Month: September 2005

Yes they were, but the media hasn't covered them too much. Here are some pictures I found online of the Gulfport and Biloxi areas.

In this post, I mentioned two missing persons that my boss' family had been looking for. Well, I have just recevied the following e-mail from my manager:

Thank you for praying today! After over a week of searching the message boards and phone calls, we found a distant relative who just heard from my cousin in Biloxi. The cousin says they are ok and will communicate more news later.

Thanks for praying! God is faithful.

This is yet another reason why support in disasters just takes time: The logistics of disaster relief operations.

There's something called "logistics." Check it out.

You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military suddenly appear somewhere.

Nor can you legally send federal troops willy-nilly to shoot looters, courtesy of the Posse Comitatus act. You should know this, Ann. You're a lawyer by profession. You shouldn't need a dumb grunt to explain it to you.

But watch for much of our news commentary and public debate to predicate itself around a vast ignorance of logistical capacity and principals.

For instance: Suppose you got a brigade worth of troops (5,000 or so) available,. How are you going to support them? How will you transport them? Think organic trans is sufficient? Think again. Even at 100% operational readiness, a typical infantry battalion can only self transport perhaps a company at a time. And if every soldier is bringing a rucksack and a dufflebag, you're really talking about maybe two platoons. And unless you expect the unit to become a drain on local resources, every company is going to take a half truck or more of MREs and a half truck or more of bottled water, along with its own water trailers. I've seen it happen. I've done it. I've been a battalion S4 in combat, an HHC XO for dozens of major moves of a hundred miles or more, and an HHC company commander for six hurricane mobilizations.

Those of you who read my blog may not realize it, but not many other people do. Why do I keep doing this? Well, I read a lot, I think a lot, and I have an opinion on everything. I think a blog is a good way for me to communicate what I think. Eventually, people will find it and read it. Besides, I like to think that some people like to know what I think about certain things :^)

Anyway, over at the EvangelicalOutpost, there is an article dealing with how a blog can be an important communication tool even if a small number of people read it. To read more of the article, click here.

Here is an excerpt:

Imagine that you've been provided the opportunity to hold a daily public conference. Six days a week between a dozen and a few hundred people gather together for the sole purpose of hearing what you think. Some of them find you insightful, even brilliant while others think you’re a blithering idiot. Each day, though, they come to hear you give an opinion about current events, expound upon an obscure topic of personal interest, or hear you share an amusing anecdote. A few stay thru your entire oration while others leave after only a few words. But every day someone shows up for your briefing.

Unfortunately, we bloggers rarely appreciate the power we possess. Instead of being constantly amazed at the potential influence we wield, we carp and whine (if only to ourselves) that we don’t have the links of Glenn Reynolds or the site hits of Daily Kos. We believe that since thousands of people could be reading our blogs that we should have thousands of readers. If we don’t then we judge ourselves to be inadequate.

If you have a blog that is read by more than a few dozen readers then you are making a bigger impact than you probably realize. If you have 50 people reading your blog then you have more people in your “classroom” than most professors at Harvard. If you have 90 readers then you have more people in your “pews” than most pastors have in their churches every Sunday. And if you have more than 1000 readers a month you have a larger “circulation” than most poetry and short story magazines.

But having a larger audience doesn’t necessarily translate into having more influence. As Malcolm Gladwell argues in his book The Tipping Point, the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship is about 150. In blogging terms, this means that when your readership grows, you’re ability to have a true one-on-one relationship with them decreases significantly. This is not to say that you should attempt to limit your readership to 150 readers, turning people away when that number is reached. What it means is that if you want to maximize your personal influence you would focus on establishing strong bonds and deep interaction with at most 150 readers.

Now consider what would happen if each of these 150 readers read and thought about what you wrote on your blog for five minutes every day. Five minutes may seem insignificant but it has an exponential effect: with only 5 minutes every day, six days a week, every month, you will have the reader’s attention for more than one entire day – 26 hours – every year. With only 150 consistent readers you will have gained the equivalent “mindspace” of one person for one entire day for almost five straight months. This is what I call the "5/150 Principle": capturing the mindspace of 150 people for 5 minutes can create an astounding opportunity for influence.

For those who don't know, I was active in the BSU (Baptist Student Union) at Marshall University when I was there. My first year, the BSU was good sized and had probably 20 regulars. The next year, the president didn't do such a good job and attendance went down. The next year, I was elected president. We started off the year with 5-10 regulars and grew to about 15-20. The year after that, the growth continued. We weren't as big as some of the other groups on campus, but we were solid and growing. Thrown into all this, after my year as president, there was a big tado at the state level and we lost our campus minister. The next year, we didn't really have one and had to make everything up on our own. After I graduated, things continued going downhill.

I hadn't been back in Huntington recently, but I think often of the BSU and the people I knew there. The group definantly made the group. Anyway, I digress.

Cyndi stopped by the Christian Center at Marshall today and met the current BSU Director. Only it isn't called BSU anymore. Most BSU groups changed their name to BCM; however, Marshall already had a BCM group so they chose the name Revolution. From what Cyndi said, when the current director arived, there was only a remnant of 3 people meeting on Mondays (traditional BSU night) for prayer. Anyway, the group has now grown to over 60 people! Praise God!

Here is a link to their website: http://www.marshallrevolution.com