Camp

Well camp was fun a fair number of people went along ~ 17 from CU and one ICFer with the rest from Lincoln and Otago all up there where probably 40-50 people there (it varied abit). The location was quite nice and the main room fairly warm. The bad stuff was the room assigned to us guys. It was a fairly large octagonal room off to one side of the main building. Having a concrete, no heating (part from the 6 bar oil filled someone provided) a massive old cupboard in the middle of the room and a number of cast iron (or something similar) bunks around the edges with a wire mesh/fence like base. The mattresses where very basic and soft foam things and the combination resulted a sort of U shaped bed when you lay down. The wire base also had a habit of making quite a racket when ever you moved around not to mention moving would cause some of the bunk to sway around and clunk into each other. These combined with a rather humerus late night discussion resulted in little sleep for a number of people and promoted several to sleep the next night on the floor in the main building. Also the bunk room didn't have enough beds for every the resulting being that most of the Lincolnites had to sleep on the floor on spare mattresses in the bunk room, I must mention though that 20+ guy's in a room generate enough heat to keep the room warmish.
The other lovely thing about our (males) accommodation's where the toilet and shower facilities assigned to us. When we first walked into the place it smelt like something had curled up and died in there. Then noted the facilities 2 toilets a urinal and two attempts at showers, shower heads stuck on a wall with a couple of wooden sides sticking out and some sort of curtain thing at the end. with what appear to be abit of painted packing crate for standing on or something hanging at the bottom.
The Girls on the other hand were rather lucky they where assigned the fairly modern cabins at the other end of the camp each with it's own toilet and shower. As a result they seem to have managed to get a decent amount of sleep and have showers.
Apart from that though the things weren't too bad. The food was good though it seemed some what less than last year. Roast for tea with Club sandwiches for one lunch and sausages for the second.
The speakers where fairly good as well.
Jean? the south Island head of one of the missionary groups spoke first on missions on the Saturday morning and was reasonably interesting.
The Pastor for one of the Lincoln churches (baptist?) spoke next going over a couple of meditation exercisers thing's which seemed abit new agey to me.

Val Gould (amazing I managed to spell it right) then spoke in the Saturday evening and Sunday morning meetings on outreach (she really likes interactive stuff doesn't she!). Saturday evening she focused on testimonies keeping them short sweet and effective and how they should leave the person listening thinking about God not us which was a good point. She also got us to at articles in the newspaper and see if we could find related or semi related verses to support our view on each article. After which she pointed out the general negative slant on many of the verses chosen as well as that many had been taken out of context and several only applied to Christian not the general populace the final thought she posed was about what sort of stuff we need to point out about Christianity and god when talking to non believers and what order might be best in which to do so. I can't remember either the details of the order though.
Sunday morning she spoke again about outreach stuff but I can't remember the details.
Apart from the speakers quite abit happened at camp. Friday evening was mainly talking and a mix of odd games and alot of talking. e.g. Mu/Mew? not sure how that's spelt a rather amusing card game which several people were talked into playing, the name game with choosing random names and guessing who was who etc.
Saturday afternoon involved Andre at his corny best with a number of the exec helping out running a random Olympics involving such things as eating dry wheatbix and rolled oats, seeing how many times we could manage to fold a sheet in half and successfully get 6 people from our group to balance on it, the group I was in managed 6 the winning group "9" times, other such fun events were caring a member of our group around the field as fast as possible while they were holding a bucket of water and trying to spill as little as possible.
Later that evening when it got dark another game was run by Andre and co involving "bible smuggling" at the domain down the road which was fun but cold accept for the blackberries which we tried to sneak through on one side of the domain.
After that finished (11 something) more cards and a lot more talking occurred as well as some settlers (I didn't play in that game yes unusual I know).
Sunday was sleep in till 9am which was nice not much apart from the Val speaking occurred though and after lunch we packed up and left.
Another thing thing that should be mentioned was Brehaut and a lincoln guy played the music for most of the worship after the normal lincoln band managed to effectively disable them selves during some skiing or something a day or so before the camp. So congratulations to Brehaut for managing that at what was probably rather short notice.
Any way overall a good time was had by most I'm sure and I certainly at least enjoyed it.
Also one thing to note is Tim Weir managed to acquire a cell phone some how so now there's another number to collect for those who are interested and leaves Andre as one of the few remaining people in CU to get one. If you want Tim's number leave a comment and I'll stick it up for you I'm sure he'd enjoy a number of random texts :).
Any way here is a few photo's from camp thanks to Jared.

Insanity is A OK.

Well the latest victim has now signed up! Andrew now has a blog, theogeek.blogspot.com. Note that is also not exam time so he may not use the excuse "temporary insanity due to exams" to explain his sudden reversal and establishment of a blog.

Time flies by.

Well it's been a bit since I last posted here fair bit's been going on with uni starting up again. Unfortunately looks like I'll have to do some work this term as I'm taking a lab paper "Biochemical Techniques". Which means lots of lab reports and assignments. It should be an interesting paper though with two especially interesting bits, The Murder Mystery and the Projects.
The Murder Mystery is a non assessed assignment/project thingy, where we attempt to solve a fictional Murder produced by one of our Lecturers.

Here's a brief out line of it.

The deceased was a 20 year old Female flatting with one of her best friends (Female) who is also her ex lover. She was having an affair with her flatmates father a 40+ year old geneticist who's primary area of research is Bioterrorism and is currently married to his second wife a Microbiologist also researching bioterrorism.
The deceased had recently thought she might be pregnant and had mentioned it to her lover.
The deceased was a test tube baby which she new, but cloned by her current lover 20 years ago, from DNA that was claimed to have come from a finger bone of Helen of Troy.
The deceased had been taking Gossiupy an anti nausea Medicine provided by her flatmate (ex lover) who had gotten it from her step mother (her fathers second wife.)
The flatmates mother (the first wife) had died ~20 years previously of the flu at the age of ~30 and had left her considerable fortune to her husband.

And that's just the basic out line.

The second part of the course which will begin in the second term is a 7 week research project into one of the topics provided by various members of the Biochemistry department. The topics I've expressed an interest in doing are.

Switching enzymes on and off: are tyrosine phosphatase's present in plants and fungi
Which will test for the presence of tyrosine kinases (a type of enzyme) in a number of plant and fungal species. Making use of such techniques as ELISA, Western blotting, antibodies for molecular species detection, coupled enzyme assays and the genomics database.

How do parasites invade host cells? - Turgor pressure in a parasitic plant.
Which will involve examining turgor pressure in Cuscuta cells and the effect of hormones on the turgor pressure.

Detecting toxic metals in the environment: fungal growth patterns could provide a new tool
Which involves the use of fractal geometry to examine the shape of colonies of Microbes growing on various agar plates contaminated with toxic metals.

Enzymes of nitrogen nutrition in Old man's beard
Which is studying NO3 assimilation via the NR protein in Old man's beard. Via hydroponic growth of plants, enzyme extraction and assays and quantifying enzyme concs using antibodies.

Hopefully I'll get the first one as it appears to be the most interesting of the ones I choose.


Quick note times I'm most likely to be found hanging round uni with noting to do are.
Monday 1pm.
Tuesday 10-12 and 1pm.
Wednesday @ CU.
Friday 12-1.
Rest of the time I'm usually at home or in lectures or Labs.

The Limitations of God?

After having read the last to post on Reuben's blog I was wondering what are God's limitations (I've thought about this before)?

Does God actually have limitations?
Does he have limitations in his abilities?
Are any “limitations” only really decisions that God has made and decided to abide by?

What do you think?

Thinking about it at various times I've come to think that God does have some “limitations” that result from his very Nature or at least appears to based on our perceptions of his Nature. Most of you probably wouldn't call these “limitations” most likely advantages and I guess many of them are what are things that would seem to be limitations in a human but in God are only advantages.

Any way these are the ones think he may have.

He is can only be truthful and follow his word exactly. He is unable to lie in any form or manner, i.e. he can not conceal “emotions”, shade the truth, tell only part of the truth (might be some exceptions) pretend to be what he is not . He may decide not to revel something but can not easily tell partial truths.

He can not change, his word or mind. Once he says something he will do it.

He is unable to completely force a human to do something he may set things up so that there is only a 1x10^100 or less chance that we will not do what he wants but in the end the final choice is ours, even if it only comes down to the random firing of one neuron or something.

Really most of these are not truly “limitations” for god but would be if applied to a human in the world as it is today.

Any way what do people think?

Does God actually have limitations, can he be limited?

Does he have limitations in his abilities?

Are any “limitations” only really decisions that God has made and decided to abide by?