In a nutshell, it allows you to zoom from any satellite altitude into any place on earth using various images captured from LandSat and STRM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) elevation data. It’s pretty impressive and definitely worth the 231MB download (although, it requires some pretty beefy processing and video power). [thanks to furrygoat]

~Jason

Over night, seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has accelerated significantly, which increases our level of concern that current unrest could culminate in an eruption. We are increasing the alert level to the second of three levels, which is similar to Color Code Orange of the alert system used by the Alaska Volcano Observatory and analogous to the National Weather Service’s hazardwatch [USGS]

Kinda scary for people living around the area!

~Jason

Feeling down? This will make you smile!

Thanks to Rev. Joyleaf.

~Jason

~Jason

~Jason

During a week that CBS was fined $550,000 for Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash and its news division had to apologize for shoddy reporting, at least the prime-time ratings gave its executives something to smile about.

~Jason

On Aug. 4, Bush and Kerry had campaign stops three blocks apart in Davenport, Iowa. The entire police force of 157 officers was on duty for the two events in this Mississippi River town. Total cost: $23,000 - nearly the annual salary of a rookie officer.

While the police were protecting the presidential candidates … three banks in town were robbed. … Suspects in the other two robberies have not yet been caught.

“We were glad to see them show up,” police chief Michael Bladel says of Bush and Kerry. “We were double-glad to see them go.”

~Jason

I have ridden the current world record holder twice (“Top Thrill Dragster” at Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio). It was the fastest and tallest roller coaster in the world (120 mph in 4 seconds to a height of 420 feet).  I took the ride twice in a row, with a girl I liked named Monica, back in 1989. The waiting line was well over an hour both times.

Now a new ride is coming to New Jersey’s Six Flags which accellerates to 128 mph in 3.5 seconds and rises 456 feet off the ground! It might be time for me to go back and visit friends in New Jersey— taking a little side trip to visit my friend the thrill ride.

I took Lucas to Canada’s Wonderland last Saturday for a day of coasting. It was his birthday present this year. We went on just about every roller-coaster there— except the ones with waiting lines of more than an hour. Top Gun, Wilde Beast, Mine Buster, Skyrider, The Bat, Dragon Fire, Thunder Run, and White Water Canyon. Next time we’ll wait in line to ride Tomb Raider, The Fly, and Vortex.

~Jason

~Jason

Great 404 Error Pages

~Jason

However, Bennett and Percy have always stated that man may well have travelled to the Moon in 1969 but maintain that the Apollo imagery is not the true and accurate portrayal of such an event. As a result of the interviews they have conducted with those involved in the Apollo program it became very clear to them that there were numerous discrepancies between the information presented to the public, and the facts as known to some NASA contractors. These issues were to join the photographic and TV anomalies as worthy of examination. So a book that started out as an investigation into the photographic and film record became, of necessity, a much deeper look into the events before, during and after Project Apollo.

Where’s Fox Mulder when you need him?

~Jason

It’s a funny thing: We Canadians have a Constitution that was patriated and radically updated within living memory, but it seems sometimes not to be a living thing. Not in the way, I mean, that the U.S. Constitution is. The American republic’s founding debates and basic law never fade from view for long in the bustle of current affairs; the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments endlessly dissected and cited there, and the Fourteenth shows up, throwing wild haymakers, in every debate from affirmative action to the 2000 presidential election.

We certainly talk about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms a lot, or our politicians do. But we don’t have a political culture in which new laws are instinctively tested against the ambitions and intentions of our constitutional framers — either the ones of 1982, who are rarely consulted or even considered in the capacity of founders, or the ones of 1867, whose ruling passions and federalist specifications are largely forgotten.

It’s the latter group that is most relevant to a consideration of contemporary health policy. The problem is that none of them, for a second, would have considered the possibility that the state would one day be responsible for providing comprehensive, universal health care to the citizenry. If you could shake John A. Macdonald awake and explain medicare to him, he would wonder how and when the damned filthy Prussians had managed to take over the Dominion. And the same is true, I would warrant, of everyone else who had a hand in the events of 1867. They were Victorian gentlemen; they had no idea that the political “centre” would one day be located far to the left of their era’s jelly-spined European socialists. [emphasis mine]

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The U.S. seems so concerned with protecting the founding father’s original intent for the country, while we seem to blythly ignore our founder’s wishes.

Speaking of medicare, the ‘brain-drain’ we often refer to is all the more interesting in light of this tidbit of history:

When [medicare] was broadened, the Douglas government had to fight the doctors, who were foursquare against the socialization of their labour and went out on a hair-raising strike. Douglas won.

~Jason

Things break, when you use them,
Bones ache, as time goes on
Things break, things break…

One part of this tune that really sticks in my mind is the ending… the singer repeats over and over, “Things break, things break, things break, things break—” almost like a skipping vinyl record. Then as the song started to fade out, I heard something which made my stomach drop! I heard the magnetic tape getting all wrapped up inside the machine— that wrinkling, crinkling sound we all learned to fear back in the days before CDs were common.

I quickly popped the tape out to stop it from getting too tangled, and it was fine! I did a double-take— the tape wasn’t caught in the gears at all! I suddenly realised that I’d been fooled, and that those sound effects were recorded on the cassette!

The point was made, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Don’t get too attached to stuff, it just breaks.

Now that’s all good, and easy to say, but the last few weeks have been especially trying for me.

• My tiny steam locomotive went plumetting to it’s death off a high bridge on my train layout
• My GPS compact flash card died a sickly death, testing my resolution to hold things loosely
• My MIDI USB port stopped working on my computer
• I got a particularly nasty computer virus
• My 256 MB SD RAM card AND my 256 CF card died within weeks of each other
• My electric guitar snapped in half at the head-stock.

Now if I was a fool, I’d say this was all coincidence. Let’s hope I’m not a fool, and that I realise what’s really happening: God is reminding me that all the stuff I have is unfullfilling, untrustworthy, undependable, even unecessary!

I can’t seem to get it through my head that a new gadget isn’t going to make me happy. But slowly and steadily God is showing me the truth.

“Things break.”

~Jason

Google Inc.’s recently launched news service in China doesn’t display results from Web sites blocked by that country’s authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to “do no evil.”

Interesting, isn’t it? I wonder how bloggers will react to this?

~Jason

I want one of those! Imagine, your battery gets low, so you go out to the garden and pull some weeds!

Neat!

~Jason

~Jason 

That way I can subscribe to it in my Bloglines account, and be reminded one more time about my need to grow in faith.

Comments anyone? Useful? Don’t bother?

UPDATE: Here it is: RSS Feed- 40 Days of Purpose. Use it with BlogLines.

~Jason

Far from being a young nation-state, we are in fact one of the older ones — certainly one that has had representative institutions and the rule of law for much longer than some of the most storied nations on this planet. When we pretend that Canada is a new nation, that we are still coming to discover who we are and what we can do — I feel that we are closing our eyes to what we have been, for good or for ill. And that sort of misperception cannot be sustained.

When people speak of how peace-loving Canadians have always been, I think of the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal in 1849 by an anglo-Montrealer mob — which probably was what prevented the city from being the capital after Confederation. I think of the desperate battles of the First World War, when Canadians won victories on the battlefields that Britons and Frenchmen could not, when our best general, Arthur Currie, was knighted on the battlefield by King George V and later took possession of Kaiser Wilhelm’s suite in the Palais Schaumburg (in Bonn). I think of the battles in Northern France in the Second World War, when Canadians ended up in a grudge match with the Panzer SS division that contained the Hitler Youth, when neither side would take prisoners (they started it — they murdered fifty Canadian POWs on D-Day), and the Germans labelled our troops “the British SS”.

There’s more, go read it.

~Jason

(1) Worship “from the Story” means we can’t settle to endlessly name and sing of the glorious attributes of God.
Worship can’t be about magnifying our conception of perfection, ripped as it were from a few favorite proof texts. Instead we must get our hands dirty in the ambiguous, storied soil of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The big question I bring to worship is, “How are we remembering God here?” Without the texture of the story’s context, we unwittingly import an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God into the narcissistic machinations of our own stories.

(2) Worship “to the Trinity” means we begin with a richer understanding of sovereignty.
Our three person-ed God dwells in community. At the heart of the cosmos is not my relationship with God, but the Father’s relationship with the Son. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are baptized in the Triune name. It’s how Paul says things like, “I am crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me” and “You have died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” Though we enter as individuals, worship is about community. And it’s not our community “down here” worshipping God’s community “up there.” In Christ, by the power of the outpoured Holy Spirit, we are ushered into the dwelling place of God the Father Almighty. We do not generate worship in and of ourselves. Jesus Christ makes an offering through us to the Father for the sake of the World.

(3) Worship “for the World” means simply we are not our own.
Herein lies the most subtle temptation of all: To run headlong into the world, making worship an instrumental means to mission. Authentic worship is the end, leading us to a place of being “in Christ” for the World.

If the church’s last five years could be summed up in an idea, I think it would be something like, “the time the church started to really understand worship.” Yet, reading this article reminds me that we’re blissfully arrogant and ignorant of what God really deserves in our worship. Somehow, we always seem to make it about us.

Comments?

~Jason

~Jason

Tell me what you think.

~Jason

Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah – the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.

Yeah, like I’m suprised we’re not getting the whole story.

You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.

Why do we have to funnel the news we see on TV through a bias filter? I’m tired of it, and I’m not going to take it anymore!

It’s terrible to see our national morale, and support for what we’re doing here, jeopardized by sensationalized stories hyped by media giants whose #1 priority is advertising income followed closely by their political agenda; getting the story straight falls much further down on their priority scale, as Dan Rather and CBS News have so aptly demonstrated in the last week.

~Jason

But after years of members of the Canadian Unregistered Firearm Owners Association publicly demanding to be arrested so that they can challenge the law the police sent six officers to take down Bruce Montague in public and locked his family out his home for three days to do a search.
I have to echo Jason Hayes on this. Shame on each and every one of you who had anything to do with this disgraceful exercise. You are an embarassment to the policing profession. You could have politely taken up the challenge at any public demonstration they held and accepted the evidence being offered.

~Jason

As a place for attendees to connect, I have built an additional web site, called FortyDays.info. It has a community blog with an RSS feed so go on over and leave a message to get things going, and be sure to add the feed to your RSS reader or your BlogLines account.

~Jason

My friend Jay Forderer works at Dilt’s and referred the job to me. Things went well, though there was some difficulty in communication, and the guys didn’t really know exactly what they were looking for— or maybe I wasn’t good at explaining the process.

In the end, it all worked out, I learned some valuable lessons, and I think the site looks pretty good too.

~Jason

It was great; I went door to door and invited all of the neighbours out for a picture. The photographer borrowed a step ladder, and we all posed— about 30 of us— to show off community spirit.

Afterwards we took the opportunity to sit out in my backyard, around the crackling fireplace, nursing hot coffees and Joanne’s mom’s fresh-baked cookies. Kid’s rolled in the grass, and parents laughed and talked until dark.

I love this neighbourhood!

~Jason

p.s. Keep an eye out for us in Friday’s paper. Apparently they’re going to publish my email as well.

Update: The article was posted today. My email was the second last one on page 2 of the section, but at least the picture was front and center! How fun!

Update: Here’s the article.

There are, at most, 15 of them. Their ages range from 19 to 42, their professions from nurse to window dresser, mason to film director. And in a cave beneath the streets of Paris, they built a subterranean cinema whose discovery this week sent the city’s police into a frenzy.

Huddled round a table in an anonymous Latin Quarter bar, the group’s members - of whom only Lazar wanted to be named - relate past exploits: rock concerts for up to 4,000 people in old underground quarries; 2am projections in a locked film theatre; art and photo exhibitions in supposedly sealed-off subterranean galleries.

But since they aim to leave each venue “cleaner, if anything, than when we found it”, LMDP’s activities have never before come to public attention. Until late last month, when police patrolling one small stretch of the estimated 200 miles of tunnels beneath the city stumbled across the underground cinema.

It was constructed in a series of interconnected caves totalling some 400 square metres beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower. Former quarries, they were partly refurbished during the 1900 Universal Exposition when one of the galleries was clad with concrete to represent a future Channel tunnel and a wall was artfully terraced.

But the caves were sealed off for the last time at least 20 years ago and subsequently “ceased to exist officially”, Lazar said. “We knew them well because we used them to get into the Palais de Chaillot every Bastille Day. The roof is the perfect place from which to watch the fireworks.”

Indeed most of the LMDP’s underground happenings are organised in places the city authorities are not aware of, he added. “There are so many underground networks - the quarries, the metro, the collective heating, the electricity, the sewers - and each is the responsibility of a different bureaucracy,” he said.

Jordan first posted this, and wondered if Saskatoon had a secret underground city. I know Moose Jaw does… but I want to know about Hamilton!?!

Hey everyone, let’s watch Alex Proyas’ Dark City in an underground cave somewhere!!

~Jason

Turns out this is nothing new for CBS and Dan Rather. He’s been at this for some time:

Burkett has tracked Rather’s claims for years. In “Stolen Valor,” Burkett investigated a CBS TV documentary, “The Wall Within,” hosted by Rather.

The thrust of Rather’s report was that hordes of Vietnam veterans were dysfunctional, mentally disturbed or harbored guilt because their superiors had forced them to kill Vietnamese civilians.

Burkett did his own investigation and found that this was all hype. And while he was at it, he looked up Rather’s own military history. So determined was he that the story be put in perspective that Burkett ended up collaborating with ABC on a “counter documentary” on that network’s “20/20.”

This attempt to set the record straight won “20/20” a Cine Award, a significant honor within the industry.

“We attacked Rather’s documentary as being a bogus piece of work,” Burkett recalled to NewsMax.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

~Jason

It’s hard to imagine two institutions less associated with a classical Christian worldview than Harvard  University and the Public Broadcasting System. That’s why it comes as a pleasant surprise that, starting September 15, the two will come together to give Christianity a chance to make its case against the secular alternative.

The two-part series, airing September 15 and 22, is called “The Question of God.” It’s based on the book by my good friend Dr. Armand Nicholi, a professor at Harvard Medical School and editor of the Harvard Guide to Psychiatry.

I have always been confident that when the Christian worldview is presented fairly, an open-minded person will see that it does answer life’s most important questions better than any alternative. Any alternative, in fact, is irrational.

So, please, I encourage you: Watch “The Question of God” on PBS and get your friends and neighbors to do the same thing. And then start a discussion. Then you should write or e-mail PBS and thank them for putting the program on. There’s a good chance they will rerun a special like this, and the more people who see it the better.

Social Text’s acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory — meaning postmodernist literarytheory — carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn’t bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and “text,” then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and “language games,” then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre.

It’s sad that so many are satisfied with this type of ‘non-science.’ You might enjoy the whole article.

~Jason