Mongol - the Genghis Khan story.
Beautifully shot, this Russian-made film tells the “untold” story of the early life of Genghis Khan. The characters are well-formed, and it ends up being a very human story. Yes, there are big set-piece battles, and there’s a fair bit of gore, but even that seems more of a dream [...]
Branding the Youth in the Totalitarian State - when you’re trying to control the hearts and minds of a people, it stretches even to the way that you present your children’s books, and their schooling. Some examples of how this was put into practice last century.
Another semester has drawn to a close. And so, to celebrate, I’ve upgraded wordpress out of beta mode, and then, despite my best intentions, kept the template exactly as it was. I have, though, done some long-overdue pruning to my blogroll: let me know if you think you should be on there, or if you’ve [...]
The Happening is really not worth your time or effort. Though it has a great sense of creepiness throughout, the poor characterisation, plot, and premise make for a time in the cinema spent wondering how this project was approved.
If you do bring yourself to watch it, you’ll find the things that are good about it [...]
Greedy landlords turning pensioners into cheap, environmentally friendly oil, and it’s completely legal: how it can save you money.
[Good Experience] Short animation about procrastination: Procrastination is making a cup of tea. Procrastination is thesaurusizing your emails.
fireworks 2/4
In an effort to avoid spending the whole weekend studying Greek, and to make sure we caught up with friends before their son grew up too much, we spent the majority of the long weekend down in Canberra.
I still remember those childhood fireworks nights: the bucket of [...]
Don’t waste your life is the best book of its genre I’ve read for a while. A man in his 60’s becomes convinced of the truth of Christianity, and is struck by the awful truth that he has wasted all of his life in secular pursuits. John Piper expertly weaves together a range of other [...]
Bit Literacy
MIT computer science graduate Mark Hurst has put together a book here that details ways for the average person to be able to cope with the massive influx of “bits” - of digital information - that press in on modern life.
Easy to read, minimally technical, there are a lot of practical ideas to be [...]
Iron Manкомпютри is mostly a movie for kids, though it has a little too much violence and innuendo in it to particularly commend itself. Unusually, I found myself craving popcorn about two thirds of the way through: it’s just that kind of movie. A fun distraction, and really seamless special effects, but a little less [...]
how to set up a maximise window script on mac - a number of different ways to make it happen.
Detailed video from the 1970s explaining how a Polaroid camera works. We’ve come a long way, downhill, in terms of what level of technical detail it’s reasonable to put into a video about photography.
We all remember the video where someone folds a t-shirt in two seconds, but this video explains how to fold a t-shirt in two seconds.
[haibane] Lego Stephen Hawking with transforming chair!
An insightful list of things to avoid while studying at bible college, framed as a list of 45 ways to waste your theological education.
Update: more thoughts on this topic over at the PTC blog.
scribal error?
This week as a Sunday School activity, we had a look at the idea of how the copies of the New Testament came into being. Scribes made copies of the originals, and then copies of these copies were made.
Parchment was very expensive, and so the original copyists [...]