So I finally got an iPhone! I got the 16 Gb White 3G. Awesome. Anyway, the past few days have been a mad scramble for me to find new apps to download and I’m totally addicted. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

1. Apple Remote - This is possibly the coolest App I have and it’s all thanks to Stephen. It syncs with your iTunes over wi-fi to provide a non-directional remote that works anywhere within range of your router. You get full access to all your playlists and music and it displays album artwork. So cool. You could use it to say, push play on Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get it On from the bedroom. Oh yeah.

2. Pandora - Everybody’s favorite internet radio on the iPhone. Need I say more?

3. Google Mobile App - Voice recognition powered Google search that knows where you are and provides local search results automatically. Awesome. Watch the video on the link.

4. Evernote - I’ve only just started using this one so I can’t say too much about it yet, but I can already see the potential. Take picture, text or voice notes, sync them evernote.com and then your desktop. It should make for keeping up with all those disparate things in my life a little easier.

5. Shazam - We live in a very special age: hear a song on the radio and want to know who does it, just hold the iPhone up to the speaker and Shazam will identify it and provide links to the iTunes store. It doesn’t get much cooler.

I got a few other apps too, but I don’t feel like writing about them so I’ll just list them: 9-Toolbox, Super Monkey Ball, Tweetie, The Weather Channel, Last.fm, i.tv (this one is pretty sweet, a TV Guide on your iPhone … makes channel surfing obsolete) and Diggnation (This one is great if you love the Diggnation Podcast, it brings the newest episode right to you, my girlfriend Hannah is using it as I write this).

Am I missing something? If there’s an App you think I need to get, just post it in the comments.

I just finished writing a paper for my Sociology Directed Reading class on memetics. The topic was the Protestant Christian Memeplex in America. Anyway, I’m quite proud of it, especially the part below. In it I try to explain why Christianity in America has been so successful. Let me know what you think. Also, if you want to read the whole thing, you can download it here.

[W]hat gives the Christian memeplex in America its adaptability in the face of changing political, cultural and social changes over the course of American history? In a word: breadth. Even ignoring various dogmas and doctrines, the Bible is a massive, often contradictory work. As Boyer pointed out, all manner of various social groups have used its passages to validate their worldview … and it is not simple misinterpretation. Indeed, there is a good deal in the Bible to support nearly any worldview.

Slave owners can find numerous verses in the Old Testament where God commands the Israelites to take as slaves those they defeat in battle. Abolitionists can equally point to Moses’ freeing of the Jews from the bonds of slavery at the hands of their Egyptian masters. Capitalists can find verses commanding them to “Live as free men,” (1 Peter 2:16) and to “exercise dominion over the Earth” (Genesis 1:26­28). Communists can find in Matthew (16:10­15) that they “[should not] be lovers of money” and in Exodus (22:24­25) that harsh punishment will come to those who lend to the poor to take advantage of them.

Examples like this could fill a book of their own. There are in fact many Web sites and books dedicated to this very topic. But these are just the contradictions one finds when reading the Bible literally (something typically reserved for the most traditionalist of denominations and readers). When taken figuratively, the possibility for interpretation (and in turn mutation of memeplexes) is nearly endless. Couple this with the initial (and then increasing) freedom of religion afforded in the U.S. and get a vast, churning soup of memeplex branchings.

I went to my university’s surplus auction yesterday and picked up this:

It’s a 15 in 800Mhz iMac G4 with 256 Mb of RAM and a 40 GB HD … a little dated but I’ve ordered 1 GB of RAM on eBay and an AirPort card so I can use the interwebs on it.

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll use it for yet (between my MacBook and Hackintosh most all of my home computing needs are filled), but I couldn’t pass it up. In my opinion, these iMacs are some of the best things designed by Apple. I just love the swivel head.

I’ve read up on various mods where people put a Mac Mini into a G4 case … it sounds pretty cool and i may just do it if I can save up for a Mac Mini that is. Another idea I saw was a touch screen mod. That would be pretty awesome since the screen is about the coolest part of these things.

What do you think I should do with it?

I’ve noticed a trend over the past few years which I find pretty amazing: social comedy.

There could be all sorts of definitions for this term, but you should just pick whatever you want. I think of it as anything comedic done/created with the intent of sharing it with people via the net or the possibility of it being shared via the net.

Here’s a great example that made the front page of digg today: Nothing Beats The Durex Warranty (PIC). Hilarious.

Maybe whoever posted that didn’t plan on putting it on flickr, but it made it there none the less and has, by this point caused thousands of us to chuckle.

I even joined in the fun earlier this month when I posted this: Fig. 1: People I Hate. When I made it, I didn’t intend to post it on-line, but when I received such positive response I thought I should share it.

My point is, Comedians and jokes are no longer the only place people go for laughs … and it’s not just silly videos of nut-shots, or dubbed x-men episodes anymore either.

The new face of social comedy is hyper-local, subtle and witty. Sites like passiveaggressivenotes.com, papyruswatch.com and graphjam.com (to name only a few) are filled with entirely user-generated content, a good deal of which is inside-jokes or very high-brow humor (by internet standards at least).

Then of course there’s the other side of this: when internet memes invade the real world. Here are two great examples of the Kool-Aid meme showing up IRL: Kool-Aid 1 | Kool-Aid 2.

I’m in favor of this new trend. A few extra smart laughs throughout the day is definitely needed in my life. What do you think? Also, post links to your favorite social comedy or IRL meme invasion.

NEWS FLASH: is is no longer a mystery as to whether or not evolution happened … it did.

I went to an Evolution/Intelligent Design form/debate last night, sponsored by our History Club. I had to have been one of four, perhaps five there who actually supported evolution (and that includes two of the faculty panel members) in a sea of IDers (most of which came from the BCM, Baptist Collegiate Ministry)

The faculty member who they got to speak on behalf of ID did a pathetic job of even explaining ID, let alone attacking evolution. He told us about a project he worked on with the National Sciency Foundation, mapping the phylogenetic lineage of Angiosperms through statistical analysis of DNA sequencing. The results of the study were apparently inconclusive … and this was so somehow supposed to invalidate or undermine all of evolutionary theory.

Just because the results of ONE study were inconclusive does NOT mean that all of evolutionary theory is invalid … it just means exactly what it sounds like: that the study was inconclusive.

He (and various members of the audience) went on to make the classic ID arguments against evolution: irreducible complexity, parsimony (that a universe with a creator is somehow simpler than one without) etc.

I don’t know why this bothers me so much still … I’ve dealt with this type of ignorance throughout my college career. I think that it bothers me because there are so many real mysteries in science that are yet to be solved. Why waste time beating this horse to death when we already have an excellent explanation for the diversity and similarity of life on Earth?

I just got talked into upgrading to the 10 Mb/s … it was only an extra $10 a month.

Anyway, I decided to test their claim and it turns out they’re pretty spot on.

I put up this poster in the elevator the other day:

Originally, I only had 3 circles, but since some a-hole took it down I added the 4th. I’ve submitted it to passiveaggressivenotes.com.

I’ve made a few things for SigEp over the years and I thought I’d post them here for anyone who wants them:

Here’s a desktop background I made:

and a poster I did:

Here’s some more stuff:
Blacklight Party Invitation
Spring Recruitment T-Shirt

I have the original InDesign files for most all of these if you’re interested. Also, if you’re a brother and want to use one of these at your school just shoot me an e-mail and I’ll be happy to modify it for you.