Really, what is it with people doing stupid things which anyone with more than a pinch of common sense would realize that they would probably get killed by? I just read about a 19-yearold from Manchester who tried to make explosives in his garage. This follows hot on the trail of the two lightsabre fighters in Essex who it seems got strip-light tubes, filled them with petrol and then attempted to light them and film the resulting fight. Needless to say they didn’t get much further than the lighting stage. Is the human race doomed to self-destruction? Fortunately these people didn’t achieve Darwin Awards yet (or perhaps unfortunately given they’re still in the ‘gene pool’…)
All posts by Mark
Sunday and Monday
Sunday was good fun. Got about 2 or 3 hours sleep on Saturday night for no apparent reason – I’d allowed myself about 7 hours to sleep but my body just didn’t want to. Went to church on Sunday morning and met up with Jim from Oxford which was good – hadn’t seen him in ages, and won’t see him all summer due to China. We then went to Jesus Green where the 30 or so Eden people were joined by the Holy Trinity student lunch, a few random StAG guys and the CLC posse were over the other side of the park. Thanks to Widge we had a BBQ though which was the highlight. There was a (i think 3-way) football match, some “French” cricket, frisby, rounders and then some ultimate frisby at the end (Jesus college vs). Then went home to have a shower and back to church for the evening service which was Marvin speaking on Jude 17-25.
Monday was very lazy – listened to some more NTW lectures and read through some essays I wrote. Started learning a bit of Haskell due to boredom and then started doing a mock test. I’d just got 1/4 of the way through when Ellie phoned me asking if I wanted to go to a jog; the former being worse than anything i accepted. Was really nice and sunny and we ran along the river to Fen Ditton. Took about an hour and 10 min but we did walk quite a bit. I really ought to do more jogging – a healthy body leads to a healthy mind and all that.
Found some cool links:
An ‘Open source’ Cola recipe… looks somewhat dangerous though, and cola is pretty minging.
A really sick piece of modern art which is a dead frog in formaldehyde spliced open with a web server and electrodes which lets you trigger its legs to jump, ovr the internet…
A DIY laser which is basically a spark-gap in the air which uses the nitrogen to generate the laser beam. Might give this one a try sometime.
Lazy days
It’s been another lazy day of revision and boredom (although the two usually go togeather). Read quite a lot of a thematic commentary on Matthew’s gospel by J. D. Kingsbury and also listened to one of the Hulsian lectures which N. T. Wright gave last year, the title of which was “Paul and Justification”. The talk I listened to was about Paul’s political scene and whether he was a political thinker. At some points, NTW seems to be reading too much into the text but I think on the broad picture he’s right that there are some resonances in the text which would have reminded people that “Jesus is Lord and so Caesar isn’t”. Not too sure on his political reading of Romans but I do agree that the Romans 13 section about obeying the governing authorities is actually bringing the rulers down a peg in terms of there is a higher king than them.
Found the following two pictures quite funny (click for bigger pictures):
11 steps to a better brain
Really interesting article here.. probably a bit late to help with my exams this year (apart from the eating toast thing).
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18625011.900
Thursday night and Friday
The Barn last night was very good – saw Mehmet for the first time in ages and we had a ‘mini Olympics’ night which was good fun for all involved. Harry’s today was similarly good, many people turned up and we went to Rachel E’s afterwards for toasties and chat – maybe 20 people went and it was great to get to know people better.
The rest of the day was nice – it was very hot here, perhaps 25 to 28 degrees and the wind was also very hot. I spent the day until 4:30 locked in my room trying to do some work, and I succeeded in the main part although not as much work as I’d have liked to. After Harry’s, I went into Sidney to check my mail and went to see Ellie to have a catch-up. We ended up going on a nice walk and chat until about midnight. Cambridge is all about just randomly meeting up with people and getting to know them better it’s such a privilege to be here.
Jim should be coming here from Oxford tomorrow, as is Rosalind (from London during her half-term) so I’ll probably be busy the next few days just seeing people and socialising. Really ought to start getting down to serious revision soon as my exams are only a few days away… First is my Greek on Thursday.
My day so far…
It’s been another lazy day of revision… Got up, read my Bible, went to the last lecture of the year about Islam! Then came home and listened to some lectures by Tom Wright and went to do Bible study with my mate Kim. Anyway, I really ought to get down to do some more work now…
Hissop
I went to Christian Union tonight for the first time this term. We looked at Psalm 51 which is one of my favourite Psalms and very clear about forgiveness and how we should live as the people of God. It’s amazing how you notice something new every time you come to the Bible, and this time I noticed that David talks about being cleansed to be whiter than white by Hissop. Hissop was a type of tree in Israel and it’s quite important throughout the Bible as a sign of forgiveness – in the Passover (Exodus 12) the Israelites are instructed to put the blood of the lamb on their door posts using a branch of Hissop so that the Angel of Death might pass over their houses. In John 19:29 as Jesus is dying on the cross, someone gets a sponge of wine-vinegar and offers it to him on a Hissop stick. It’s also used throughout Leviticus 14 law about temple sacrifices, specifically to do with the blood of the animal which has been killed.
It’s really amazing to see how these really random themes just permeate all through the Bible – there’s really no chance to my mind that they could have been invented by the human authors of the Bible.
Last APU :-(
It was the last APU cafe last night. It’s been a good year, we’ve seen it grow from one or two internationals to have at its peak about 20. We had a good party at Briony’s, Richard baked some potato bread and Karunashur made some wonderful Indian food. Briony made some amazing cookies too. I started my “trying to get to bed early” programme and managed just past midnight.
My new blog
I’m meant to be revising for my second year exams, so I decided to start a blog in an attempt to waste more time…