For once, it's a midweek edition of the Compendium! Mostly because I finished teaching ESL, mowing the lawn and generally getting things done so I want to do something that is fun. Like blogging. And sharing really fun nerdy videos. Therefore, this entire compendium will be made up of nerdy videos I've found recently. Doctor Who meets Rocky Horror Picture Show: Another timey-wimey-themed video short: Zelda: Ocarina of Time meets mariachi (or flamenco?) band: How to multiply two (not more) numbers using lines: (Note on this one: It also makes you think about the possibility of a limitless number of dimensions... since you can always multiply by one more number... :D ) Batman meets Charlie Bit Me: And finally, a Five Iron Frenzy song I ran across that is all about guys needing to take out their testosterone via nerdy video game pursuits and other seemingly pointless but competitive toys: (Don't miss the Lord of the Rings reference!)

The past few weeks have been going by in a blur. It's likely to only worsen until about the end of June. I know there's something going on every weekend until at least Memorial Day. And I don't know whether to be extremely excited or tired just at the thought of it. :P Fortunately, the weekends all involve people I love dearly so I think the excitement will overcome the fear of getting tired out. New Age Bullsh*t Generator - The computer algorithm spits out a lot of gibberish disguised as New Age enlightenment, much to my amusement: "The complexity of the present time seems to demand an awakening of our chakras if we are going to survive. Suffering is the antithesis of understanding. Bondage is born in the gap where joy has been excluded." And so on. Test your European geography knowledge with this interactive map! You get points for naming a country on the first try! I've gotten pretty good with the Slavic countries, surprisingly enough - which I attr...

I'm such a baby when I get sick. All I have the energy to do is sit on the couch and read... if that. All I've got is a bad cold, and I slept till 11 a.m. today. I blame it on my sister. :P A Japanese architect won an architecture prize for his beautiful temporary structures built in the wake of major disasters. Check out the photos of the buildings made of cardboard... paper... you name it! (HT: A cousin) An addicting math-y game featuring Doctor Who! It's called 2048... I think because 2048=2^11 and there are 11 Doctors. So far I've only been able to get to the seventh doctor, I think. A really neat GIF shows the progression of history through the borders of U.S. colonies, territories and states! Tim Challies shares 8 ways to get more done this week -- very commonsense stuff but often overlooked or pushed aside! (I'm talking to myself here. :P ) Jon Acuff finally distinguishes between "haters" and sincere disagreement . A quiz from Pew R...

I took my Amiguita (my Little in Big Brothers/Big Sisters) to the YMCA pool today, but had the morning all to myself to get some chores done and take care of other fun things. Like blogging! The Art of Manliness sounds off about what it means to pay attention and remain focused . Pretty good advice, too. Speaking of my Amiguita, here's a list from Boundless.org of 20 ways to mentor in your 20's . This business about "finding yourself" and such isn't what life is all about. It's about finding God, and investing in others is part of that. You're never "too young" to start (unless you're, say,  9 months old). A friend of mine is battling sterility and trying to have children. A blog she wrote a few months ago is a piercing insight into what she feels when she's surrounded by women with cuddly little ones, and how she must remain tenderhearted toward their joys. Watching someone else live the life you thought you’d have is painful. Yo...

I woke up at 7 a.m. to shovel new-fallen snow off my driveway before heading to church for praise band practice. That's a good hour or two before my normal wake-up time. I think a traditional Sunday afternoon nap is in order! But before I get to that, here's this week's Compedium of interesting stuff I found on the Internet. It's kind of like the questionable trinkets children come home with. "Mom! Look what I found!" Ham on Nye: The high cost of winning an evolution/creation debate - A really interesting, long take on the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, published on the Ars Technica website. The reporter appears to have done excellent research. Courtdate: A generation of courtship culture on trial - Benefits and unseen consequences of the "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" culture, and how one may right the imbalances. If men got the Titus 2 treatment - A hilarious reminder from Rachel Held Evans that we oughta be careful to exercise g...

I have not slept well all week. Last night I think I slept for maybe 45 minutes, woke up, and then proceeded to spend the next 6 hours trying to go back to sleep. However, today's nap and tonight's sleep will probably set me back to rights. In the meantime, you may entertain and inform yourself with the following random links! Annoying Things in Worship Songs - you know, like being simplistic, repeating endlessly... oh wait... Buy a beard! Or a mustache! You can even get a two-part beard that looks like ram's horns. To Dwell in Possibilities - A friend o' mine started a blog geared toward young single Christian gals. I'm looking forward to reading it. Unknown mathematician proves elusive property of prime numbers - "Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang — the paper claimed to have taken a huge step forward in understanding one of math...

I spent most of this week not sleeping well. Whether I just couldn't fall asleep until 2 a.m., or woke up earlier than I wanted to, or couldn't nap... it was just tiring. I finally got something close to eight hours last night, I think. And man, I feel far more awake this morning than I have for some time. For this edition of the Compendium I'll merely have videos, since I've amassed several! Most of them are fun ones with a serious one or two mixed in. (Actually, looks like it's just one serious video.) What does it look like when you mix paint with an audio speaker ? School administrators pretend they're Queen to cancel school . HAHA! A while back I saw a video that made fun of stuff Christians in general say (or a lot of Christian guys). This one's for the gals. Serious video: Inverting men's/women's experiences with sexist treatment. Or should I say, disrespectful treatment. Because that is the problem: Men who act the wa...

I quite literally spent more than two hours early this week cataloging my library. I've recorded 170 of the ones I own, with probably another 100 to go in another room. I'm pretty near the estimate of 300 that I had guessed I owned. And if you're curious, you can check out my shelf of owned books on GoodReads . Relevant Magazine addresses why it's so hard to make friends after college . Proof that the average American is obsessed with money. Or, the top 10 best and worst places to live measured by chances of upward mobility . Probably the best essay I've read about leadership in quite some time. If you only read one link out of today's list, read this one, "Solitude and Leadership," delivered to West Point freshmen (or, plebes, as they call them). A very short quote from it: "...[W]hat I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, ...

This... has been a busy week. Good, but busy. You already know about the guitar. What you don't know, also, is that my siblings were over to visit last weekend and I lost about half my sleep every night because I decided instead to spend time hanging out with them and with my cousins. I managed to make it through this week, though, despite the sleep deprivation! But, in honor of this blog's 50th Compendium, I present the first collection of 2014, which is neither more nor less eclectic than all the Compendia before... and every bit as nerdy. The electricity-generating bicycle desk that would power the world - You know, I could get into using this. Really, I could. I stand up at my desk half the time already. And fidget. LOL My Thesis - Masters' and doctoral theses distilled into one or two basic, often snarky sentences. Like Truth is, Nurse Practitioners are a band aid solution to Canada’s broken health care system. Have American parents got it all backwards? - A...

It's snowing out, and it looks gorgeous, as the first snow often does. I've decided I really like the look of my adorable little house in the snow. It's like Little House on the Prairie, but 1920's city edition. Wait, somebody still thinks Jesus was white ?? The maker's schedule vs. the manager's schedule... Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. A psychologist explains online dating. (Hey, I read The Atlantic. So what?) And in the psychologist's words: "It can expand the pool of potential partners, making available a whole slew of people who otherwise would have been unavailable. That’s a huge, huge benefit. B...

Today is "The Day of the Doctor" for Whovians like myself -- that is, fans of the British TV show "Doctor Who." However, I must go to work this afternoon, so I shall miss the worldwide premier of the 50th anniversary special episode. Sad, isn't it? Well, not really. Because in the grand scheme of things, a TV show is just a TV show. A couple of Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicators charts for some laughs! Prayers for each Myers-Briggs type ("Lord help me be less independent, but let me do it my way."), LOTR by personality type and Star Wars in MBTI ! Maps showing the etymology of different words in Europe. Funny: Most people in Europe think a pineapple's proper name is "ananas." The album for the movie "Inside Llewellyn Davis," a movie by the same guys who did "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," is out! I managed to listen to it via NPR's First Listen post , but apparently the audio is no longer available the...

Man, it's been a busy weekend. I took my Amiguita (the little girl I'm matched with in Big Brothers Big Sisters) to the YMCA pool today for quite a while -- I kid you not, we spent nearly an hour playing frisbee. Later tonight is a staff party at my editor's house. So right now, I'm chilling before I have to go be all social again. :P Three coders in California built a better health insurance browsing website than the government. Granted, it didn't have to mess with the security and database issues regarding signups, since it simply directs those looking to actually buy something they see to call some phone number -- but still. It's a whole lot more user-friendly. A rather funny blog on First Things called Dr. Boli publishes esoteric jokes of general interest, plus some that Christians or Catholics will get, because it's a Catholic site. My favorite posts are the "Ask Dr. Boli" ones... because they sound like this : Dear Dr. Boli:  I play ci...

I've just finished a week that felt like it passed me by in a day. That must be what adulthood feels like. When an adult took a standardized test intended for children ... and failed miserably. I'm sorry, but if I'm to judge by the questions offered in the mini-tests that accompany that blog post, this person who's ostensibly an education expert should be required to retake basic grade-school math. Seriously. I may not agree myself that standardized testing is the optimal way to gauge students' learning, but this is not the argument I'd use against it! 17 problems only book lovers will understand . Like: "1. When someone asks you what your favorite book is and expects you to pick just one." Why David McCullough still types all his books on a typewriter (or, at least, did in 1991): People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower. I don’t think all that fast.' ...

My editor got sick Friday, the very morning I emailed her my spec pieces for that column I mentioned, so I have not heard any response from her. I'll definitely post when I do! In the meantime, entertain and inform yourselves with the following random links... Only Canada, China, North Korea and the U.S. allow abortion after viability for any reason. 40 maps that will help you make sense of the world... including one showing where 29,000 rubber duckies made landfall after falling off a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific... Which finally answers the question: How long would it take a rubber ducky to travel from the Hawaiian Islands to England? Somebody went looking for a novel about women that's not about love, and thinks they're frustratingly rare . I'm not sure what the big deal is -- it's just as easy to learn from a guy's "going it alone" novel as it would be from a girl's. Unless, of course, you admit that guys and girls have fu...

I’m following the whole Edward Snowden saga as best as I can, and it’s highly intriguing. The government’s behaviors also remind me somewhat of an old Sinclair Lewis novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which tells a dystopian story of the U.S. falling ever so gently into fascist rule. I feel like I need to re-read it. But anyway. Before my browser gets too full again, here is your weekly serving of interesting stuff, featuring one of my favorite subjects: Technology! On Christians naively expecting the best web offerings from ministries they donate a pittance to (if anything at all): (via Challies ) In their mind, every Christian ministry is expected to have every possible resource (study tools, videos, books, audio, articles, apps, etc.) available on every possible platform. And they want it now! Not only do they want it now, that want quality, and they want it for free. A thank you is seldom heard when this is actually achieved, after all, it was online and therefore easy, inexpensive...

Welcome to this SPECIAL EDITION of the Compedium! I’m off to work today but I had a little time this morning to clean out some more tabs from my browser… and to cull links from my email, as I’ve started to do a bit more reading on my phone and haven’t figured out a feasible way to save links from there other than by emailing them to myself. (If you have suggestions, especially ones that involve Firefox, I’m all ears.) Of course, none of these links actually have anything to do with Independence Day… but I don’t mind. I hope you don’t. I don’t quite believe this: Indianapolis’s single guys are willing to spend some three times the national average on a first date – and a website claims that the sum amounts to $226. Like, what could you possibly do on a first date that costs that much?? (For this link, I have to thank… my single male living-in-Indy cousin.) Anthony Bradley, a regular contributor (I think) to World Magazine, takes a short hop over to Journey through NYC Religions t...

I’m pretty well settled into my new house – have mowed the yard a couple of times and pulled a lot of weeds after the recent rainstorm – and now I’m just waiting to get the internet modem hooked up! In the meantime, I spend a lot of time at the library and actually get my browser cleared of the following tabs…. Top 10 reasons I’m actually a man – from a woman, of course. Hilarious. *6.5 SMALL TALK. WHAT EVEN IS THAT. DON’T WE ALL ALREADY KNOW WHAT THE WEATHER IS LIKE (WE LITERALLY JUST WALKED IN OUT OF IT) & IF I REALLY WANTED TO KNOW WHAT BRAND OF MASCARA YOU WERE WEARING – IF, GOD FORBID, I COULD DISTINGUISH THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MASCARA BRANDS – DON’T YOU THINK I WOULD ASK YOU. Somehow though, as much as women can generally small-talk me under the table and I abhor it (I tend to take it as a sign that you don’t actually want to know me), I have to believe that a skill that inane must be a societal construct and hardly something I can blame on any particular gender. However!...

I’M HOME!!! By that, I mean I’m visiting my folks, and won’t be online much, I suspect. However, my sister right now is in the middle of her morning routine and nobody else is awake or home, so I shall share a few links! Seven skills to develop in your twenties – like, you know, a lengthened attention span, logical thinking and budgeting. (Via Boundless .) What to do about teens dropping out of church after high school graduation? Well, find out why they’re dropping out , or revisit your assumption that they’re dropping out in such high numbers at all . If you read one article, please read the other, too. (First link via Facebook friends; second, via Gene Veith .) The decline of marriage and the rise of unwed mothers : An economics-based answer to why the culture is changing, courtesy of the writers at The Atlantic Wire. Curious, isn’t it? Think of marriage like any other contract or investment. It's most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages...

Daylight Saving Time went into effect this morning. Thus, I overslept a bit (despite my alarm) and nearly missed praise band practice. I should go sleep soon. But I have several extra tabs open. 38 maps you never knew you needed – including how Google autocomplete describes all 50 U.S. states: Yes, it’s hilarious. The rest of the maps are worthwhile too. Or, shall I say, entertaining. (Via the roomie .) Speculative Faith gathers Christian sci-fi and fantasy writers together, supplying writing tips, thoughts and encouragement. (Via a Facebook group.) Why Facebook might be losing teens. Apparently Tumblr is the next new thing. I so called it years ago. (Well, not the Tumblr thing, but the fact that Facebook’s monopoly wouldn’t last forever.) Via Challies : Ultimately, the day of the overshare may have passed, and bragging online isn't as fun as it used to be. "I think that kids just don’t care anymore," Bois wrote. "They have gotten over the idea of knowing ...

The experiment of the movie-less month continues, and I’ve read no less than two collections of Agatha Christie short stories in the last couple of days. And started a Martyn Lloyd-Jones collection of sermons on the Sermon on the Mount (which I’m really enjoying). Yeah, I miss watching movies, and yeah, there are (many) times when I feel like all I want to do is sit down and unwind watching a fun little fictional story. But this is becoming a really great month. For your entertainment this week…. How to find a modern-day Mr. Darcy. This article is completely serious. (via me ol' roomie ) And on a related note, I present: Pride and Prejudice, The Game. Also found via the roomie. You had one job. ONE JOB. (Via a Facebook friend.) A writer for Speculative Faith penned a two-part series on the relationship between Amy and Rory in the splendid British sci-fi show Doctor Who . That pair is probably the best married couple depicted on modern screens, just FYI. (Via a Facebook DW f...