Wired Magazine on 'Manga News'

Putting the two together, they are appealing to young potential readers by setting the news into manga – real news in cartoon form. Talk about adjusting your approach to meet the culture!

Now imagine sitting down with some of the best leaders in today’s church and hear what their “9 minutes” were. That’s the idea behind THE NINES. THE NINES is a free one-day conference that will take place totally on-line. It is designed for all current and potential pastors, church staff members and ministry leaders who want to be motivated and stretched in their leadership.

Over 6 dozen of the country’s best evangelical Christian leaders and communicators have each been given the opportunity to speak for a maximum of 9 minutes. At 9 minutes, you know each talk will be both intense and very specific.

THE NINES is an internet broadcast to be held on 9/9/09 at 9:09 Central (that’s 10:09am Eastern). These messages will help you and your church navigate into the future; each one will last a maximum of 9 minutes. Find out more at their web site here, and see their list of over 70 speakers – there’s the names of some impressive people whose books, blogs and tweets I read:

• Alan Hirsch (Forge Mission Training Network)
• Anne Jackson (FlowerDust.net)
• Dan Kimball (Vintage Faith Church)
• Dave Ferguson (Community Christian Church)
• Dino Rizzo (Healing Place Church)
• Ed Stetzer (Lifeway Research)
• Eric Bryant (Mosaic)
• Geoff Surratt (Seacoast Church)
• Greg Surratt (Seacoast Church)
• John Ortberg (Menlo Park Presbyterian)
• Larry Osborne (North Coast Church)
• Mark Batterson (National Community Church)
• Mark Driscoll (Mars Hill Church)
• Neil Cole (Church Multiplication Associates)
• Perry Noble (NewSpring Church)
• Pete Wilson (Cross Point Church)
• Scott Hodge (Orchard Valley Church)
• Scott Williams (LifeChurch.tv)
• Steven Furtick (Elevation Church)
• Troy Gramling (Flamingo Road Church)
  … along with 54 others that I’m looking forward to finding out about for the first time.

Praise Christian Fellowship is hosting THE NINES at 52 New Hartford Road, Barkhamsted, via internet feed. We’ll bring in lunch (bring a $5 donation to help cover costs) since the conference goes straight though the day. We’ve only just heard about this a few days ago, so unfortunately it’s pretty short notice. If you’d like to attend, please let us know in the comments .

Thanks – hope you can join us!

• Teens are driven by a genetic imperative to build an identity that separates them from their parents, so they look for something new.
• Teens are in the middle of the mating dance (also a genetic imperative!) – both sexes showing off and trying to be cool, often by being silly – so again they’re looking for something new.
• Young brains get far more ‘exercise’ – they’ve had to absorb language, safety and culture lessons since birth – and are wired to assimilate, synthesize and communicate. This seems to slow down during the twenties, but during the teen years it’s at its peak.
• Teens have an enormous amount of time and encouragement to socialize – high school is designed to be engaging and fun; they are encouraged to date; they are expected to watch a lot of television and go to movies. Their work load is relatively low – mostly homework and a few chores. Some take jobs, it’s true, but as a whole (and we’re talking about teens as a class here remember) they have a lot of time.
• Kids are expected to make mistakes, so they can afford to take greater risks because they know they will be indulged and forgiven. Some of the trends they start are simply moronic – wearing baseball hats backwards or sideways; pants that look like they’re falling off (don’t you just want to get out your power stapler?); jeans with holes in them – the sillier the better at present, although in 20 years there’s a chance they’ll look back at photographs and wince.
• Parents indulge their children in other ways too, which is why, as Brad notes, vast segments of the economy are tuned to teens – music, electronics, clothing. And in turn, since these corporations are trying to discover and market to the culture leaders among the teens, other teens watch what the corporations are selling so they can get in on those trends and look like leaders.

However, just because we can see some of the reasons for teens’ creativity doesn’t mean we can adapt them for us older folks (sorry!).

Teens are the life-blood of any cross-generation organization, whether we’re talking about a town or a church. And when a town or church fails to invest in their teens and design for them, they will leave. How does this connect with what you’re seeing around you – in your town or your church?

Are you seeing the exodus of the 13-31 year-olds in your church?

Check out Brad’s post here.

[flv]http://www.gwilt.org/RRGBNQP/RRGBNQPlarge.flv[/flv]

But good times with good friends are precious and deserve to be remembered.

The Earth rotates once per day (no duh!), and is approx. 24,900 miles around at the equator. It’s turning counter-clockwise from the perspective of someone hovering over the North pole. At noon in Quito (on the equator), you step into your time machine. You go back 6 hours. They opened the door at 6am that morning and found your body crushed to a pulp. Bone fragments too tiny to piece back together, and a really big dent in the floor and one wall.

What happened? At noon, you were on the equator in Quito, which was traveling at 24900 ÷ 24 ( = 1,037 mph), currently on the side of the Earth facing the Sun (that’s why it’s called ‘noon’) in a direction at right angles to a line between Earth and Sun. Send yourself back 6 hours, and you’re still traveling at that speed in that direction, but Quito is a quarter of a revolution away moving at about 1000 mph directly toward the Sun while your velocity (speed and direction) haven’t changed. Your velocity is now directly into the center of the Earth. Result: splat.

… At least, that’s what would happen if you showed up in the same place relative to Earth, with the Earth only spinning in place.

But the Earth is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, more easily thought of as a circle with a radius of about 93 million miles. That means it is traveling around the Sun at 2*π*93MM miles (circumference of a circle) per year, or about 67,000 mph. So it’s all right, the good news is that you won’t be smashed to a pulp by going backwards 6 hours. Of course, the bad news is that you’ll be in space, and will therefore die by exploding in the sudden zero-pressure of outer space. Alone – a little over 400,000 miles from Quito and the surface of the Earth.

… Or you would, if it weren’t for that fact that the solar system is also rotating around the Milky Way galaxy at just under 500,000 mph. So we may as well forget about the trivial orbital velocity from the Solar System – you’re now approximately 3 million miles away. But still alone and exploded.

Of course, we haven’t taken into account the fact that the Milky Way itself is moving through space at approximately 3 times that speed.

So don’t take up any offers of time travel. You won’t like it (for a very, very short time).

On the other hand, if we could send a rocket backwards or forwards in time – even 5 minutes either way – then we would have found a way to defeat the Earth’s gravity well. The rocket would be out in space instantly – no vast expenditure of fuel. In fact, if we did it right (i.e., the right time and place on Earth, as well as the right amount of time forwards or backwards), the rocket could be placed directly into the gravitational attraction of the planet we want to visit – it would save enormous amounts of fuel. Supplies could go at the same time and bombed onto the planet.

Up the ante by sending the (unmanned) rocket back a thousand years and you may be able to reach another planet on the far side of the galaxy. (Maybe that’s how the Ancients planted the Stargates before they had any to travel with.) Send out really powerful radio pulses in Morse code and drive SETI nuts for the past 10 years, trying to find out how anyone invented an English-based Morse code 20,000 light years away. On a more serious note, you could play this game to look for inhabitable planets. It would be a one-way trip for the colonists, though.

Or again, for the Stephen Hawkins-type astrophysicists among us: how about finding at least one component of our absolute movement through the universe? Drop a nuclear bomb into space, timed to go off 5 minutes after the time-switch (don’t send me a ticket to the launch, thank you). 5 minutes will leave it close enough that the detonation will be visible and you can plot the distance and position. Drop 2 or 3 more at 1-second intervals and you can plot absolute speed, taking into account the angular momentum, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, that of the solar system around the galaxy, the galaxy around … something bigger?

Just remember – these ideas: copyright – me!