Fortress of Solitude Alert #1

Props to our thriving youth group at Coram Deo (3 people, including the pastor, but who's counting?) for going to the river to feed homeless people. Of note: according to those on the street, Sunday is the hardest day to get food (whether this means int he soup kitchens, or just do-gooders on the street I do not know - I wasn't there). Go figure.

Things to do someday

For the low, low price of $600 you too can spend a half-night looking through the 60-inch diameter telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near L.A. You can even get a group of up to 25 people to share the experience. For $1100, you can have all night, from dusk to dawn.

That could be pretty stinkin' cool.

Link

Frailty

Having pulled the hard drive from my sister's laptop to try and recover data from a computer that no longer wants to boot, I offer this advice: don't trust your precious documents to a laptop hard drive. Nothing that small can be as reliable as the 3.5" drives in your desktop. And you should back those up, too.

This thing is slow, only functions if it feels like it, and as I said before it fails to boot up the computer it's in.

I also learned that if you change too much hardware in your computer, it decides you need to reactivate Windows. That was 15 minutes I could have spent doing many other things this morning. Okay, not really, but it's still an inconvinience to call in to Microsoft.

Sunday Mornings

Why do we go to church on Sunday mornings? Not "what are some reasons that Christians may once have met on Sunday mornings," but why do we, here and now, feel some compulsion to meet on Sunday mornings. I have heard it suggested that for an unchurched person, Sunday morning is a time one associates with church - hence, that's when they are most likely to show up.

The church I'm becoming involved in (PLUG: Coram Deo) is, among other things, committed to being different - not for the sake of being different, but because the status quo just isn't enough. Different is not a matter of the music style, the kinds of dress allowed, or having a coffee bar in the back. If that was all the change I could imagine, I'd be sorely tempted to ditch the church altogether.

The church is also committed to service - being Christ to others, in the flesh (as it were). Not "I'll-mow-your-lawn-if-you-listen-to-my-presentation-of-the-gospel," but motivated simply by the desire to serve. An end, not a means.

So I figure, why not use Sunday morning as a time to get our hands dirty serving the community? The world sees Christians and Sunday mornings like something from the Simpsons - we all get dressed up, huddle together, learn about the evils of the world, sing some songs, and go home eager to catch the afternoon football game. What would the world think if Christians made it a point to have their "Sunday morning service" become a time for Sunday morning service?

What if Sunday morning were spent visiting the sick, clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry? What if the focal point of the Christian Week was serving others, not huddling away from them in our fortress of solitude? For the local church to say "This gathering is not to be your focus. Your focus is to be out there, serving as Christ did."

Perhaps it is pointless and unnoticed symbolism. But I think it could be meaningful, especially (and perhaps only) if the heart is moved to match it.

Global Warming

There are a couple of key questions in the global warming debate. I am not a paleoclimatologist, so I am hardly qualified to speak about the mechanisms and history of the temperature of the earth. The question is, are they?

Things we need to know, and seperate from each other:
1) Is the earth warming up? This can be observed from current data. Recent years do seem warmer than previous years, but this is with no more than about a couple-hundred-year window.

2) Does this warming deviate from the long-run history of the earth? This is a crucial question. More below.

3) Is any deviation from long-term trends due to human activity? Another point suspected, and modeled, but I have heard that said models are somewhat shaky. The Earth is really frickin' complex. To claim to fully know how X affects Y when a direct result cannot be observed is something that leaves me nervous.

More on Question #2. The U.S. House of Representatives committee on Energy and Commerce recently held a couple hearings on Global Warming. At issue is a temperature reconstruction done for the UN IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) in 2001, and for an academic paper in 1998 that shows the temperature of the earth spiking to unseen heights in the 1900's, dating back more than 1,000 years. This would be significant. The problem is that the statistical methods used to do the reconstruction appear (1) not to have been worked on with any statisticians, (2) to be fundamentaly flawed - intentionally or unintentionally - in a way that predicts the end result whether the historical data or even random data is inserted.

An independent panel was comissioned to look into this. Their results are worth looking at. A website I read regularly has put together some of the excerpts from the first hearing on the subject. The attitude of the Democratic congressmen seems to be this: "We know the truth, don't bother us with your facts. Your facts might run counter to the Truth. You are here not to address the Truth, but to satisfy a partisan agenda. You are hypocritical in your analysis of the Truth." I was shocked to read some of these statements.

I prefer the report the most. Written by a statistician who voted for Gore, I trust it to be less partisan. The key issues brought up are (1) The statistical tools were misused, (2) the academic review of the work was done with people the authors knew and collaborated with on other papers, instead of independent experts, and (3) No experts in a key field (statistics) were consulted, despite multiple authors being from schools with excellent stats departments.

Excerpts Here
Full Report Here (PDF, 1.4 MB)
Committee Page Here

Puppies

Golden
Originally uploaded by Titania1980.

I couldn't help but think of Josie and the Pussycats, when Josie in a fit of subliminal cruelty tells the most innocent girl "Puppies turn into dogs who grow old and die!"

We later see her playing with puppies at a pet store looking very distraught.

It made me sad, too. Our Golden Retriever is old, and won't last much longer. I think she'll be 14 in December.

Ed: "her" = the innocent girl, not Josie.

Reality/Talent Shows

They are everywhere. On the only channels I get to a visible degree, every one is a reality-talent show. A talent show, a dance show, a modeling show, a singing show. My other options are PBS (documentary about a sinking ship), TBN (sometimes amusing, though even it wasn't coming in well today) and the Spanish-language channel.

I suppose people that don't like talk radio feel the same way, especially on the AM band. I think the audience-participation genre on both TV and radio has a powerful draw.

The problem with the TV shows is that they are all the same. Especially the singing show - they even have an annoying British guy. Painful, it was.

Breaking Stereotypes

Not everyone on the street is a n'er-do-well, drug-addicted loser. You knew this, right? Bad things can happen to honest people. It's good to be reminded of that, lest you feel unsympathetic.

Homeless Man Returns $21,000 in Savings Bonds

Unintended Consequences

Interesting happenings in Las Vegas. Due to the number of homeless people that have crowded local parks, the city decided to make feeding them there illegal.

I can see good and bad reasons behind this. I'm curious to know what others think.

Personally, I think it's a symptom of "I don't want to see the problem, and want it to go away." Put the homeless in distant shelters, far from where I might see them.

Chick-Fil-A

I ate there for lunch last Tuesday, because if I had gone to North Carolina and not tried this mythic dining establishment, I'd have woken up one morning with a chicken head in my bed, or something similarly daunting.

It was located in the local mall's food court. I ended up getting a chicken caesar wrap. Perhaps I didn't make the best choice. It was good, but hardly mythic. But I did not sample their food time and again - that one meal was it. I might have tried again for dinner, but ended up having dinner at proper restaurants with coworkers, classmates, and the instructor.

I think I'm just hard to impress. In-N-Out is good, but I'd not drive hours out of my way to go there. Same with Krispy Kreme. If I want a good burger, I think a local place has to be the thing. Have an Awful-Awful at the Nugget in downtown Reno (not the Sparks Nugget). Eat at a stool in the diner. That is a proper fast-food meal. Get a chocolate shake, too.

I so wish I could go there for lunch right now. [cries]