I have now officially relocated to London. One of the things you can’t fail to notice when you’re studying Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College is just how much is sponsored by oil companies. The fresher’s barbecue was sponsored by BP, the maths formula booklet is sponsored by Shell. On the first day of lectures, we were given a book of 112 pages to read called, “The insider’s guide to the energy industry”. The book contains 21 pages of oil related advertising.

Now, maybe I’m just a cynic, but I think there’s more to this than just the benevolence of Shell, BP and ExxonMobil. Perhaps Imperial all want us to graduate and become oil billionaires so we can donate millions to them. Maybe they want a ‘Roberts Engineering School’ to go with the imposing ‘Tanaka Business School’ that greets you on entering the building.

Well, unfortunately for Imperial, I have no such intension. On leaving Imperial and making my billions, I plan on donating £27m to Imperial for them to create a large, and very imposing, Film and Media Studies department. One wonders if they would turn me down.

Things seem to have turned out as well as they could’ve here. One thing I hadn’t thought of on going to Imperial would be that the Christian Union would be full of Christian scientists, engineers and
medics. It’s quite exciting actually, because all the people I meet will have at some time grappled with the issues of modern science as it relates or doesn’t relate to Christianity.

I was expecting that it would be easiest sharing with someone likeminded to me in accomodation. Preferably a Christian, and one who got to bed early. Now I’ve realised that all those years sharing with Mark have in fact prepared me for this. Most nights my roomate comes in past 1, except I don’t notice, because I’m used to sleeping through that. It does however mean that I usually get the vast majority of the afternoon and evening to myself, which is brilliant.

I’ve visited three different churches since I came here. The first church was HTB, which, although it was large and very impressive, did not suit me very well. There were simply too many people there, and the day after moving in, I didn’t have that much patience for learning the names of dozens of people I’d probably never meet again. Last Sunday, I visited TBT and CCM, which both meet in the same premises in Mayfair. This was much more positive, since I knew quite a few people from CU there already, and wasn’t simply landing in the middle of a church I had no way of understanding. TBT and CCM are about a 45 minutes walk from where I live, and next week I’ll be visiting a small local plant of theirs which meets about 15 minutes away. I found out about this place on Sunday, and it should be very much more suitable.

That’s it from me for now.

Calvin is acquitted on all charges

Today I received my A Level results. I got an A in Physics, Maths and German and a B in AS Further Maths. This is sufficient to get into Imperial College, my first choice university. It’s a strange day with some people terribly happy and some people devastated. Two of my friends will be unable to go to their universities of preference until some apparently anomolous results are sorted out. They are both significantly better students than myself.

Kudos to Ben Youd, however, who got four As and a distinction. That’s just madness. I think his subjects were Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Art, which is all the more impressive since none of his subjects end in the word ’studies’.

Today we also received the good news of the birth of Joshua Trinder (8lb 10oz) to Paul and Ida. So there was good news from more than one direction.

stevec77’s photos on flickr

I am currently in Tenerife, more after I get back on the 5^th

Today’s the day! Download firefox 3… If the page works…

Note to self: don’t tell everyone in the world to download something on one day if your server can’t cope with the pressure.

Update

Sam, who has recently become a Christian, was baptised today. We had a service in Hartshill, and then went on to Park for the actual baptism. Jonathan Gravil led the baptismal service, and my father supervised. A picture can be seen below:

It has been a while since we have had a baptism in our church, and this one was certianly special. Several of her family and friends came. For the morning service, my dad continued the series he had been preaching on John, and by God’s providence it turned out to be John 3 this particular morning. We finished with a church meal.

At the same time, we also thanked Trevor Knight for his ministry in our church. He has now moved on to Emmanuel Evangelical Church in order to have more contact with his family. He was presented with a copy of ‘Sermons on the Incarnation’ by CJ Alexander.

I was reading an article on the Telegraph website about Allen Stanford’s aims to establish cricket as a sport in which discussing weighty issues, like buses travelling outside the cricket ground; pigeons dying due to high flying balls and so on and so forth, would give way to a boring game styled after football, when I stumbled across an article with the slightly leading title, “Intelligent people less likely to believe in God“.

I have very little doubt that the results of the survey are true, and that in academia, Christianity is very little represented. However, I don’t believe this is a shocking thing at all. The Bible speaks in several places of God choosing ‘the foolish things of the world’ and so on. One of the most remarkable things about the disciples was that they were uneducated, and yet put the religious leaders to shame. I think we become easily discouraged in witnessing when we cannot refute abiogenesis well enough to convince an atheist, or explain that the universe had to have a cause, and Jesus is eternal, and so he’s a worthy candidate.

We are not witnesses to a concept of God, we are witnesses to the Lord Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. Perhaps we should remember the answer of the man born blind, when he says:

Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.”

The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes.

As Christians, a miracle of healing has taken place in every one of our lives. There are countless examples of lives transformed by Jesus. We do not understand all of how this healing has taken place, we know only the surface of the man who performed it, and yet the fact it has taken place is not something that will be changed when we cease to have a clear view of some of the doctrines we found easy and obvious as children.

We do not not need to be scientists to be witnesses of Jesus, and we do not need to be discouraged when those who say they are (although the man on the street very rarely actually has any idea beyond the complete blarney they propogate on TV) give questions we cannot answer. None of this post is written to suggest that we should be ignorant or uninquisitive.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a little bit of decision maths. A secret in Boggle is to remember word patterns, so when you see a group of letters on the board, you know there are several ways of rearranging those letters to get a killer score. Alastair, over on the Bogglers, has been listing anagrams of 4 letter words for precisely this purpose. He asked me to find all the 4-letter anagrams in the SOWPODS dictionary. I created a program that cannot only find the 4-letter anagrams, but the 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 letter anagrams too (not that there are any 1 letter anagrams to find)

Initially, the program was rather inefficient, and I was only able to find up to 5 letters in a reasonable amount of time. I have now vastly increased the program’s efficiency, and a complete list of every anagram in the dictionary is available.

Just so Google finds it easier to find this, I’ll just clarify that these lists contain all the anagrams which are acceptable in the SOWPODS dictionary

• All the 2 letter anagrams
• All the 3 letter anagrams
• All the 4 letter anagrams
• All the 5 letter anagrams
• All the 6 letter anagrams
• All the 7 letter anagrams
• All the 8 letter anagrams
• All the 9 letter anagrams
• All the 10 letter anagrams
• All the 11 letter anagrams
• All the 12 letter anagrams
• All the 13 letter anagrams
• All the 14 letter anagrams
• All the 15 letter anagrams

I rebuilt our church webpage. You should take a look. It will be moved to the correct address when my dad has finished his bit

How bad is the language on your blog?

I got 3.9%, which, if I’m not mistaken, is quite a bit considering I’ve never cussed a single swear on this site, unless you consider innocent British excalmations of frustration as swear words… [HT: Boar's Head Tavern]

I mean, let’s put this in perspective here… That’s less than youtube. What on Earth?

Alastair’s is apparently entirely squeaky clean. I’m guessing this test is blind to the January 2007 archive page.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Ich habe heute meine schließliche deutsche Prüfung gehabt. Leider, habe ich letzte Nacht schlecht geschlaffen. Meiner Meinung nach, waren die Frage aus dem Prüffungsblätte ziemlich einfach. Ich denke dass ich habe denen gut bestanden. Anderseits, musste ich einen 275-300 Wörte Aufsatz auch schreiben. Das war nicht so gut. Ich habe nur c.200-220 Wörte geschrieben, und habe ich in denen viele Fehlern gemacht. Das war 25/60 der Noten, und 1/12 der ganzen A-Level-Noten. Jedoch, habe ich gute Noten in jeden anderen Anteil des Deutschsprachkurs. So Gott will, würde ich doch nächstes Jahr Imperial College besuchen.