the book ASAP. It fits neatly into a long list of books about postmodernism and Christianity's (and all of modern culture's) shift into the next era of humankind.

The main idea of Blue Like Jazz is that Christian faith ought to be more like art and music than science and math. Modern Christianity has gained the reputation of being staunchly self-righteous, knowing all the answers and demanding that if you don't agree with all our answers, then you can't come inside the fold. Miller in Blue Like Jazz admits that he doesn't have all the answers, and it's okay to let non-Christians know that. They will respect us more if they realize we are mere humans like they are.

Searching For God Knows What continues the development of these ideas, but in my opinion delves deeper and becomes more meaningful on many levels.

The book slowly but surely develops the case for a God who loves and cares for his created ones. By the middle of the book I was being challenged to my core on some fundamental issues of my own personality and defense mechanisms during his discussion of the Lifeboat. The crescendo makes as convincing a case for Christ as (in my opinion) Chesterton's Orthodoxy or C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

Excessive accolades? I don't think so. I love Chesterton and Lewis, but for today's audience, Don Miller's books are just as convincing and perhaps more accessible and meaningful to seekers entering the third millenium.

Code Name God

For a long time I have wondered - even considered writing a book about - where the interface between the physical and spiritual resides. A simple move of a finger turns a thought (something immaterial) into a physical act (something with "material" consequences, whatever that means), which in turn can have significant spiritual consequences. Full circle. Kind of cool.

Mani Bhaumik turns a scientific eye toward the spirituality underlying all of physical reality in a very good book entitled "Code Name God" (Crossroad Publishing, NY, 2005). Bhaumik has earned untold riches (including mansions in Beverly Hills and elsewhere) with his mind, primarily for developing the excimer laser, which is used for Lasik eye surgery. Born and raised in India in abject poverty, Bhaumik begins by retelling the story of his childhood which, although unimaginably poor, was rich with a real spirituality that fed and nourished his curiosity of the natural world.

Half the book is autoiographical, which is worthwhile background when he finally delves into the spiritual aspects of physics. It's no coincidence that many books on physics tend toward the spiritual and metaphysical (just go check out the bookstore). Bhaumik does a great job discussing the possibilities that spiritual forces underlie all of material reality, to such an extent that what we think of as solid material governed by familiar Newtonian physics is not really all that solid. Not only that, but it may not be all "real" either.

Although Hindu, the author is deeply spiritual, speaking of God virtually as naturally as any Christian I know. Almost sounds like he's talking about the same person. It'll make you wonder...

Highly recommended.

Tons of legal bootleg music

"...the Live Music Archive...is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits."

Incredible selection of live bootleg, all legal. The "lossless" format is best quality-wise, but songs are 25-30 mb each, making one concert as much as a gig. Try "Browse bands with MP3/Ogg versions" to download shorter files.

To convert the huge lossless files requires a software program to decode them. They arrive in .shn format. Information about how to do all that is in the web site.

My recommendation: anything by Martin Sexton to start with.
http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php

The modern church - thumbs up or down?

Have problems with the modern church? Want to hear from others with the same feelings?
http://www.kbproweb.com/gel/reform/lovehate.shtml

Spiritual renewal and social justice

"Sojourners is a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice." Check out this proposal about "Confessing Christ in a World of Violence."
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=sojomail.display&issue=041020#3

Daily devotional

Oswald Chambers may be old-fashioned, but his daily devotionals pack a whallop. Not for the faint of heart. If you want to be challenged and you're serious about shaping up, this will do it. I try to read "Ozzie" every day.

http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost/

Mosfet Booster

Here's my booster, and the web site with the design:
AMZ

Build Your Own Guitar Effects

Okay, so it's time-consuming, frustrating and challenging. The advantage is, in a given design you can swap a resistor for a potentiometer, and get a variety of sounds that an off the shelf effects pedal won't have. Or, where you see a capacitor you might be able to add a multi-position switch connected to capacitors of various values for a multitude of unique sounds. Once you control the design, the possibilities are endless.

My only successful project so far is a mosfet booster that works great. When I first built it, the only container I had around the house was a specimen test vial from the hospital, but then I put it in a standard black box.

Some great projects are here, including my booster:
AMZ

Other designs can be found at:
Geofex
Harmony Central
General Guitar Gadgets
Vintage Guitar Effects

There's enough here to keep you busy until the wee hours.

Also for your edification, some of my favorite stuff:
Z.VEX
Blackstone Appliances
Fulltone
Voodoo Labs
Hughes & Kettner

Some of these sites have sound files of their effects...fun!

Postmodern Christianity

One author that has really been challenging me and making me think about the status quo is Brian McLaren. He considers himself a post-modern Christian, and challenges Christians to learn the new language and thought processes of postmodernism so we can more effectively communicate with those around us. These are the books I've read lately:

A New Kind of Christian and its sequel The Story We Find Ourselves In. These are fiction books based on McLaren's true experiences as a pastor in a church that likes to challenge modern thought. Excellent mind-stretching stuff.

More Ready Than You Realize. This is basically the history of an email exchange between McLaren and a woman he met, walking her through the difficult questions many thinking seekers are asking today. Very interesting stuff.

Get 'em here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/002-6456511-8706465

Also, there's an interesting exchange between McLaren and Chuck Colson on McLaren's web site http://ww.anewkindofchristian.com/archives/000160.html in response to a column Colson wrote in Christianity Today, expressing an opinion that postmodern thought is a "dead end" http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/012/24.72.html.

Interesting stuff...