collin park

Yeah right Newt

2012-01-28T11:06:00.000-08:00

Newt, you say that a 30% income tax rate on the highest earning Americans would destroy jobs. I have three questions for you.

We now know that Mitt paid about 14% on his 2010 income of $21.7 million. If Mitt had instead paid 30% (i.e., about $6½ million), how many jobs would would have been lost? Put differently, how many additional jobs did Mitt create because he paid about $3 million in income tax rather than $6½ million?
If a 30% income tax on the rich is a job-killing figure, then how in the world did our economy grow at all from World War II through the 1970s, when tax rates on high-income Americans were much higher?
Why do you and other Republicans keep repeating this same damnable lie? Do you think, "It worked for Hitler, so it'll work for us"?

You lying scoundrel! You whitewashed tomb! You reprobate! I'm embarrassed to be a Republican.

"What do you want me to do for you?" (Mark 10:51)

2012-01-28T09:37:00.000-08:00

Or, How should we pray?

Before going into the Big Game, should an athlete pray for victory? Or should s/he pray for grace and faith whatever the outcome? Should parents pray that their investments will do well, so they can afford to send their kids to college? Or should they pray for wisdom and creativity regardless of the financial outcome?

The PC (pietistically correct) answer is to pray only for acceptance of God's will however things turn out, but that's not the biblical answer: both by example (Paul in 2 Cor. 12:7-9, David in 2 Samuel 15:31, and countless others) and by command (Philippians 4:6) the Bible tells us to pray specifically for what we want. There are of course conditions (not selfishly James 4:3; according to his will 1 John 5:14; abide in Christ and his words in us John 15:7; etc.) but God wants us to be honest with him. Yes, he already knows what we need (Matthew 6:8), yet we're told to ask. And here's the best part: sometimes he gives far more than we ask—or even could imagine asking as Paul tells us in Ephesians 3. I have a couple of examples. First, you may recall that Jesus was crucified together with two criminals.

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.[a]”
Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Luke 23:39-43

I think this a remarkable passage. The “other criminal” asked only that Jesus remember him. But Jesus replies, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

Imagine this: here's a guy who once was a little boy, playing in the fields or on the streets. Somehow his life turned to robbery (Matthew 27:38, Mark 15:27) and eventually to ignonimous execution. At the last, he realizes that his life is over; he begs for a little pity from Jesus, the Righteous One.

Imagine what light must have come into this man's final hours on earth when he heard that unbelievable good news from Jesus: today he would be in Paradise with Jesus himself!

Why didn't he say, "Lord, let me be with you in your kingdom" in the first place? (For this question I'm indebted to Mailis Janatuinen and her excellent Glad Tidings Bible Studies.) I think it's because he asked only what he could imagine. Thanks be to God, he can do far far beyond anything we can ask or even imagine.

The second example, which I must have heard some decades ago, concerns a young girl who had severe problems with her feet due to some disease. Her father didn't have much money for the very expensive orthopedic shoes she would need. I think he bought a lottery ticket or bet on some horse race or something like this. He prayed fervently that God would bless his gamble.

Or maybe he was a salesman and he prayed that God would enable him to sell more of his product, or maybe he asked his boss for a raise. I don't remember exactly what it was, but he prayed with great energy and sincerity.

Well, his horse lost, his lottery ticket didn't pay off, he didn't exceed his quota... and with a heavy heart he took his daughter to the doctor. He had no idea how to pay for the very expensive orthopedic shoes, and he didn't understand why his prayers weren't answered.

Then came the astonishing news: his little girl's feet were inexplicably healed; no orthopedic shoes would be necessary. As far as the doctor could tell, this girl would be just fine with regular shoes.

This father had prayed that his bet/ticket/efforts would succeed, but they didn't. Instead he got something so much better. Why didn't he pray for his little girl's feet to be healed?

Like the criminal in Luke 23, he could only pray what he could imagine. Also like the criminal in Luke 23, the father received far more than he could ask or imagine.

God sometimes does that, and we get glimpses of his goodness, the abundance riches of his grace in kindness toward us.

The question always arises, "Why didn't God do that for me?"—or for any number of other people who prayed and saw nothing happen? I'll tell you: I don't know. Nobody else knows, either. And here's something else: it's not necessarily your fault, and you are not alone.

They were stoned, they were sawn in two, [were tempted,] were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.
Hebrews 11:37-38 (NJKV)

But he does answer sometimes, and gives such astonishing and extravagant gifts that we are amazed, and wonder, and worship.

CDs of Shakespeare for (almost) free!

2012-01-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

The lovely Carol wants to listen to a few Shakespeare plays for her MFA program, and asked me how to get CDs of them. Yeah, I can hear you now. "CDs? That's so 20th century!"

Two words for you: car stereo. "Ruby," our 2004 Subaru, has a CD player but no mp3 player and no aux input jack. The other thing about the car stereo is that, unlike an iPod, you can't leave it on a bench somewhere. If you're in the car, the car stereo's there.

All-righty then. A search on "twelfth night audio" (no quotes) led me to LibriVoxsite and the download page for King Lear, which you see at right. As you can see, the play runs about 3½ hours, and there are five mp3 files, one per act.

So far so good, but there are two issues we want to deal with. First, a music CD holds what, 65 or 70 minutes, right? Notice the duration of the various parts of the play:

Act 1 – 00:53:42
Act 2 – 00:38:56
Act 3 – 00:38:38
Act 4 – 00:42:54
Act 5 – 00:28:52

How do we put these on CDs? Act I goes on one CD. Great, fantastic. Act 2 goes on another -- but that leaves 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes unused at the end of that CD. But not 38:38 -- not enough time for Act 3! Will Act 4 and Act 5 fit together on a single CD? Maybe.

So that's the first issue. The second issue is, if the CD's in the car stereo and somebody wants to change the CD, then how can you recover your place? If one track is 28 or 42 or 53 minutes long, it's rather a pain. So we want to have track divisions at maybe 10-minute intervals.

So here's what we're gonna do. First, change each mp3 file into a "wav" file. For this, we'll use "lame" (meaning "lame ain't no mp3 encoder"). Then we'll use the compact "snd" together with "sox" to split the "wav" files into 10-minute pieces. The plan then would be to put these onto CDs as follows:

Act 1 + 12 minutes of act 2
about 27 minutes of act2 + act 3
acts 4 and 5

Well, we'll see how that works out. So after downloading all the mp3s, we convert them to wavs by typing:
lame --decode Downloads/king_lear_1_shakespeare.mp3 /tmp/k1.wav
and so on for the other 4 files.

Next, we want to divide each of these into (about) ten-minute segments. Where exactly do we divide them, and how? To answer the "where" we'll use snd. You may want to use something else, but "snd" works for me. In the image at left, you can see what looks like a pretty quiet spot about 612 seconds in. The x-axis shows just 611.0 and 613.0 and a bunch of tick-marks; you have to interpolate... well, or you can position the cursor and click, and you'll get a little number near the lower-left corner;you can see it if you enlarge the image -- "612.5030" -- let's just call it 612.5. We'll look for quiet spots around 1200 seconds in, 1800 seconds in, etc., and break the ".wav" file at those points.

But one thing at a time. Given the first break-point, at 612.5 seconds, I type:
sox /tmp/k1.wav -c 2 Desktop/k1.1.wav trim 0 =10:12.5
which is explained as

sox
the program name.
/tmp/k1.wav
the input file
-c 2
Make the output have two channels (stereo) as CDs have
Desktop/k1.1.wav
the output file
trim 0 =10:12.5
Trim 0 off the front, and everything past 10:12.5 (612.5 seconds) from the start.

The next breakpoint looks to be about 1206.2 seconds, which is 20:06.2 so I'll type
sox /tmp/k1.wav -c 2 Desktop/k1.2.wav trim 10:12.5 =20:06.2
and so on for the rest of the 53-minute act. Here are the files for Act I:

collin@p3:/mnt/home/collin> ls -o /tmp/k1.wav; ls -o Desktop/k1.*.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin 284258442 2012-01-23 20:30 /tmp/k1.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin 108045044 2012-01-23 20:48 Desktop/k1.1.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin 104728724 2012-01-27 21:08 Desktop/k1.2.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin 107039564 2012-01-27 21:18 Desktop/k1.3.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin 103723244 2012-01-27 21:19 Desktop/k1.4.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin  85906844 2012-01-27 21:20 Desktop/k1.5.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin  59073640 2012-01-27 21:20 Desktop/k1.6.wav

You may wonder why it is that the six files come to about 56 Mbytes whereas the original /tmp/k1.wav was closer to 28 Mbytes; it's because the output files are stereo, which I think we need for recording on CDs.

I do the same with the rest of King Lear's ".wav" files, aiming for 66 minutes (my guess for how much will fit on a blank CD) on each. The last CD has over 70 minutes, but it still just might fit -- I'm finding out now.

For actually burning the CDs, well, my CD-writer is broken, so I'm using a mac mini, which belongs to the lovely Carol. It's pretty easy to do on a Mac using iTunes (we are running OS X 10.6). Here are the steps:

File → Add to Library
then select the files (in this case k1.1.wav up to k5.3.wav
Select 65-70(?) minutes' worth of tracks, then File → New playlist from selection
Then name each playlist
right-click on a playlist and "burn CD from playlist"

And Bob's yer uncle. To summarize, we

get free MP3 files from librivox (or wherever);
convert to 44.1khz stereo WAV files using lame
Separate into tracks (if needed) using snd and sox
import into iTunes
create iTunes playlists
burn CD image using iTunes

Re-reading the Psalms

2012-01-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

One of our pastors recommended Peterson's book Answering God. Early on, Peterson says we have three languages; really they're overlapping subsets but I agree they're broad categories of speech:

The simple expression of a need—not very articulate but often effective. A baby's cry is an example of this language.
Another language is what conveys information and ideas.
Persuasive, motivational speech is the third.

According to Peterson, the Psalms are examples of the first language, or category of speech. Now of course they aren't just the first category, but a lot of what they are is that:

Give ear unto my words, O Lord.
Consider my meditation.
Hearken unto the voice of my cry,
My king and my God,
For unto thee will I pray.
My voice shalt thou hear in the morning.
O Lord, in the morning
Will I direct my prayer unto thee
And will look up.

I don't remember which psalm that was (probably 3 or 5; too lazy to look it up) but it was set to music some years ago and I remembered the words from that. One could argue that the psalmist is conveying information here (My Plans for Tomorrow Morning) and maybe trying to persuade or influence God (Give ear, consider, hearken). But I think Peterson is on to something in saying the psalms are mostly the cry of a dependent, contingent creature, directed toward the Creator.

It's struck me lately that we are a lot less capable and secure in ourselves than we often think we are. It's not just in Tunisia or Egypt or China where the government might decide to persecute someone arbitrarily—who was that guy that the feds accused (incorrectly) of spreading anthrax?

And I believe it was here in the US that the government released radioactive dust into the air to see how many people it would sicken or kill.

Besides governments and organized crime, there's disease and accident. Men my age, and younger, have dropped dead from heart attacks—sometimes with no prior warning.

We know how a lot of diseases happen; what we don't know is why we don't have just about everybody sick or dying just about all the time. The same could be said for motor vehicle (or airplane) accidents.

It would not surprise me if one day I learn that there really are angels preventing death and disease, that "upholding all things by his powerful word" and "in him all things consist" are more literal than we usually think.

But one thing is certain: every moment of every day is a gift. By reminding me of my contingent existence, my dependence upon a merciful Lord, they help me appreciate that gift.

Collin reads actual literature

2011-12-17T19:53:00.000-08:00

The lovely Carol is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in—no, not computer programming or mathematics (the latter especially being a very Fine Art)—Creative Writing. Consequently, new books appear on our shelves and in our travel bags. One of these books, a short story collection by Andre Dubus, caught my attention (actually, the lovely Carol may have asked my opinion about one of the stories) and WOW! I read every one of them.

Todd Field wrote the preface to this collection, named after his 2001 film In the Bedroom, which was based upon Dubus’s story Killings. Field’s title does not mean what you think; according to this wikipedia article, the rear compartment of a lobster trap is called the "bedroom," and if two males and one female are together in it, one male will kill the other. Killings, the first story in the collection, is superbly crafted, the story of a moral failure following a tragedy I hope never to experience; if it happens, I pray I have the strength to do what Jesus would have me do.

Yet the story drew me in, and convinced me of how a man might murder his son's killer and feel the inevitability of his own crime, and paradoxically also remorse.

Dubus’s writing is accessible; if literature must be abstruse, opaque, ponderous, difficult, painful reading, then this isn't it. But these stories are filled with deep insights expressed in beautiful language. Here's Dubus in Rose:

Rose and Jim... could not see a single act of renunciation or affirmation of a belief, a way of life. No. They had neither a religion nor a philosophy; like most people I know, their philosophies were simply their accumulated reactions to their daily circumstances, their lives as they lived them from one hour to the next. They were not driven, guided, by either passionate belief or strong resolve. And for that I pity them both, as I pity the others who move through life like scraps of paper in the wind.
Rose, from In the Bedroom, Andre Dubus
(Vintage Contemporaries, 2002), p. 65

Rose is also a tragedy. I do not like tragedies, but the insight Dubus brings to the tale makes it a gem—no, an X-ray, exposing the human condition with its faults: living without thought, without courage, without taking responsibility for our careless words and actions. There is an awakening and a repentance and a victory, and perhaps it isn't really a tragedy after all.

So what do I find so captivating? Besides the beauty of the language—the expertise he brings to the craft—is the deep thought behind the insight evident in these stories. Field writes in the preface that Dubus desired from a young age “to understand how my two sisters had to live in the world compared with the way I had to live as a boy.” (op. cit., page x)

The other thing is that I have come late in life to an understanding that just as "A gallon of good California red in thekitchen closet will do more for your cookingthan all the books in the world" (The Supper of the Lamb, p.33) so this book of short stories will do more for a person's soul than all the math and computer science books in the world.

And there is the pleasure, particularly in the last story of the collection, titled All the Time in the World:

"I want a home with love in it, with a woman and children."
"My God," she said, and smiled, nearly laughing, her hands moving up from the table. "I don't think I've ever heard those words from the mouth of a man."
"I love the way you talk with your hands." (146)

and near the end of that story:

And this time love was taking her into pain, yes, quarrels and loneliness and burning rage; but this time there was no time, and love was taking her as far as she would go, as long as she would live, taking her strongly and bravely with this Ted Briggs holding his pretty cane; this man who was frightened by what had happened to him but was not frightened by the madness she knew he was feeling now. (148)

Why that story in particular? I guess I'm a sucker for a feel-good story, and as the father of daughters it pleases me to read about a young woman discovering the truth about herself (on p. 142 I read that "[s]he wanted love, but she did not want her search for it to begin in someone’s bed.") and then taking a step toward the life she actually does want.

Keller talks on marriage at Google

2011-12-03T21:37:00.000-08:00

It's at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9THu0PZwwk

Here are my unsanitized incomplete distracted inaccurate [etc] notes.

Preface: Presenting Christian views of marriage. Some of you think, "That's partisan." Well, whatever your view, it's partisan; it's religious or quasi-religious; it's not scientific.

Essence of marriage

You've heard it said, "I love you, why do I need a piece of paper to tell me I love you?" "Marriage is just a piece of paper" but what does the piece of paper do? What does the covenant relationship do?

Adds security. There are two types of relationships:
- consumer-type relationship. You buy stuff at the store, that's great, but if you find another store that provides same stuff at better prices, you'll go there, because your needs are much more important than your relationship with the grocer or whoever.
- covenant relationship. If your kid cries and is selfish and bratty, you have responsibility; you can't just dump him somewhere with "you're not meeting my needs."
If you're "dating" and not married, you don't have a covenant, you're in a consumer-type relationship where the other person could just leave at any time. So you have to continuously sell yourself; you can't just be yourself; the covenant creates the security within which you can be vulnerable and honest.
Adds stability. 2/3 of "unhappy" marriages, if they stick it out, are happy 5 years later. What keeps you in there, through hard times, to something really great? Think Ulysses past the island of the sirens, tied to the mast.
Auden, "Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate" because it's the product of time and will, not just of fleeting emotion.
It adds freedom. Kierkegaard: if you don't know the discipline of making a promise and sticking to it, you're not free; you're slave to your impulses, the moment, the circumstances, your feelings. Hannah Arin: without promises, no identity. Smedes, "when you make a promise you are most free."

"He loves me but doesn't want to marry me." Keller: "He probablymeans, ‘I don't love you enough to marry you, to lose my independence, to bind myself to you in a covenant relationship.’"

Mission of marriage

What's your marriage for? What do you hope to accomplish with it? To many people, it's passion and romance, maybe to combine your fortunes together to form a more comfortable life.

The Christian purpose is for deep character change through deep friendship. People want a compatible soul-mate... who will accept me the way I am and whom I can accept and appreciate just the way they are; someone who won't try to change me. If you want that, that's why you're not married yet. You want someone low-maintenance who won't change and won't try to change you. But no such person exists, and you're not that way either. You pose like someone who is, but you're not; you've got flaws. What might some flaws be?

fearful person with tendency to anxiety
proud person who tends to be selfish
inflexible person who tends to be demanding
undisciplined person who tends to be unreliable
perfectionistic person who tends to be too critical of others
impatient, irratible person who tends to hold grudges
a cowardly person who tends to twist the truth to look good

Everyone comes into marriage with these kinds of things. Your parents told you, your siblings told you, but you didn't really believe them. But you get married, and those issues that caused small problems now cause big problems. Marriage doesn't create flaws, it reveals them.

Hauerwas says, we assume there's someone out there who's just right for us, but this overlooks the fact that we always marry the wrong person.

Marriage is a huge thing and it changes us. So we change. Hence even if you could find someone compatible to marry, after you've been married awhile, they won't be any more! So what are the Christian responses to this?

First, not to be surprised, because the Christian view is we're all selfish. Think Kim Kardashian. Embrace the conflict.
Don't look for a finished statue, look for a great block of marble. You want to be in love with the person as they are, but you want to love the person they're becoming. Don't overdo what they look like, as that'll change. Don't focus too much on their character as it is today, but who they could become!
Look for someone who could be your best friend. Remember that great friendship doesn't come out of great sexual chemistry; it's other way around. The praise of the praiseworthy is its own reward.
The feeling I got the first time I kissed her was shallow; it was all ego. It wasn't about her; I had no idea who she was. It was about me, the thrill that she liked me. Now it's like a deep river that makes no noise, vs a babbling brook one inch deep.

The secret of marriage

To be able to love your spouse for periods when you're getting very little back. They might be discouraged, sick, absorbed in their problems. Very important to keep on giving love. That takes a source of love from outside.

Seen this happen a lot of times: give to child, don't get much back, but you give and you sacrifice [etc] anyway for 18 years. These actions engender deep feelings of love. But your spouse -- if you don't love me the way I want, I won't love you the way you want, and at the end of 18 years, you love your kid, you don't love your spouse, and the marriage falls apart.

And it's your fault because what you did with your kid you didn't do with your spouse. "Love philanthropy." Financial philanthropy possible when you got a lotta money. Love philanthropy possible if you got a lotta love from God.

Christ loved us not because we were lovely but in order to make us lovely.

Q&A

On finding a spouse, not just physical; what criteria? 4 or 5?
First, someone who really understands you, maybe better than you know yourself. Who isn't surprised by your reactions. Second, someone you can already solve problems with -- had a serious conflict, solved it in a way satisfactory to both people.
btw if your faith is important to you, then for somebody to "get" you they have to share your faith.
I think we have a great marriage, my husband would say I have a lot of flaws and am not making real good progress. How can I change? I think I'm trying but it's harder than I thought.
If you agree on what needs to be changed, then 2/3 of your problem's over; you just need a coach. You might want to get a 3rd party involved. You need add'l fellowship.
Love analogy of truck exposing stress fractures in a bridge; kids are like a 2nd truck. Your perspective on that?
You spend more time together but you're not talking with each other as much as talking through the kids. Probably not so much disagreements about children, but time. You might travel less, work fewer hours, to get time with family -- but time with my wife very specific.
Mothers get a lot of their "skin hunger" addressed with kids and don't have as much desire for physical intimacy as husbands have. Husbands' desire is less complex.
Criteria... sounds like it could take a long time to be sure about that.
If you go to a film, have dinner, that's maybe an hour of conversation; doesn't have to take a whole lotta time.
At other end, you describe the case of both spouses withdrawing, and it's been going on 18-20 years, what do you do?
Too general a case. There are grounds for divorce so I don't know that you absolutely can work it out. Intervention.
About attraction -- ego rush vs real love?
Ego rush is inevitably there. If the main thing that attracts you is physical (women disproportionately look at height and economics; men likewise disproportionatelylook at body and face)... you need something more.
Role of dating? Dating vs engagement etc?
Nothing in Bible about dating. Lots about marriage in the Bible. All I can tell you is, get a picture of marriage and let that affect dating. As you get older, probably you shouldn't be dating if in your view there's no way you could get married to that person.
Advice for an engaged couple? Not premarital counseling.
The book is basically about that. So don't get discouraged in the short term. The basic cancer is self-centeredness. It's not "I've got into conflict w/spouse; marriage has brought me into conflict with my self-centeredness." Mission of marriage: become best friends and figure out how that happens. Look at sex as a covenant renewal ceremony, or covenant cement.
Sex outside marriage is no preparation for sex within marriage. They're completely different.
What you've said about marriage, most of that would apply to gay marriage. What role in society?
Christian view of marriage is that it's between a man and a woman, because primary mission connected with bringing together people of diametrically opposed genders. We clash and mesh. It's intrinsic to the Christian idea of marriage. My wife teaches me things that I could not learn from another man.

"Count it all joy" -- no, really

2011-11-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

At this weekend's services at MPPC , USC philosophy professor Dallas Willard addressed several questions on the topic of pain and suffering. One was, "How do we find God in the midst of suffering?"

The answer was a call to something proactive: to be turned toward God before suffering comes, so that you're not in a position to have to go looking for him when it comes. This is also a clue to following James’s command to "Count it all joy" when you meet various trials (James 1:2 NKJV). Now the text says that since trials test our faith, and this produces perseverance and maturity, therefore we can rejoice in the trials. Paul also writes something similar but it seems to me that this perspective itself requires wisdom most of us lack. Perhaps this is why James tells us immediately afterward to pray: "But if any of you needs wisdom, you should ask God for it. He is generous to everyone and will give you wisdom without criticizing you." (James 1:5 NCV)

Dallas shared some of his wisdom: that if my life is oriented toward God, if I have faith in God—who's big enough to take care of things—then trials give me an opportunity to see him in action; I'll even greet them with anticipation! (I confess I'm not writing this from first-hand experience, but I can appreciate the theory.)

And what is joy? How can we have it in the midst of sorrow and pain? Joy, Dallas said, is a pervasive sense of well-being. It's like peace, not an action but something in the background.

Well-being in the midst of pain and suffering—how does that work? Dallas said we need to have a big vision of a big God. Two illustrations come to my mind: the first is from Anne Lamott's book Operating Instructions, where she writes about feeling vulnerable in a new way, shortly after her son is born. Before this, she says, she felt she could survive anything. She writes something like, "I could die, and somehow survive even that"—which is not logical, but it made emotional sense to me: a sense of strength and well-being beyond any circumstance.

Another example that came to mind is due to Larry Crabb, Jr., who talked about deep longings that we all have, and the wrong strategies we often use to fulfill them. Depending on our perspective, he said, painful events can be to us like a five-foot fall from a platform (something that will hurt, may cause injuries, but probably won't kill us), or a five-mile fall from an airplane (which probably will).

With that background, here's the example I was thinking of, which I think was presented in a 1987 lecture. There was a guy who often spoke of wanting to ride in a hot-air balloon; his wife bought him tickets for his birthday, and early one morning, she watched the balloon take off with her husband and I think one of their kids. But in a freak accident, the balloon met some power-lines; it literally crashed and burned, killing all aboard. Because she was deeply connected to Jesus, this tragedy was a five-foot fall; she had that pervasive sense of well-being in the midst of terrible tragedy.

Now there's an inner strength to admire—not an inner strength of the "self-made" tough-guy, but the strength of one who knows their own weakness and clings to Jesus. May the Lord so strengthen us, that we have the power to count it all joy when we meet various trials, and to rejoice in our tribulations.

A useful exercise

2011-11-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

This morning the lovely Carol and I talked briefly about thankfulness. Psalm 65 has some things, and I neglected a whole lot of things in the list below, but here are a few things I'm thankful for anyway...

that I can walk without straining, limping, or lurching
that the VTA stops close by the office
a car in case I need to drive to the office
a job (i.e., an office to go to)
-- though I complain sometimes about having a day job,
the lovely Carol to come home to
a house with a roof and walls and locking doors
healthy parents -- not to be taken for granted at their age, or mine
loving children (though they're not kids any more)
the knowledge that I'm forgiven
the promise of eternal life
a place of worship
the freedom to worship there
-- though I sometimes complain about meetings...
circuit breakers (rather than fuses) for the power in our house
Long's and Safeway at the Caltrain station
money to buy stuff there
Friday bagels
a great team at work
the ability to enjoy reading/writing code
big windows near my cubicle
enough clothes to protect me from the air chilled by those windows
a functioning clothes washer
the ability to fix it (again) when it overflows
hanging things to dry the laundry on
a working clothes dryer for when laundry can't (or shouldn't be) hung
a seat on the train
mobile wifi

Collin writes a program*

2011-11-12T22:23:00.000-08:00

(* Title borrowed from Ron Carlson Writes a Story)
A few times in the past months, someone's commented that they have no idea what it's like to write a computer program, so I've been thinking about a sort of gentle introduction to the fun ("joy" seems a bit overstated) of programming. Then it happened—the puzzler from Car Talk was announced, and I thought it was perfect. So in the next 45 minutes I want to write a program to solve last week's puzzler. It goes more or less like this:

Imagine a very long hall with 20,000 lights hanging from the ceiling, all off. These lights are controlled by a pull-chain: pull it once, the light turns on; pull it again and the light turns off.

Now someone comes through the hall and pulls every single chain. The lights are now all on. Person #2 comes through and pulls every 2^nd chain, so that now lights 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on are now off. Person #3 comes through and pulls every 3^rd chain, thus changing the state of lights 3, 6, 9, 12 and so on; they turn some lights on and some off. Person #4 comes through and flips lights 4, 8, 12, 16 and so on.

And so on, until person #20,000 comes through and only tugs on the chain of the 20,000^th light.

Can you predict which lights will be on, and which will be off?

Now with a pencil and paper you might be able to figure this out in five or ten minutes, but like my first math professor, who spent ten minutes figuring out how to avoid a five-minute calculation, we'll go through the process of writing a little program to show how at least some programmers think.

We'll use the programming language Python here. I briefly considered using something like Ruby or OCaml, so we could go through the experience of learning a new programming language together, but I'm long-winded enough that...

Right. So Python. Here's what we're going to do: We'll create a list representing the state of each light fixture. And rather than forcing the program to do exactly 20,000 hanging lights, we'll provide a parameter to say how many lights there are. The pattern will be obvious with as few as 100 lights, so let's start with that. Here's a first partial whack at it.

# Adjust the following line to be however many lights you want
howevermanylights = 38

# "light_states" represents the states of howevermanylights
# Initialize it to have just some junk in element 0
light_states = ['junk']

# Add the states of however many lights
for a_light in range(howevermanylights):
    light_states.append(True)

# We'll add code here to manipulate the lights' states

# Now show the state of each light

for a_light in light_states[1:]:
    if a_light:
        print '*',
    else:
        print ' ',

print
for a_light in range(howevermanylights):
    # print last digit of a_light
    print (a_light % 10),

print

and if I run the program (which I imaginatively called "ceiling") it does this:

$ python ceiling
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
$

(The bold blue text is what I typed in response to my computer's prompt.)

This shows that light #0 is, oops... do you see that? I wanted to show the state of light #1, #2, #3 etc., but for some reason the numbers are 0, 1, 2, etc. I need to fix the digit printed. That last part will now read:

for a_light in range(howevermanylights):
    # print last digit of a_light
    print (a_light+1) % 10,

print

OK, that worked. Why did I have that "bug", or error? (Programmers call their mistakes "bugs"; it sounds so much better to say "I had 5 bugs in my code" than "I made 5 mistakes (or more) in my code.")

Well, actually I put it in on purpose. No, really; I wanted to mention that Python, like Perl, starts its lists with index 0 rather than 1. This is why I wrote above

# Initialize it to have just some junk in element 0
light_states = ['junk']

if light_states has howevermanylights elements in it, they will benumbered 0 up to howevermanylights-1.

Why do Python and Perl (and C and java too) start numbering lists/arrays at 0 rather than 1? Well, it's for convenience. The first ten elements (or "decade" of elements) in an array are numbered 0-9; the second ten are numbered 10-19. So you can tell which "decade" we're in by looking at the tens digit.

This stands in contrast to our system of years, where the first century is years 1-100; the second century is years 101-200... the 20th century is 1901-2000, and so on. See how inconvenient this is? The 21st century started in 2001 (not 2000) so you can't tell just by looking at the top digit. A computer scientist didn't come up with this system for numbering years.

So a list of 5 elements (for example) has its elements numbered 0,1,2,3,4. Similarly range(5) gives 5 numbers -- also numbered 0,1,2,3,4. To wit:

$ python 
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Jul  5 2010, 11:47:21) 
[GCC 4.5.0 20100604 [gcc-4_5-branch revision 160292]] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> range(5)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
>>>

Anyway, light_states starts at 0, and we number the ceiling lights starting at 1, so I put some junk into element 0 of the list so element 1 could correspond to ceiling light #1, etc.

OK, now let's put some more code in to deal with persons #2–howevermanylights.

# Adjust the following line to be however many lights you want
howevermanylights = 38

# "light_states" represents the states of howevermanylights
# Initialize it to have just some junk in element 0
light_states = ['junk']

# Add the states of however many lights
for a_light in range(howevermanylights):
    light_states.append(True)

# Code to manipulate the lights' states
# We have person#2 upto and including howevermanylights.

for a_person in range(2, howevermanylights+1):
    # Flip every "a_person"th light:
    for a_light in range(a_person, howevermanylights+1, a_person):
        light_states[a_light] = not light_states[a_light]


# Now show the state of each light

for a_light in light_states[1:]:
    if a_light:
        print '*',
    else:
        print ' ',

print
for a_light in range(howevermanylights):
    # print last digit of a_light
    print (a_light+1) % 10,

print

The new code is shown in this color and basically, um, does what it says -- assigns the variable "a_person" all values from 2 upto and including howevermanylights. And for each such person, flips every "a_person"th light.

When I run the program, it does this:

$ python ceiling
*     *         *             *                 *                     *    
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
$

Right, that's not 100 lights, and I've only printed the last digit of the light number, but lights #1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 are left on. (If I make howevermanylights much bigger than 38, then you won't be able to see the result on a single line.)

Time's up and you got the basic idea

OK, the above was 45 minutes' worth, but let me take a little more time to do two things:

First, let's change this line to say 1000 instead:
```
howevermanylights = 1000
```

And let's just list out which lights are on, rather than printing out the state of all the lights:

# Now show the state of each light
# Don't do that; just list out number of each light that's on
for a_num in range(1, howevermanylights+1):
    if light_states[a_num]:
        print 'On:', a_num

And when we run it?

$ python ceiling 
On: 1
On: 4
On: 9
On: 16
On: 25
On: 36
On: 49
On: 64
On: 81
On: 100
On: 121
On: 144
On: 169
On: 196
On: 225
On: 256
On: 289
On: 324
On: 361
On: 400
On: 441
On: 484
On: 529
On: 576
On: 625
On: 676
On: 729
On: 784
On: 841
On: 900
On: 961
$

Do you see the pattern there? Every number that's a perfect square is left on, but composite numbers are off. Why perfect squares? That's an exercise left to the reader.

Anyway I hope that gives an idea of some of what it means to write a program. Most of what "real programmers" do is quite a bit more complicated, but that ought to give a flavor for at least some of the tasks. I hope that was fun reading for you; it certainly was enjoyable for me to write.

Finishing(??) touches

OK, it's now the next morning and I wanted to sort of finish the program off, and to give you the whole program in one snarf'n'barf-able blob so you can tweak it yourself, if you've got the interest.

#!/usr/bin/python -utt
'''Program to solve cartalk puzzler
http://www.cartalk.com/content/puzzler/transcripts/201144/index.html

Basically this:
    Imagine a very long hall with 20,000 lights hanging from the
    ceiling, all off.  These lights are controlled by a pull-chain:
    pull it once, the light turns on; pull it again and the light
    turns off.

    Now someone comes through the hall and pulls every single chain.
    The lights are now all on.  Person #2 comes through and pulls
    every 2nd chain, so that now lights 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on are
    now off.  Person #3 comes through and pulls every 3rd chain,
    thus changing the state of lights 3, 6, 9, 12 and so on; they
    turn some lights on and some off.  Person #4 comes through and
    flips lights 4, 8, 12, 16 and so on.

    And so on, until person #20,000 comes through and only tugs on
    the chain of the 20,000th light.

    Can you predict which lights will be on, and which will be off?

The program calculates (not predicts) which lights will be on.

Provide the number of lights in a parameter (default 100)'''

import sys

def main(howevermanylights):

    # "light_states" represents the states of howevermanylights
    # Initialize it to have just some junk in element 0
    light_states = ['junk']

    # Add the states of however many lights
    for a_light in range(howevermanylights):
        light_states.append(True)

    # Code to manipulate the lights' states
    # We have person#2 upto and including howevermanylights.

    for a_person in range(2, howevermanylights+1):
        # Flip every "a_person"th light:
        for a_light in range(a_person, howevermanylights+1, a_person):
            light_states[a_light] = not light_states[a_light]


    # Now show the state of each light
    # Don't do that; just list out number of each light that's on
    for a_num in range(1, howevermanylights+1):
        if light_states[a_num]:
            print 'On:', a_num
    sys.exit(0)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    try:
        num_lights = int(sys.argv[1])
    except:
        num_lights = 100
    main(num_lights)

So this does a few things beyond what I had last night:

You can give a parameter and it'll do the calculation for the number of lights provided

% ./ceiling.py 38
On: 1
On: 4
On: 9
On: 16
On: 25
On: 36
% ./ceiling.py 100
On: 1
On: 4
On: 9
On: 16
On: 25
On: 36
On: 49
On: 64
On: 81
On: 100

It's got documentation:

% pydoc ceiling | cat
Help on module ceiling:

NAME
    ceiling

FILE
    /Users/collin/to-mail/ceiling.py

DESCRIPTION
    Program to solve cartalk puzzler
    http://www.cartalk.com/content/puzzler/transcripts/201144/index.html
    
    Basically this:
        Imagine a very long hall with 20,000 lights hanging from the
        ceiling, all off.  These lights are controlled by a pull-chain:

(etc.)

It's easier to debug (google "python debugger" for more info).
It returns a "success!" code so the system thinks the program worked.

Can I mess up God's plan for me?

2011-11-12T16:17:00.000-08:00

Suppose someone says, "I know God has a good plan for me (Jeremiah 29:11), but what if I mess it up? Will it then become his plan for someone else?" How do we answer them?

I certainly understand this sort of thinking; it comes from the old performance mentality, the same old lies that say, "you're OK only until you mess up; then you're irredeemable." We think we can pass the audition but if we miss our cue or flub our lines, an understudy will take over and we'll be thrust out the backstage door into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But wait, you say, that's true, isn't it? If the star of the show shows up drunk or something and can't perform, the understudy takes over, yes?

Let's have a look at where this verse comes from to see why I think God's plan is not like a play or concert or opera performance. The passage is in Jeremiah 29; it's part of a letter to Israelites living in Babylon. These people are in Babylon because the nation has not obeyed the Lord -- Israel was full of violence and greed and idolatry. In other words, the plans to prosper the Israelites, to give them hope and a future, were announced after they disobeyed the Lord for generations—hundreds of years of disobedience! And yet he says, "I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." (Jeremiah 29:11-13)

Hundreds of years of disobedience by millions of Israelites didn't thwart God's plans for their nation, and yet we worry that a few decades of disobedience by one individual might lead him to break his promise. As if we could disappoint him so much in a way he didn't already know!

I mean, did God say "Before a word was on your tongue, I knew it completely (Psalm 139) but then you came out with that??" Or "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you (Jeremiah 1) but then you went and did something else." Or "I chose you in Christ before the foundation of the earth to be holy and blameless (Ephesians 1) but then you went and messed it all up."

I don't think so. As I wrote last month, God already knows (Isaiah 44:6-7, 46:10) what will happen; there is no way that we can surprise or disappoint him, and there is no way that he will change his mind about his plans. He doesn't do that.

And isn't that good news?

Mistakes

2011-11-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

I hate making mistakes, which is really a pain because I do it all the time. When I read the gospels, though, I don't feel so bad, because I see that the disciples made mistakes all the time, too. Peter was forever putting his foot in his mouth—In Mark 9:5 he's having this dazzling experience with Jesus, James, John, Moses and Elijah, and he has to blurt something out. Right afterward, a cloud appears and a voice tells Peter (and the rest) "This is my beloved Son; listen to him!"

In Mark 16, we see Mary and Mary and Salome going to visit Jesus’ tomb. They have no idea how they're going to get in there (Mark 16:3)—planning's not so good. Once they do get in, they receive instructions (Mark 16:7 "But go, tell his disciples..."). They don't obey the instructions (Mark 16:8)—execution's not so good.

There are lots more like this, and as I said, this gives me hope because... well, no need to go into details.

Today I also read some of Merton's words about mistakes, which mean so much more to me now that I know he struggled with these things himself. He is like one of the high priests spoken of in Hebrews 5:2, who "can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness."

As long as we are on Earth our vocation is precisely to be imperfect, incomplete, insufficient in ourselves, changing, hapless, destitute and weak, hastening toward the grave. But the power of God and His eternity and His peace and His completeness and His glory must somehow find their way into our lives, secretly, while we are here, in order that we may be found in Him eternally as He has meant us to be.
…
The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, buta life from which practically all the obstacles to God's love have been removed or overcome.
No Man Is an Island 7.10 (pp. 129-130)

Doesn't that sound good? To know that mistakes are part of life, nothing to be surprised about, to have God's power and peace &c finding their way into our lives, and to have nothing between God's love and us... sign me up! What's stopping me from getting there? Merton tells us in the next sentence:

One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men.

I resemble this remark too! Thanks be to God; he knows all this and chose us and called us anyway. And that's good news.

Personality and Perspective: Counseling, Theology

2011-10-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

How can people be helped? What do they need in order to start making better decisions, to change directions? Here are three kinds of answers:

There are deep longings, which they are pursuing with wrong strategies, and we help them by exploring the deep longings, exploring the wrong strategies. They change by recognizing those longings and changing those strategies.
The problem is simply the will; their first need is for exhortation, and the second need is for accountability.
People are insecure; they don't know deep in their souls that God loves them unconditionally. Once that fact is a constant part of their awareness, they'll be freed up to choose wisely; we help them by providing community (this is the chief way that God loves us -- through others).

No doubt there are other "mental models" of problems and counseling, but the thing I wanted to say was that the model, the sort of theory in our minds is influenced largely by our personality.

So if you're an angry kind of person and like to tell people what to do, you'll tend to think #2 above is the way people change. If you're into group hugs and you think of "warm and fuzzy" as an honorific, you'll probably like #3. If you like figuring things out and analyzing things--if you like crossword puzzles or computer programming, your mental model is likely to be #1.

This just about follows from the adage, "If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Of course these things tend to be self-reinforcing; if you yell at people and things happen, you'll tend to believe it more. As you believe it more strongly, you'll tend to yell more often and so on. So there's a sort of chicken-and-egg question, but I tend to think it starts with personality—because it seems so insightful and because Larry Crabb said it.

Theology and risk-taking

How about the propensity to take risks, to live on the edge? Tell me the verses you like and I'll guess whether you naturally are a risk-taker or a careful planner. Do you like Proverbs 6:6-8 (Go to the ant... it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest)? Or "The prudent see trouble coming and take cover; the simple keep going and suffer for it" (22:3)? I'll bet you're risk-averse. I don't mean you don't trust God; you believe that part of how God provides for our future is by giving us enough today to give, to spend, and to save for future reserves.

But if you prefer verses like "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy..." (Matthew 6:19) or "Whosoever he be of you, if he forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:33) or "Do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ ..." then I'll guess that you believe we shouldn't have much—that God provides for today's needs today and tomorrow's needs tomorrow.

Something that's important here is (sorry for sounding PC) that we embrace diversity! See, if you're a Proverbs 6:6-8 kind of guy, the temptation is to think of the Matthew 6:19 crowd as being imprudent. You might read this story and think the person profligate or wacky. And if you're a Matthew 6:19 kind of guy, there's a temptation to think of the Proverbs 22:3 crowd as being stodgy if not downright deficient in faith.

But the Apostle Paul tells us, "Let each one be fully convinced in his own mind" and ""with humility of mind let each of you consider others as more important..." Right? How about Romans 15:7?

Let's think a little more about the visionary without food in the refrigerator. If we all lived like that, who would God move to write the big check? And if nobody dared anything like that, a lot of good things wouldn't happen. Really, it's not for the eye to say to the foot, "Because you're not an eye, you're not part of the body." If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? (1 Cor. 12:17)

Because, like it or not, our views on how Jesus treated people, what he expects from them, and even how people change—our views are influenced more by our personality than by the Scriptures, so we must hold them with humility.

So here's a bit of my view on counseling. (Prayer and the Holy Spirit play important roles in our spiritual and psychological health, but I mean what we do to help people.) I believe that people get into trouble because they use wrong strategies to try to fulfill their deep longings, and that a big part of helping people is to explore those deep longings and wrong strategies. But some are more in need ofconfrontation and accountability than any exploration. Some need more reassurance, more warm&fuzzies, before they can do anything else. And some may need lithium before anything else.

And risk? I believe that ants (Proverbs 6:6-8) are wise and prudent, not faithless (though I did think for a time that savings accounts were sin!)—but I also thank God for visionaries like the 72 who went into the villages without "a purse or bag or sandals" (Luke 10:4) and people like Hudson Taylor and the founder of Jeremiah's Promise (referred to above).

I hope that what I now think I understand about these things is closer to what God wants me to think, but no way can this be the ultimate truth.

"All the days ordained for me..."

2011-10-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

In Psalm 139, David says, "O Lord you have searched me and known me; you know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You know my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord" (Ps 139:1-4).

Which brings up a question: If God knows what I"m going to say before I say it—if, as Jesus said, he knows what I need before I ask—then what's the point of saying my prayers to him?

Well, the psalm also says "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be". If all our days are known beforehand, why bother to live any of them?

Right? OK, the point of living life isn't just for God to see what we do, as though he needed new information; it's for us to live it. And the point of prayer isn't just for God to hear what we say, as though he needed new information; it's for us to pray it.

In other words, praying is for my benefit, not his. Sometimes when I pray, and tell God what I'm hoping for, I realize that that's not what I really want, or that I really want a lot more, or something else. And whenever I pray, it reminds me that I need God, that nothing that really matters in life is under my control. It's really important for me to remember that.

But what does it mean, "All the days ordained for me..."? It seems to me that there are two possibilities:

If this refers to a prescribed set of days written in God's book (as the translation "ordained" suggests), then one has to wonder, can I get away from it or not? Again, two possibilities.
- If I can deviate from the plan, then once I've gone off it like in 1961, then my life has been off it since then, and it's not much of a book -- it's more like a fantasy.
- If I can’t deviate from the plan, that means David couldn't either, and his misdeeds (adultery and murder, to name two) were prescribed by God. As someone once said, "I don't think so."
So this must be a descriptive set of days written in God's book. (Not all translations have the sense of God ordaining the psalmist's days; some have more the sense of knowing in advance.) If we can deviate from this description, it's not a very good one. So if we slip up, even if we do terrible things as David did, God knows we were going to do it.

And as with any Bible passage, the next question is, "So what?" Here's what I take from it: that God is not surprised by anything. He knows what's coming; he knows what I'm going to bump into. He knows when I'll overcome, and when I'll goof up. And in spite of the ways I slip up, or willingly deviate from the path, I can say with David: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand." (Ps 139:17-18)

I love this psalm; it's so realistic. David seems happy that God is so near in verses 1-6, but then in 7-12 he wants to run away—yet knows he can't; he can neither run nor hide. And David is so honest about his thoughts in verses 19-22, asking God to slay the wicked and confessing his hatred toward them.

I want to finish here quoting David's words -- he began with "O Lord, you have searched me and known me" (Ps 139:1); he ends with "Search me O God and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts... lead me in the way everlasting" (from Ps 139:23-24).

Words to a young teen

2011-10-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me to "take a few minutes and jot a note of wisdom and encouragement" to his son, who is about to enter the teenage years. Wisely, he asked a lot of us for this (more to the point, he asked a lot of people besides me) but anyway here's mine:

You're entering a time of great opportunity and growth, though it may feel more like a maelstrom of confusion and insecurity. When I was your age, I looked at the grown men around me and thought they had it all together: Would I have my life together when I got to be their age? As it turns out, they didn't have their lives as much together as I thought they did, and I spent too much time thinking about what things would be like way out there; I sometimes wish I had taken more time to enjoy the present, back when I had so much more time.

I used to think the most important thing was to avoid making mistakes. I thought if I could just stay out of trouble, things would be okay. The problem with this perspective is that I avoided all kinds of adventures because I thought I might goof up.

So my wish for you is that you take enough time to enjoy what's right in front of you. It's prudent to prepare for the future, to seek guidance and blessing from the Lord and so on, but don't forget that today is part of your life too. And I hope that you don't waste as much effort as I did trying to avoid mistakes -- focus rather on seeking the excitement and adventure and blessing that God wants you to enjoy.

As I look at those words, it occurs to me that I haven't outgrown that advice myself.

Collin reads "chick lit"

2011-10-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

So we were on vacation in an exotic foreign city and stumbled upon a trade paperback copy of The Pretend Wife, by Bridget Asher (author of My Husband’s Sweethearts). OK, let's at least try to be open-minded, shall we?

The plot has an unsatisfying deus ex machina ending, as some amazon.com reviews suggest, but the question that interested me from the book is this: What is the appropriate level of, ah, intensity in a marriage?

Gwen, Asher's first-person narrator, had been involved in an intense, overwhelming relationship in college, then broke up with the guy and married "Peter," who

didn't shove love at me. He didn't lavish it on. He wasn't brimming with love. He doled it out in portions. Love wasn't an ocean—it came in packets....
It was perfect for me when we met. In fact it was all I could have handled.
And, later, as I was learning that it was insufficient, I knew that I was asking too much of him.... And, the truth was, we'd have passed any marital test—from a psychologist to a Cosmo quiz. We made each other laugh. We had enough good sex and regularly so. ... We didn't squabble in public, and we barely ever squabbled at all. ... We were, by all accounts, lovely to be with, a sweet couple that looked nice together walking into a room.
I knew that there were many women out there who would have said: It's enough already. Be happy with what you have. They were right—and wrong. (70-71)

So Gwen's looking for something more: she wants love like an ocean, peace like a river, joy like a fountain? Something like that maybe.

This put me in mind of Lori Gottlieb's article in the May 2008 Atlantic, featuring the graphic at right. Ms. Gottlieb takes what one might call an opposing point of view, as shown in this paragraph:

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling ‘Bravo!’ in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)

Now to the "fish without a bicycle" crowd, Gottlieb's article probably sounds like “Please tar and feather me.”

I have to confess that Asher's book made me a little uneasy. I think that many males have secret or not-so-secret anxieties about whether they're really enough. Am I enough of a husband to the lovely Carol? Am I enough of a... a... whatever-Gwen-wanted?

Reading Asher I feel insecure; I get a sense of relief from Gottlieb. Gottlieb is single and Asher's fictional Gwen is married; this, plus the grass-is-greener syndrome, undoubtedly affect their views of What To Expect From Marriage.

The Pretend Wife reminds me of a fairy tale: it ends with a hint of "and they lived happily ever after" but we actually have no idea whether Gwen will be dissatisfied about something else after a few years with the other guy.

That's life, isn't it? As Lewis's Aslan says, "No one is ever told what would have happened"; neither do we know what will happen to us. Gottlieb doesn't know how she'd feel today if she had in fact "settled" for one of the men she rejected a few years earlier.

Still, there's a part of me that wants the lovely Carol to think I'm enough of a husband—enough of a man perhaps?—for her. Sure, part of that is my own insecurity, my own ego; another part, I think, is that I want her to be happy. As much as I lack as a husband—I actually know I'm not an ideal one—my best self really wants the best for her.

I'll end with a line from Randy Stonehill, completely out of context: "So if You'll trust me I'll do my best and I'll be trusting You for the rest"

Does every natural number divide some Fibonacci number?

2011-10-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

This puzzle came from a recent CACM. The answer, given in the subsequent issue, was "yes", but I had to think about the explanation before I got it. I'll leave a little whitespace here so you can avoid reading the explanation if you want to think about it some first.

Consider the ordered pairs (f_n,f_n+1) modulo N, where N is the natural number under consideration. There can only be a finite number of unique such pairs—certainly no more than N² of them. Hence they must cycle at some point. If we set f₀=0 and f₁=1, that says there must eventually be some M>0 such that f_M=0 (mod N) and f_M+1=1 (mod N); this condition is sufficient but not necessary for N | f_M to be true. Why must we eventually have this condition? Because given f_n and f_n+1, we can calculate f_n-1 -- that is, the process can be run backward and cannot branch. The CACM answer said that the process can run backward ("Yeah, so what?" I thought) but because I'm slow, it didn't occur to me that since it can run backward, and produce a single result, we could not have the case where f₀=0,f₁=1 and then at some later point have f_X,f_X+1 (both nonzero), and at some even later point come back to f_X,f_X+1 and cycle that way without ever hitting (0,1) again.

Right. Next question: Given a number N, how far must you go to find a Fibonacci number that's a multiple of N? I didn't answer that one; instead I took a very short whack at calculating n>0 such that f_n≡0 (mod N) and f_n+1≡1 (mod N). Of course a computer program was involved (I think this is what happens to lazy math majors; they become programmers). I wrote the following code before I understood the part about "process can run backward", so...

def doit(the_base):
    apair = 0, 1
    b2i = dict()
    for iter in range(99999):             # arbitrary
        if not SILENT:
            print apair,
        if apair in b2i:
            if SILENT:
                return iter, b2i[apair]
            print '\nDone at %d: %s seen at %d' % (
                            iter, `apair`, b2i[apair])
            break
        b2i[apair] = iter
        apair = (apair[1], (apair[0] + apair[1]) % the_base)
    else:
        print "You can't get here --- at least I hope not; base =", the_base
        sys.exit(1)

I ran this for several values of the_base and found what look like some interesting patterns.Now let φ(N) be the smallest n>0 such that f_n≡0(mod N), f_n+1≡1(mod N). It seems that if N=p₁p₂, p₁≠p₂, then φ(N)=LCM(φ(p₁),φ(p₂)): for example φ(2)=3, φ(3)=8, φ(6)=24. and φ(5)=20, φ(11)=10, φ(55)=20

What about powers of primes? It appears that φ(pⁿ)=p^n-1φ(p) for n>1. Since φ(2)=3, this predicts φ(4)=6, φ(8)=12, φ(16)=24, φ(32)=48, φ(64)=96. And so it is.

But there are some surprises. Often φ(N)>N; but φ(19)=18, φ(21)=16 (LCM(φ(3)φ(7))), and so on.

After writing the above, I searched on "factors of fibonacci numbers" (no quotes) which led me to http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibmaths.html; this has a lot more interesting stuff about Fibonacci numbers.

Last week's puzzler

2011-09-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

I mean this puzzler from Car Talk -- yes, that Car Talk. The answer is linked from there, but of course rather than figuring it all out by hand I wanted to use a computer to do something about it.

Here's my paraphrase of the puzzle: What is special about the numbers (and the spellings) in this list: 4, 6, 12, 30, 33, 36, 40, 45, 50, 54, 56, 60, 70, 81, 88, 90, 100? The order is not important, and the property we're talking about is met by no other numbers between 1 and 100. I'll put a little space here so if you don't want to know the answer quite yet, you don't need to see it :)

OK, so I thought, "H'm, why 'four' but not 'five'? Well 'four' and 'five' are both 4 letters long; 4 is a factor of 4 but isn't a factor of 5. 'six' is three letters, 3 is a factor of 6."

So I typed this little list into a file, which I imaginatively called tmp/cartalk-number-puzzler:

four
six
twelve
thirty
thirty-three
thirty-six
forty
forty-five
fifty
fifty-four
fifty-six
sixty
seventy
eighty-one
eighty-eight
ninety
one hundred

Now, rather than counting letters by hand, I did this:

$ while read X; do echo $X ${#X}; done < tmp/cartalk-number-puzzler
four 4
six 3
twelve 6
thirty 6
thirty-three 12
thirty-six 10
…

Let me explain that.

while read X; do means "read a line and assign it to $X, then execute the following."
echo $X ${#X} means to echo (on the terminal display) the values of $X and the length of $X (which is the translation of ${#X})
done is the other end of the do we saw above
< tmp/cartalk-number-puzzler means "and read from this file, not from what I'm typing"

Now 12 isn't a factor of 33, and 10 isn't a factor of 36. So I wasn't sure about this whole factor business. But then I noticed that if you count only letters, then the length of "thirty-three" comes to 11, which is a factor of 33. So I tweaked my little loop:

$  while read X; do  Y=${X// /}; Y=${Y//-/}; echo $X ${#Y}; done < tmp/cartalk-number-puzzler 
four 4
six 3
twelve 6
thirty 6
thirty-three 11
thirty-six 9
forty 5
forty-five 9
fifty 5
fifty-four 9
fifty-six 8
sixty 5
seventy 7
eighty-one 9
eighty-eight 11
ninety 6
one hundred 10

The two new things here are... Y=${X// /}, which means "replace all the 'blank' characters from $X by '' (nothing) and put the result into $Y — and Y=${Y//-/}; which takes $Y (i.e., the de-blanked version of $X) and replaces all the hyphens by '', storing the result back into $Y

We then print the length of $Y -- the de-blanked, de-hyphen'd version of $X -- and by inspection I think these all match the hypothesis: 10 goes evenly into 100, 6 goes evenly into 90, 11 goes evenly into 88, etc.

But wait, that's not enough! The puzzler specified that these are the only numbers between 1 and 100 with that property. I'm way too lazy to type 'twenty-one' and 'seventeen' and 'eleven' in, and I thought somebody must have written a routine to do this, so I googled "python numbers to text" (no quotes) and downloaded "Convert Numbers to Words (Python)", which works like a champ. I coded this little thing which uses num2word, like this:

import num2word 
for i in range(1,101):
    tweaked = num2word.to_card(i).replace(' ', '').replace('-', '')
    if i % len(tweaked) == 0:
        print i, tweaked, 'len =', len(tweaked)

What this says is, take all positive integers up to and including 100, and calculate "tweaked" -- which is the de-blanked, de-hyphen'd version of the textual representation (i.e., num2word.to_card(i)( of the number. Then, display a message on the terminal if the length of tweaked is a factor of i. The result was:

4 four len = 4
6 six len = 3
12 twelve len = 6
30 thirty len = 6
33 thirtythree len = 11
36 thirtysix len = 9
40 forty len = 5
45 fortyfive len = 9
50 fifty len = 5
54 fiftyfour len = 9
56 fiftysix len = 8
60 sixty len = 5
70 seventy len = 7
81 eightyone len = 9
88 eightyeight len = 11
90 ninety len = 6
100 onehundred len = 10

which was the list we started with.

"You've done it again—you've wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk."

London sept 2: British Library and Museum

2011-09-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

We went to the "new" British Library -- there was no budget for it so it seemed to take forever. (The reading room and collection used to be inside the British Museum.) Construction workers were reported to say they were working on the Library and thus were employed for life.

I saw a few pages from an early printing of the King James Bible of the 17th century, which I could actually read; I can't say the same of either the 16th century Gutenberg Bible (it's in Latin and the font is sufficiently strange to me) or the 5th (not a typo) century Codex Sinaiticus. The latter was opened to Psalms 9-13 but the lighting was quite low and the ink rather light (faded, or just written that way). I don't know Greek either. (The sign nearby said that psalms 9-10 were written as a single psalm in the Codex, a single acrostic poem. I suspect this was the way the LXX has it too.) Anyway I thought I recognized a word, but turns out I was wrong. At least I think I was.

But it was pretty darned exciting to see these old documents. Codex Sinaiticus especially.

At the British Museum we saw the Rosetta Stone! I mean the real one! Its story is the stuff of adventure film -- rediscovered by French soldiers, but then being given to the English as spoils of war; Thomas Young's attempts at deciphering it; then Jean-François Champollion's discovery of several keys, which enabled him to see ancient monuments and, for the first time in maybe 2000 years, being able to say what it meant.

Champollion was apparently given to fainting; he'd translate a monument, faint, and translate another. Can't say I blame him, though; if I were the first person in 1500-2000 years to be able to read a monument I'd be pretty excited, too.

Lunch

Lunch was at "Tas" Restaurant, 22 Bloomsbury St.; their domain registration seems to have expired, but here's a cached copy.

We took the £9.15 per person lunch menu -- 2 persons minimum. Lots of good stuff, no meat. What I can remember it had: eggplant, something like ratatouille; hummus; bread of course; tabbouli; cracked? bulghur with walnuts, spinach/yogurt, fresh hot falafel, freshly baked(?) thing that reminded me of spanakopita but was probably pronounced something like "boo-regh".

Supper

was at the Ebury Wine Bar at Ebury and Elizabeth Streets, right next to the hotel.

St Paul's Cathedral 8/31; also brief remarks on Sept. 1

2011-09-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Quick: what is a Cathedral? Are they all Catholic? Is the Crystal Cathedral a real one?

Answers: where the seat of a Bishop is; No, the Church of England has Bishops; No, the Crystal Cathedral has no bishop and hence is really no cathedral. Finally, a cathedral need not take hundreds of years to build, though it seems a lot of them did.

But today (8/31) we learned that St. Paul's was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the 1660s and completed within a few decades -- within his lifetime. I was shocked to hear about the speed of construction, knowing only about cathedrals what Fred Brooks and Eric Raymond wrote about them -- Brooks writing in The Mythical Man-Month that cathedrals generally have their designs changed multiple times during construction (Rheims being one of the few exceptions) and ESR writing in The Cathedral and the Bazaar about ... well, you can read it.

As it turns out, the current St Paul's Cathedral seems to be the fifth on that site, being built after its predecessor was destroyed in 1666's big fire. The astonishing speed of construction was, our guide (Mary here, not Tom) surmised, because it was a replacement and thus urgently needed.

You can read a lot about St Paul's online; that the building endured a few bombs (some parts were rebuilt) was interesting, as was the information that Wren didn't want any memorials in there. There aren't as many memorials there today as there are in Westminster Abbey, and I wonder if Wren lived to see the first one, but memorials there are. There is an American Chapel -- dedicated to the Americans who lost their lives in England -- within the building, which is nice I suppose, though it strikes me a little strange.

Food

Lunch was at the Counting House [review], 50 Cornhill, London EC3V 3PD, phone 020 7283 7123. Generous portions, tasty food. I almost left my camera there, but someone from our tour group saved me. I had the "coronation chicken sandwich"; Carol had the steak and ale pie.

For supper we wandered over to our nearby La Bottega just down Ebury St at the corner of Eccleston. Carol had a small plate with salads; I had some eggplant lasagne and "spinach" (maybe New Zealand spinach?). Tasty, moderate prices. They close at 7 on weekdays, 6 on Saturdays.

While I'm here I'll tell you about Thursday 9/1

We went to Windsor Castle. The group met before 9am and walked to Victoria Station, where we caught a train to Clapham Junction. From there we took a train toward Windsor, which stopped short in Staines(?) because of "a police incident" (a "suspected fatality" -- hello, are you dead? I say, are you dead?); there was no guess about when the trains would run again, other than "you'd better take the bus."

We took a pleasant walk to the bus depot, and after a while the #71 bus came. We piled on (quite a few standees, as you might imagine), and after a bit more of a while the bus took off.

There were some gorgeous views, including one of the castle along the route from Ascot (the road the Queen takes when she comes to Windsor). Not far from the castle, our bus came to a halt, and we disembarked, walking up to the Guild Hall, which has underground rest-rooms on either side of the "porch."

The building was designed by Christopher Wren, originally with no interior columns. The townspeople insisted on columns (or we won't pay you) so Christopher Wren put the columns in, but they don't actually touch the ceiling.

Immediately to the left of the guild hall is the Crooked House, on Queen Charlotte St.; they serve "tea" all day starting around 9am. The food and drink were fine (we got the afternoon tea service for two, £32.00) but the tea and coffee were served in stainless-steel pots. Fine functionally, but if you prefer china/porcelain tea service, cross the bridge into Eton and take your tea at, umm, House on the River? River House? It's on your right at the Eton end of the footbridge.

Anyway, the castle is humungously enormous (Tom's description) and it surely is. Some of the "decorations" on the castle were added in the 19th century (it's way older than that) to make it look the way some people thought it should. The garden in the "dry moat" is gorgeous.

We made our way back to Victoria Station without incident. With no dinner plans, we scattered. Carol grabbed a salad from... was it M&S simply food? and on our way to the exit we saw "wasabi" -- a food cart(iirc) in the station. This wasn't gourmet food, but was every bit as good (or maybe I was hungry) as the stuff from a Japanese convenience store. The o-nigiri even had nori separated from the rice; after removing the tear-around strip and easing the sides off, you've got a crispy seaweed wrapping around the triangular rice-ball. Dee-lish!

Picked up some nigiri sushi, a plastic cup filled with eda-mame (they were salted just right as far as I was concerned), and one packet each of shoyu and wasabi paste. Grabbed a light Italian beer (Peroni I think) from La Bottega on our street. It was great.

Learned a few interesting things today (8/30)

2011-09-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

First, "Peace in our time" or "Peace for our time," as Neville Chamberlain said after a 1938 meeting with Hitler, was not nearly as daft as some have claimed. He was no dummy and certainly knew Hitler was plotting war; he knew England would need to prepare for war. He also knew that England wasn't ready to fight in 1938; by apparently appeasing Hitler he bought the UK time to prepare.

Until today, I'd heard only the traditional view, that Chamberlain was silly for believing Hitler. But upon reflection, what I heard today makes a lot more sense. The wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain#Legacy_and_reputation offers both sides of the story.

Something else we heard today was that during WW II, relationships were formed much more quickly than had been usual before that. Young people would meet in Trafalgar Square -- scandalously, without regard to social class, level of education, etc. -- and take the short walk to St James's Park, which was not mowed during those years. London suffered nightly bombings 57(?) days in a row at one point, which made people ever more aware that tomorrow we may die. Besides disregarding class, some of these young people even ignored nationality (how many thousands of British married Americans during the war?) -- and England (indeed the world) was never the same.

Hearing this, I immediately thought "Of course!" though I wouldn't ever have come up with the insight myself.
Not nearly as important...
but we had lunch at The Two Chairmen, a nice pub at the end of Lewisham St. (really an alley) where it meets Old Queen Street. The address seems to be 39 Dartmouth St.; more location info here.

In the National Gallery

Our guide, the superb Tom Hooper, explained several paintings hanging in the National Gallery; I remember some of his comments on two of them. The first, which you see at right, was the Arnolfini Portrait. Tom's comments were not quite the same as what Wikipedia says, and you can look up the latter, so I'll try to relate what Tom told us. First, the man is considerably older than his wife. She's wearing green, not an expensive color (Wikipedia says it's fur-lined, indicating its expense). Tom also pointed out that the man is wearing fur, but not the most expensive fur; he's of the merchant class and has done well. The girl is not pregnant, but she's got enough of a belly to show she's been eating well; lifting her green outer garment, we see that her inner garment reaches to the floor (further emphasizing the wealth of her husband-to-be).

By the way, the perspective and realism of the painting (note the convex mirror along the back wall) were what one would expect for the period (dated 1434 by Van Eyk), but this sort of technique hadn't made it to England by then.

One interpretation of the painting holds that the girl is afraid because of the high expectations placed upon her (at this time: to bear sons), communicated by the ample but not extravagant clothing she wears, by the age difference, by her submissive posture. The dog (man's best friend; most faithful creature) suggests the husband expects faithfulness from his new wife (or -to-be). The picture may document a betrothal (note the date/signature on the rear wall).

The idea of this picture as documenting the new/prospective husband's possessions (does he consider the girl as one of them?) and expectations is rather a mind-blower to me. As a father of daughters I find it offensive, but I also understand that the world often is and was that way.

Tom also interpreted for us "An Allegory of Venus and Cupid," seen here at left. The painting was evidently a "gift" for Francis I of France. Here's my recollection of his interpretation.

Cupid (Eros), son of Aphrodite (Venus), is here fondling his mother's breast and kissing her on the lips -- a kiss she's returning. An act of incest is about to happen, which Oblivion (upper left corner, with eyeless sockets) is trying to cover up. Father Time (upper right, with hourglass on his shoulder) is trying vehemently to foil oblivion -- suggesting that in time, one's sins will find one out.

Cupid's posture is unnatural (as the act of incest would be?) and he's about to step on a bird (a European swallow??); there's a girl on the right side of the painting also with a very unnatural (impossible) posture: she seems to be looking over her left shoulder at us (that's her left hand holding something near Venus's left arm). The girl's right hand holds a scorpion's tail (or something resembling it), and her left foot (near the right foot of the rose-clutching boy) is some sort of animal's paw -- so she's not really a normal human girl but some sort of mixed creature; foot of a wolf?, tail of scorpion, hands and head of a girl.

The old woman(?) in agony, whose head is below Venus's right elbow, may represent syphilis, which according to some accounts eventually killed Francis I.

Putting together syphilis on the left, the scorpion's tail on the right, and Father Time at top, one might think the painting a warning against indiscriminate sex: the danger of disease, the eventual exposure of the deed, and a (delayed) sting. Personally, I suspect that Cupid's unnatural and uncomfortable posture (Venus's too) suggests a great deal of discomfort may accompany the act itself.

Rather a shocking message to send with a gift; I tend to think it rather a futile gesture, but who knows? Maybe it was sent with good intent (Proverbs 24:11; James 5:20). Whatever the motive, the intensity of the painting's message rather shocked me.
Supper
We took a break at our hotel then had dinner at Boisdale (of Belgravia). Quite fancy decor (white tablecloths, etc.) and the music is great (live jazz most nights I think). The food was OK -- Dave ordered a mini "haggis" -- Carol and I each tried a bite. I had sausage and mash -- which was not low-sodium. The "Jacobite Menu" is a prix-fixe set -- three courses I think for about 20 pounds. Not bad considering the decor and music.

First days in London

2011-09-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

We arrived without incident on United 954 (nonstop SFO→LHR), went through immigration (passport control), picked up our bags, and exited via the line marked "Rien à déclarer" (or it should have been -- I don't remember what it actually said in English - "No declarations" maybe).

We exchanged some money -- quite a spread as I recall: I think we paid something like US$ 1.88 to get UK£ 1, but if we have any £s left over, each will get us $1.49.

Anyway, we took our little trolley (that's what they call baggage carts here) down some ramps then up an elevator to the central bus station by 7:40 -- next bus to London was 8:30am and it was £5 per person; great.

With 50 minutes to go, we visited "Caffe Nero" for snacks and a decaf latte. When our bus (501-London) appeared in the window, we went outside to the pick-up location -- stand#8 or something like this. The staff were unloading baggage from the belly of the bus.

Some of you grammarians may complain about my choice of verb in the preceding sentence. You're American, aren't you? Here's the thing: what pronoun would you use for "the staff" -- would you say "they"? Well yes, because two or more people are being discussed. So if I said "The staff appeared very quickly" then "they were unloading baggage..." the verb would be correct there, wouldn't it? Therefore "The staff were unloading" is fine, right? It's like in the advertisement "Pan Am are now offering direct flights to..." which I read in an English paper some decades ago....

Once the Heathrow baggage was off, they checked our tickets and took our bags. The bus went directly from Heathrow's central bus station to London's Victoria coach (in the US we'd normally say "bus") station -- not to be confused with the "Victoria Station" that usually means the rail or Underground or "tube" station. Once off the bus, we retrieved our bags and walked to the Lime Tree Hotel.

The hotel is just a few minutes' walk away. We arrived before 9:30am, and the fellow at the desk greeted us warmly. No, our room wasn't ready; yes, he could prioritise the cleaning staff's work so that the room would most likely be ready by 10:30. (This wasn't necessary, as it turned out.) And yes, he could suggest some interesting things to do. First, he told us how to get to Buckingham (pronounced “bucking’em”) Palace for the changing of the guard at 11:30, but he also told us about a smaller ceremony at the nearby St James's Palace where we wouldn't have 4,000 people blocking the view. What we didn't realize at the time was the ceremony at Bucking'em would take an hour, vs. 15-20 minutes for the smaller ceremony (viewed from maybe 15 yards away).

Then, as we had tickets for the musical Chicago that afternoon, we asked him how to get to the Cambridge Theatre. He took out his pink highlighter and showed us where to catch the #34 bus, what route it would take and where to get off. Very helpful!

We "popped our bags round the corner," and headed off, eventually finding St James's Palace. We also found an astonishing little plaque commemorating a visit of a legation (delegation?) from the Texas Republic! After watching the ceremony (which involved a 1978 Barry Manilow song) we walked to St James's Park and had lunch at the restaurant, just missing a brief but intense rain shower.

After lunch we headed back to the hotel, got settled in briefly, then had a run-in with the bus ticketing system: exact change required! A mad dash followed, but we got on the bus in time to allow for a little confusion at the far end. But we eventually got to the Cambridge Theatre, and we even got to our seats before they lowered the lights. The musical was "Chicago" -- about which I knew nothing. The acting was superb, but the costumes were a little disconcerting. wikipedia told me it was a satirical account (I had thought it rather cynical before reading that).

There was water on the ground when we emerged from the theatre around 5:30, and we got a light supper at "kopapa". There was a large hanging on the wall; I thought the material and colors looked Hawaiian, but our server called it a "tapa" from New Zealand.

We caught a cab back; our driver was a former investment banker. Quite a job change I'd say. He recommended "Boisdale," which has live jazz most evenings and is within a block or two of our hotel.

Sunday 8/28

From our little map we saw that "St Michael's" was a short walk away from the hotel. Their website gave a good impression, so we attended their 10:30am service. We couldn't see how to get in, but the guest organist's mother (who was visiting) led us round to the entrance. We sat down directly, and the lovely Carol said to the young lady in the next chair, "Hi! We're from California." Jennifer Garner (her real name) said, "Well I'm from North Carolina!"

The congregation was very friendly, and one of the folks, Mary-Lois I think, turns out to know the pastor who officiated at our wedding 25 years ago. Small world indeed.

We enjoyed the hymns, the readings from 1 Timothy 5 and Luke 14, and the sermon -- which was about parents (well, really about our priorities). Jennifer joined us for lunch -- she recommended a pub round the corner, probably the Thomas Cubitt -- we ate outside, but moved inside when the raindrops fell.

We met our tour guide, Tom, that afternoon, and he took us on a walk around the neighborhood. We got practice catching the bus and the Underground, and ate together at Grumbles, not too far from Victoria Station.

This tour includes a transit pass (bus and tube; also discounts on some boat rides) for the week. I'm tempted to buy a weekly pass for our time in Paris too, but we'll see....

Monday 8/29

In the morning, we visited Westminster Abbey -- quite impressive. If you're lucky, you'll do this tour in the morning rather than late afternoon (when "people lose their will to live"). A lot of people are buried under there.

We then took a boat ride, and had a very capable narrator describe several sights around the river. He called out the various bridges, the Tate Gallery, the London Eye, and so on. He mentioned the Bloody Tower (the Tower of London actually has several towers), relating the answer to the question "Which one is the Bloody Tower?" -- i.e., "the one behind the bloody trees, which is why you can't bloody see it."

Upon landing, we ran off to get lunch (we went up the hill to "EAT") then back for a Beefeater tour. These fellows have all served at least 22 years in the British Army with (in their words) no misdeeds detected, iirc. It was disconcerting to think of all the killings that happened in the tower complex.

We made our way back to the hotel for a quick freshen-up, then walked to Victoria (tube) station, transferred at Oxford Circus, and emerged above ground at Marylebone (pronounced "Marley Bone") for fish and chips at "Seashell", a short walk away. Very generous portions (a HUGE piece of cod) were provided, though Carrie's piece was seriously undercooked (we shared a table with her and Jim). They corrected this cheerfully and promptly. Good food.

What a Rosetta Stone Can't Do

2011-09-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

My buddy Todd posted this the other day, with this note on facebook:

Imagine what might be possible if we had a Rosetta Stone to help us actually "hear" what others really meant, instead of what they were saying.

I saw the Rosetta Stone last week, at the British Museum. It's got an astonishing story, having been decoded by an Englishman and a Frenchman, the latter having quite a tendency to faint. Not that I blame him; if I were the first person in over 1500 years who could read the inscription on some monuments, I'd faint too.

Remarkable as the rosetta stone is, I'm afraid that it won't do what Todd's posting wants for at least two reasons:

The Rosetta Stone only showed equivalent sentences in different scripts (ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic, ancient Greek); we need to go to a much higher level.
To describe what I mean by a higher level, let me first describe some lower levels. In the 1980s, the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) defined a reference model for computer communications. Lower levels described signaling techniques, like this one, describing an encoding technique at the "physical layer":
...a logic 0 is indicated by a 0 to 1 transition at the centre of the bit and a logic 1 is indicated by a 1 to 0 transition at the centre of the bit.
A higher layer might describe how data are presented -- e.g., is "Ô" represented as 11010100 (iso 8859-1) or 11000011 10010100 (UTF-8) or 00100110 00110000 01111000 01000100 00110100 00111011 (i.e., "&0xD4;"), etc.
A yet higher layer might specify how semantics are communicated, e.g., if we want a file named "foo" to instead be named "bar", do we say:
- mv foo bar
- rename foo,bar
- os.rename('foo', 'bar')
- …
As "mv foo bar" is higher than "a 0 to 1 transition at the centre of the bit", so deriving human intentions between individuals is a higher level than translating between "tres heureux de faire votre connaissance" and "delighted to make your acquaintance."
Even if our intentions could be translated, they're in conflict because of The Fall.
A buyer for example has the intention of paying the lowest possible price for a box of goods, whereas the seller has the intention of getting the highest price. We can translate the intention, but we all knew that anyway.
What if "Anna" wants a world where we pay teachers more if they have to work harder to educate tougher kids who have less parental support, but "Michelle" wants to pay teachers more when they work in districts with higher property tax revenues? Is it reasonable that a richer district should be able to pay its teachers more? Is it reasonable that among teachers in the same county, teachers with harder jobs should be paid less than those with easier jobs?
Suppose "Billy" wants a world where their companies can destroy competition by exploiting monopoly power but "Sherm" thinks government should restrict what he calls "anticompetitive" behavior. What do these have in common?
How about if "Phyllis" wants popular media to affirm family values (e.g., marriage commitments that survive conflict, hardship—even betrayal), but "Jane" wants to show "the world as it is" including the behavior of typical US college students, the high US divorce rate, etc.?
Besides conflicts like this, how about the observation that we've had decades now of consumers fighting workers and finally winning? Even within one person, the desires/goals are terribly mixed up.

I don't think the answer is to give up and die, but neither do is the answer as simple as clearly communicating our intentions and goals. I'd like to think that if like-minded people will listen to each other in search of common ground (think "marriage counseling"), this could make some things better, but I'm afraid there will never be a "silver bullet."

I'll be happy to be proven wrong!

Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill

2011-09-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

It's subtitled, "Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality." (Zondervan, 2010; excerpt here; publisher info here)

I found this small volume on the book table at an Anglican church we visited in London. My impression, not backed up with statistics or anything, is that books mentioning homosexuality and Christianity often say things like:

My church rejected me as soon as I told them I was gay -or-
The Scriptures commonly used to condemn homosexual behavior are either
- misinterpreted [they're really about idolatry, lack of hospitality, promiscuity, etc] or
- outdated (like the prohibitions against eating bacon and shrimp, wearing braids/jewelry, etc]
and in either case irrelevant; -or-
I prayed this prayer [or went through this process] and was cured of my homosexuality [and you too can be cured if you're willing to...]

What don't I like about these things? The first thing is that they side-track attention from what I might call The ~~Real Problem~~, or rather the Remaining Problem:

complains about the lack of real acceptance in our congregations; this is a real issue too, but even if the congregation (both clergy and laity) fully accept people like Hill who have homosexual feelings, problems do not thereby all go away.
tries to explain away "troublesome" Scriptures, but many Christians can't believe either the "really talking about idolatry..." explanation nor the "bacon and shrimp" one (indeed, as http://bit.ly/nBJOcl indicates, some gay Christians find such explanations specious).
is no more satisfying to an un-"cured" person with homosexual feelings than a "faith healing" testimonial would be to someone paralyzed in all four limbs.

No, what I mean by The Remaining Problem is this: suppose Joe Christian experiences homosexual feelings; when he tells his pastors and church friends about the feelings, they pray with and for him, accept him as he is, listen and speak to him with compassion and understanding. Suppose further that as Joe reads and studies the Scriptures, he remains unconvinced that they condone any sexual relationship other than marriage between one man and one woman. And suppose that in spite of much praying and fasting and seeking healing, Joe continues to be attracted only to other men.

What then? The Remaining Problem is: what do we say to gay Christians about their desires -- not just sexual desires, but the desire to belong with and to another, the desire to know and be known, intimately, by a life partner? Do we say it's all right to disobey the Scriptures (you relativists out there can read this as "disobey the Scriptures as they understand them")? That seems like a really bad idea.

Do we say, "Pray so that you can be healed from this"? I think that's a wonderful idea, which also applies to our brothers and sisters with other persistent issues (those paralyzed in one or more limbs, those dying from cancer or AIDS, brothers and sisters who are blind, who can't sleep nights, who struggle with chronic depression, etc.) -- but what happens when, as in the vast majority of cases, healing doesn't come?

We should not say they lack faith [etc] -- we've no right to say that, and besides we could be 100% wrong anyway. Eutychus was dead and therefore had no faith at all when Paul raised him to life (Acts 20:9-10) -- ditto Jairus's daughter (Mark 5:35). And if the problem is sin, well, everybody's got sin, even those who did get healed or raised from the dead.

No, The Remaining Problem is, when all that other stuff has been tried, how do our brothers and sisters live when they

have homosexual urges;
feel no attraction to members of the opposite sex;
believe the Scriptures that tell us the only acceptable sexual relationship is in a marriage between one man and one woman;
earnestly desire to trust, obey, honor, serve Christ; and
yearn for love and intimacy and acceptance just like the rest of us?

How do we encourage them to live for Christ in the midst of unfulfilled and possibly unfulfillable desires?

Hill's book addresses these questions with compassion, integrity, poignancy. He tells his own story, and also describes some struggles endured by Gerard Manley Hopkins and by Henri Nouwen, both of whom had homosexual urges but did not act upon them. Hill points out that he has the same unfulfilled desires as many fellow believers who remain single, but not by their own choice. An excerpt from the introduction:

[T]his book is neither about how to live faithfully as a practicing homosexual person nor about how to live faithfully as a fully healed or former homosexual man or woman. J. I. Packer, commenting on Paul’s hopeful word for sexual sinners in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, writes, “With some of the Corinthian Christians, Paul was celebrating the moral empowering of the Holy Spirit in heterosexual terms; with others of the Corinthians, today’s homosexuals are called to prove, live out, and celebrate the moral empowering of the Holy Spirit in homosexual terms”† This book is about what it means to do that—how, practically, a non-practicing but still-desiring homosexual can “prove, live out, and celebrate” the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit in homosexual terms.
This book is written mainly for those gay Christians who are already convinced that their discipleship to Jesus necessarily commits them to the demanding, costly obedience of choosing not to nurture their homosexual desires....
† J. I. Packer, “Why I Walked,” Christianity Today 47 (January 20, 2003) 46.
Washed and Waiting p.16

Hill does a terrific job in this small, readable volume; every church leader should read it. →http://amzn.to/pCu3It

Heard last week, on a boat ride on the Thames

2011-09-07T01:20:00.000-07:00

As we approached the Tower of London area, the waterman (who claimed not to be a guide, but he was very good) described some historical events that occurred in the "Bloody Tower."

"People ask, where is the Bloody Tower? Well, it's behind the bloody trees, which is why you can't bloody see anything!" This guy was pretty funny -- every bit as funny as he thought he was :)

Two spaces or one at the end of a sentence?

2011-08-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

My buddy Michael asked the question, and pointed out that if you use two spaces at the end of a sentence, and you're writing HTML, then the web browser will treat it as a single space. But really, reformatting goes way beyond that. If you write something like the following:

The skies they were 

ashen 





and sober /          the leaves they 

were crispéd and 





sere.

it will be rendered in HTML like this:

The skies they were ashen and sober / the leaves they were crispéd and sere.

To verify, select "view source" in your browser and search for "ashen"

Everybody* hates my bike

2011-07-31T20:55:00.000-07:00

* except the organizers of L'Eroica

Some years ago, I took my old (1974) bike to the shop; I wanted them to repack the bearings on my wheels, etc. They looked at it, and me, with disdain. They saw an old junker worth no more than $25; I saw a faithful friend that had carried me around campus and over the hills for over a quarter-century.

I rode the bike to work and people acted surprised to see a padlock on it.

Some of my friends have suggested that I buy a new one; they think it's ugly and obsolete.

Just last week I was ordering a new wheel, and the guy at the store asked me if it was worth putting that much money into an old bike.

I didn't realize what that old bike meant to me, really, until I tried to explain my feelings to someone. That bicycle was the first "big" purchase (nearly $150) I made myself; I had just started attending college thousands of miles from home. I rode that bike throughout college; besides taking me to class, it also took me over the mountains and to the beach (San Gregorio, via Woodside Road). I took it home for the summer and rode it from my parents' home up to Puu Ualakaa state park, something I'd never imagined doing on a bike before.

That old bike is just a machine, but it reminds me of my youth -- back when my whole life was still ahead of me. Maybe I'm fond of it because it's one of the few things I have from that era (I still have some textbooks, too--math and physics). It represents adventure, mobility. Possibilities.

Like everything else in this life, it's just temporary, but if I have any "prize possessions" I guess that old bike would be one of them. I told my daughter Jenny that maybe I'll buy a new bike when this old one turns 40, but if I do that the lovely Carol will want me to pitch this one. So maybe not.

Using technology to reduce sex trafficking

2011-07-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

I don't remember a lot of dates or figures from however many years I studied history while growing up, but I remembered Eli Whitney's cotton gin, an invention that facilitated the processing of cotton... and by the way increased the traffic in human slaves, because now there was a cheap way to process all that cotton picked by forced labor.

Tonight, while listening to a CD from this year's Freedom Summit, I heard of a way that technology is being used to instead reduce human trafficking.

Here's how it works. A man comes to town on a business trip. He doesn't know anybody and doesn't have anything he urgently needs to do. So he pulls out his laptop, checks out ~~craigslist~~ or some similar site and flips to the "adult escort" section or whatever. There he sees a picture of a young-looking girl. "Click here to set up a date with this hottie," it says, possibly naming a price.

So he clicks; instead of a picture of a scantily clad young girl he gets something like this:

There might be an announcement that "You just tried to buy sex; be advised that the __________ Police Department will be enforcing anti-prostitution laws vigorously."

Here's something even better: a map with a red dot; the guy looks at the dot's position on the map and sees it's on the same block as his hotel!

OK, I was so excited by this use of technology that I forgot to give you the background. There's a theory about sex trafficking that says, there are a lot of men out there wanting to buy sex -- more men wanting to buy than women willing to sell. Sex traffickers see that the market is unbalanced, that money is being left on the table, so they kidnap, coerce, force women to sell themselves against their will.

According to this theory (which I actually believe), if fewer men want to buy sex, fewer women and children will be trafficked and forced into prostitution. Therefore it's a good idea to reduce or eliminate demand. If men think it extremely risky to set up a prostitution appointment online, fewer online prostitution appointments will be set up. And whereas lots of men may be willing to go onto a craigslist-like website, they may not be willing to get into their cars and go cruising around downtown looking for a street prostitute. And so demand would drop and with it the economic incentives for human sex trafficking.

If the demand were to almost completely disappear, so would the amount of human sex trafficking. So goes the theory.

A couple of issues with this concept: first, the concern about the whole Police State thing. Hey, if google knows where you are, why can't the cops know? I'm not talking about giving the police any additional powers here; I just mean that they can use whatever information is out there for commercial enterprises (including sex traffickers by the way) could use.

Another issue is that mapping by IP address is somewhat tenuous. My IP address (which isn't static by the way) appears on maps to be over 50 miles away from my house; if someone uses a mifi-like portable hotspot, geographical information probably isn't there. But a G3/G4 enabled smart phone? H'm...

I was reading recently in WHAT WENT WRONG? (by Lewis) that technology served to strengthen tyranny in the middle east, up until recent times. I already mentioned the cotton gin. And you can be sure that despite denials by the communist bandits in Peking (hey, they say hwa-sheng-dwun;I can say Peking) the bad guys use IT to extend their reach.

So it's very exciting to me to hear about ways information technology is being used for something really good and ultimately important.

But the righteous by faith shall live?

2011-07-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

Spent a little over an hour listening to a Tim Keller talk from the 2006 Desiring God conference -- a terrific lecture regarding the supremacy of Christ and the gospel in a postmodern world. Something he said made my head explode. [Update: Click here for download options.]

Somebody he quoted said that Jonah 2:9 is the central verse of the Bible, in particular the part where Jonah says, "Salvation is of the Lord" or in the NIV "Salvation comes from the Lord." It's from the Lord! As if this were some sort of surprise!

We evangelicals say we know this, but actually we don't. Keller asked the assembled audience, rhetorically, "Why do you do your ministry? It's because you're so grateful for what God has done for you, right? Then why do you burn out? Why are you up when attendance is up and down when it's down?"

His point, of course, is that we think of "salvation" as "what will get me into heaven when this life is over for me" and maybe a little more. Something we don’t think of when we say "Salvation is from the Lord" is the set of things that make me feel good about myself.

Don't get me wrong, it does make me feel good about myself to know that God loves me regardless of anything I do or don't do. But when I think about salvation I don't tend to think about what makes me feel good, and vice versa. So what does make me feel good? Here's a short and incomplete list:

kissing Carol and sharing my day with her
talking with my children
enthusiastic greeting from the dog first thing in the morning
overcoming obstacles and solving problems (like when I finally got the cluster off my 1974 bike's rear wheel)
when people I love enjoy the food I prepare
being helpful/useful to someone -- whether it's praying for them so they feel cared for, or some problem at work I can help them with, or sharing some insight...

Keller shared an experience he had, reading Romans 1:16-17. Apparently in sometranslation it says "he who is righteous by faith shall live," and he said he got an impression, probably from God—an amplification of that verse: …and he who is righteous by preaching shall die every Sunday.

Well thank goodness it's not just me! We say we're saved by grace through faith, we say our righteousness comes from God apart from anything we do, but we're anxious about how well we preach (channeling Keller on that one) or we feel good about ourselves depending on how people like the food we prepare or whether we've been helpful to someone or whether the house is clean when someone drops in or whether we've achieved some other goal. It is not bad to feel good about these things, but to seek our salvation in them, to think our meaning in life comes from them -- that's silly.

What is the cure for this folly? I hope we don't have to be thrown off a boat and get swallowed by a fish! Well, it takes intervention from God to be sure. Our part is to set our minds on things above (Colossians 3:1-2), the things of the Spirit (Romans 8:5-6); to fix our eyes on the unseen things (2 Corinthians 4:18) and our hope on Jesus (1 John 3:2-3); to be transformed (Romans 12:1-2) and to work out our salvation (Philippians 2:12).

Thy kingdom come — into my life
thy will be done on earth — and in my heart too
as it is in heaven
…
And lead us not into temptation — the temptation to look for salvation (significance or security) elsewhere
but deliver us from the evil one — and from our own folly

Guess I'll have to repeat that as needed, and 20-30 years from now I'll be less foolish than I am today.

Skeuomorphic design??

2011-07-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

So I happened to read some rants about Mac OS X Lion™’s user interface—a rant written as it turns out by a current Apple employee. These rants were not particularly charitable but I'm afraid I still found them entertaining, laced as they were with 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words (one verb in particular appeared numerous times) and complaints about stupid *pointless* skeumorphism.

Naturally I had to go look up the word. A few hours later, I was working on an HTML table; when you click on a certain element, the table would expand, and I wanted to show the number of rows you'd be adding by clicking there. It looked kind of like this:

title	KLOC	etc
[⊕₅] summary info here	474	...

Got the picture? I asked a few colleagues if they thought the number made the table too busy, etc., and one of them said, yes it's busy but I still love it... and also said the design was skeuomorphic.

My reply: "I've seen this word before but for some reason your email didn't have any profanity in it."

He shot back: "It looks f*** nice, too"

We're all broken; let's all stop pretending and admit it, shall we?

2011-07-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

My brother-in-law has a saying, "Everybody's got something." By that he means that each of us has problems, and not just little ones.

Of course he's right; his words remind me of the prescription to "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."Indeed they are, as discussed further in this article from quoteinvestigator.com:

This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self.
1903, The Homely Virtues by John Watson, Courtesy, Page 168, Hodder & Stoughton, London. (Google Books full view) link

If I think about it for a second, the fact that everybody has something, that everyone is fighting a great battle, means that I'm not alone in mine. We're all fighting great battles, we all struggle,we're all broken. As the Lord himself told us, "In this world you will have tribulation" (John 16:33 or so).

So if my struggle becomes apparent to others, there's no need for shame. And if my struggle remains hidden from others? Well, I'm not a proponent of dumping all my troubles on everybody, but as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in allour troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God." I take this to apply to me too: when I'm afflicted, and when God brings me comfort, I'm being prepared/equipped to comfort others.

Two corollaries come to mind. First, when I have troubles, it could well be that God has equipped someone to comfort me in that trouble. Second, the plan God has for bringing me comfort could well be that very person he has equipped, so if I want comfort from God but I don't want him to use people to bring me that comfort—well, that may not work very well.

In any case, we are not alone in having struggles—great struggles; everybody's got some, as the Lord himself said. So there's no need for shame. Rather, let us glorify Him by giving and receiving comfort -- let us clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, as Paul says. (Colossians 3:12)

"By this will all know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:35)

Excursus on "normalizing brokenness"

I don't like the phrase "normalizing brokenness"; I'd rather say "let's admit that we're all broken," mainly because "normalize" has at least two definitions I don't see in the dictionary.The Apple dictionary program (1.0.2) for example has:

verb
1 [ trans. ] bring or return to a normal condition or state: Vietnam and China agreed to normalize diplomatic relations in 1991 | [ intrans. ] the situation had normalized.
…

Definition #2 wasn't applicable; it has to do with math or computer science. A web search for "normalize" yields similar results.

But a web search on "normalize violence" (with or without the quotes) shows the word used to mean something more like "establish as normal"—i.e., normative. Consider what"norm of behavior" means, or "normative economics" or "normative ethics" for that matter. Here's Apple's dictionary on "normative:"

adjective formal
establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, esp. of behavior : negative sanctions to enforce normative behavior.

This aspect of establishing a norm (or standard) also appears in onlinedictionaries: merriam-webster.com has "prescribing norms <normative rules of ethics> <normative grammar>" as definition #3; dictionary.com has "tending or attempting to establish such a norm, especially by the prescription of rules: normative grammar."as #2.

Normative grammar tells us how we ought to speak and write; normative ethics tells us how we ought to behave; if violence is normative, that's saying violence is OK—which it's not.

Rather than normalizing violence, I'd much rather that we normalize generosity, honesty, self-control, patience, kindness, and compassion. Let's promote those things as standards that we aspire to.

When people talk about normalizing brokenness, I don't think they're saying "let's promote brokenness as a standard or norm that we aspire to"; I think they're saying "let's all admit that brokenness is normal in the sense of average, as universal -- i.e., that we're all broken." We don't aspire to brokenness, any more than we aspire to flatulence when we eat beans, though normal it may be for beans to produce it.

Finally, I'm an expert in something

2011-07-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Reading Merton today, I saw something that I know a lot about: impure intention.

An impure intention is one that yields to the will of God while retaining a preference for my own will. It divides my will from His will. It gives me a choice between two advantages: one in doing His will and one in doing my own. An impure intention is imprudent, because it weighs truth in the balance against illusion; it chooses between a real and an apparent good as if they were equal.
Merton, No Man Is an Island 4.4 (pp. 54-55)

Oh yes, I have a lot of impure intention. Take my money (please) for example: I give some to God's purposes, but the rest I want to use for my own. Or consider time—rather, attention: I pay attention to the things of God, like prayer, meditation, or thinking about how to serve and edify others (or myself for that matter). But after that I want to pay attention to what I want to pay attention to: writing some code, reading an "escape" novel, going on a bike ride, etc.

What does Merton mean when he talks about a real vs an apparent good? Simply that “True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.” (Merton, op. cit., 4.3, p. 54). These illusory rewards—the "vain things that charm me most" but cannot really satisfy—these are my false gods, my idols. They're only illusions, they don't satisfy, so why can't I just stop pursuing them? Like the Israelites, I hear the Lord calling me to "lie down in green pastures" (Psalm 23:2) and rest in him, to drink from "the spring of living water" that is God himself (Jeremiah 2:13).

"Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry," he says to them in Jeremiah 2:25. And like them, I sometimes reply, "It's no use! I love foreign gods, and I must go after them." What is the cure to this folly? How can they, how can I, develop a pure intention? How can my corrupt thinking be corrected so that God's will is really mine? How can I surrender more fully to him?

It's not complicated, which is not to say it's easy. And it takes a long time. Basically it's spiritual formation, transformation, discipleship. It's the disciplines: praying God to change me, remembering and thinking about the truth (in the Bible, in the lives of those around me, in my own life): that "only in God is my soul at rest; in him is my salvation." (Psalm 62:1) Indeed, who will save me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God (Romans 7:24-25). Merton adds this word:

None of these things can be done without prayer, and we must turn to prayer first of all, not only to discover God's will but above all to gain the grace to carry it out with all the strength of our desire.
Merton, op. cit. 4.9 (p. 61)

And as it says in Hebrews 4:16, Let us then approach the throne ofgrace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and findgrace to help us in our time of need.

Changing a local variable in the Python debugger

2011-07-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

Dave stopped by my office the other day and asked me how to do that, and I told him I wasn't sure. I seemed to remember having some difficulty with it in the past, but I also knew it was supposed to work. So I played with it while he watched.

After some confusion, he suggested the answer: if you modify the variable, don't look at it again; just continue. Sure enough, it works:

$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Jul  5 2010, 11:47:21) 
[GCC 4.5.0 20100604 [gcc-4_5-branch revision 160292]] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pdb
>>> import foo
>>> pdb.run('foo.main()')
> (1)()
(Pdb) s
--Call--
> /mnt/home/collin/foo.py(3)main()
-> def main():
(Pdb) l
  1   #!/usr/bin/python
  2   
  3  -> def main():
  4       x = "foo"
  5       if x == "foo":
  6           print "still foo"
  7       else:
  8           print "x changed to", x
  9   
 10   if __name__ == '__main__':
 11       main()
(Pdb) n
> /mnt/home/collin/foo.py(4)main()
-> x = "foo"                         We're about to execute line 4
(Pdb) n
> /mnt/home/collin/foo.py(5)main()
-> if x == "foo":                    x has been assigned the value "foo", and now we're about to test it
(Pdb) x='bar'                        I'm changing it to 'bar'
(Pdb) c                              and now I say "continue"
x changed to bar                     test at line 5 failed; we execute line 8

By the way, 'single' and "double" quotes mean the same thing in Python (unlike in Perlfor example, or C). Anyway, now watch me ruin it. Continuing from where we left off:

>>> pdb.run('foo.main()')
> (1)()
(Pdb) s
--Call--
> /mnt/home/collin/foo.py(3)main()
-> def main():
(Pdb) n
> /mnt/home/collin/foo.py(4)main()
-> x = "foo"
(Pdb) n
> /mnt/home/collin/foo.py(5)main()
-> if x == "foo":                    We haven't executed line 5 yet
(Pdb) x='bar'                        Change it to 'bar'
(Pdb) x                              Examine it. What happens?
'foo'                                Examining it cancels out the change I just made.
(Pdb) x='bar'                        Was I hallucinating? Try again!
(Pdb) x                              ... and look again.
'foo'                                Ugh, just like last time.
(Pdb) c                              So the debugger thinks value's unchanged; what does the program think?
still foo                            The program thinks x still equals 'foo'

This is apparently a long-standing issue, dating back at least to this 2004 thread on the topic (prettier link). Are Dave and I the last two people in the world to hear about this?

On what basis can one say "all men are created equal"?

2011-07-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

If Aristotle wrote (in Politics I:V) that "from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule," how did we come to the text of our Declaration of Independence, which says "all men are created equal"? (I'll leave to others the question of whether that applied to women or slaves.)

The idea of equality, the notion that every person on earth has dignity, was not always popular, and isn't popular everywhere today. What's the basis for this idea? Why do you believe it?

I'll tell you why I believe it. I believe it because the Scriptures tell us, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27 NIV). And as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "there are no gradations in the image of God."

By the way, if you don't believe that God created humanity with a sort of divine dignity, on what basis do you say that we are all created equal? If you say it's because we have the ability to appreciate beauty, do you say that a blind person is less than equal? If it's because we have the ability to appreciate beautiful music, is a deaf person less human? If it's because we can think deep thoughts, then is everybody with an IQ less than, say, 95, entitled to less consideration under the law?

I mean seriously. I won't go into the abortion issue here, but there are some real questions about how we decide who to respect, who to protect and defend, what our society really should be about.

And to bring this to personal experience (this is a blog, right?), I have a confession. The other day I was at J&J, picking up something for dinner. As I tried to make a beeline for my car, I was accosted by a stranger in a poncho, who wanted something to eat. I said OK, do you prefer noodles or fried rice, and we went through that whole thing. I was eager to get home and did not have much patience. I did not want to hear his story or pray for him; I just wanted to be done.

So no, I did not treat him as an equal. Did I treat him with the dignity I should have—the dignity he deserves as someone created in God's image? Not so much. I could have spent a minute or two more with him; I could have heard a minute or two's worth of his story, I could have encouraged him, I could have prayed for him, I could have invited him to my home to have a shower and get his clothes washed.

Because that's what it really means, isn't it, to treat every person out there as an equal—to treat each person as I'd want to be treated? And if I"m not willing to do that, then do I actually believe that stuff about all men being created equal? And so maybe that self-evident truth isn't really as self-evident as the founding fathers said it was—even to them (and some of whom owned slaves).

May the Lord help me to be better prepared, more aware, and more willing to do his will the next time I run into someone. Not that I'll necessarily invite them to my house, but at least I could take a minute to hear their story, to encourage them, to pray for them, and at least to think about them as a real human being, a brother or sister, rather than an obstacle to my getting home to resume my middle-class life.

“You…complete…me”—yeah, right

2011-07-03T15:01:00.000-07:00

What does that mean? That I'm incomplete without you? In saying, "you complete me," I admit I'm using you for my own benefit—i.e., to feel whole; I want to exploit you for my own benefit. Here's how Merton describes this sort of "love":

A selfish love seldom respects the rights of the beloved to be an autonomous person.... this love seeks to keep him in subjection to ourselves. It insists that he conform himself to us, and it works in every possible way to make him do so.
No Man Is an Island 1.8 (p.9)

How creepy is that? Contrast that with Paul's word that love "is not self-seeking" (1 Corinthians 13:5, NIV) or Merton's description of unselfish love:

Charity makes me seek for more than the satisfaction of my own desires, even though they be aimed at another's good.... My will must be the instrument of God's will in helping them create their own destiny.
No Man Is an Island 1.6 (p.7)

Now Peck defined love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." (The Road Less Traveled, p.81). I think love means more than that, but it doesn't mean less, and in particular love doesn't include the will to exploit you for my personal benefit.

The exception to all this is that we can love God without wanting to nurture His spiritual growth; we love God, we reciprocate God's love for us, in order to help ourselves grow.

But if that's OK, why is it so bad if I "love" you in order to make me feel good/whole/significant/whatever? There is so much wrong with that idea, it's hard to know where to begin:

It's unfair to you.
It burdens you with heavy expectations.
It's selfish.
It's dumb
which in this case means it's doomed to failure because you can't save me from myself. And therefore...
It's based on a lie.
It stops me from serving or giving to you
because I'm too busy using you; I'm clinging to you to get meaning/joy/whatever from life and so I can't afford to let go
It denies God his proper place in my life.
The Lord is my shepherd; you can't be. (Psalm 23; John 10)

And did I mention that it's selfish and doomed to failure?

Making rows in a table appear (or disappear) with HTML and javascript

2011-07-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

I ran into this problem and found someone else's solution, so you don't have to.

As luck would have it, I searched on "toggle visibility javascript" and clicked on the first thing I saw: http://blog.movalog.com/a/javascript-toggle-visibility/, which has this fragment:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
    function toggle_visibility(id) {
       var e = document.getElementById(id);
       if(e.style.display == 'block')
          e.style.display = 'none';
       else
          e.style.display = 'block';
    }
//-->
</script>

This code made my table rows disappear all right, but when I asked them to re-appear, it looked awful. If my table looked like this

row 1	something1
row 2	something2
row 3	something3
row 4	something4

and I made, say, rows 2 and 4 disappear, and reappear, with the above code, it looked like this:

row 1	something1
row 2	something2
row 3	something3
row 4	something4

Yow! That sure was icky. I discovered some other website that mentionedthe concept of using display "inline", but the result still looked like this:

row 1	something1
row 2	something2
row 3	something3
row 4	something4

Was there some other "display" I could give it, that would make things look better? I went to htmlhelp.com, which didn't help me much; http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/classification/display.html lists these values:

block (a line break before and after the element)
inline (no line break before and after the element)
list-item (same as block except a list-item marker is added)
none (no display)

The secret, as it turns out, was to change the above code to instead look like this:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
    function toggle_visibility(id) {
       var e = document.getElementById(id);
       //if(e.style.display == 'block') ← not "block"; check vs. 'none' instead
       if(e.style.display != 'none')
          e.style.display = 'none';
       else
          //e.style.display = 'block'; ← no "block" needed; make it empty instead
          e.style.display = '';
    }
//-->
</script>

Which is what the second site in the search results would have told me right away: http://www.dustindiaz.com/seven-togglers/ has:

function toggle(obj) {
 var el = document.getElementById(obj);
 if ( el.style.display != 'none' ) {
  el.style.display = 'none';
 }
 else {
  el.style.display = '';
 }
}

Kosari/gosari considered harmful -- but only if eaten raw (so eating 고사리나물 in moderation won't hurt)

2011-07-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

(This isn't actually a recipe)
Just saw this article on bracken in the Atlantic Online. The short version is that this fern actually contains carcinogens, but in varying amounts; a piece of the stuff raw may or may not contain much in the way of carcinogens. And once you cook it, the carcinogens are rendered harmless.

The poison is called ptaquiloside; if cows eat bracken, they may get cancer or pass some ptaquiloside into their milk. Creepy, huh?

But as Hank Shaw writes in the Atlantic article above,

a very normal cooking process for fiddleheads—blanching in salty water, then shocking in ice water, then sauteeing—renders the fiddlehead close to harmless.

Indeed, that's the process Maangchi uses:

This is my method of soaking kosari.
Place kosari in cold water in a pot. 1 cup of kosari will need more than 20 cups of water.
Boil it for 30 minutes and don’t drain hot water and let it soak. Wait about 6-8 hours.I usually boil it at night and drain it next morning.
"Korean Cooking Ingredients:Fernbrake"
at http://www.maangchi.com/ingredients/kosari

Well, I'm not going to go out and buy a bunch of the stuff, but it's good to know that in the amounts I eat of it, it's not really all that bad.

Kenmore dishwasher still won't drain: 665.13422k701

2011-06-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

Three weeks back, our dishwasher wasn't draining. It looked about like the picture you see at right. I was glad at that time that we had the extended warranty, because it looked like a pain to deal with whatever that valve was that I thought might be the problem.

The repairman came around 6/14 or 6/15 and said we needed a new pump. Really? I thought the pump was quite healthy when I'd looked at it on the fifth, and it seemed to me that the problem was probably downstream from there. But the repair guy had complete diagnostic tools, etc., and he ordered the replacement parts (which apparently cost over $400). The next repair visit was Saturday 6/25, and the sad news is that the picture at right was taken Sunday 6/26. That's right, after the dishwasher had been "fixed" by a professional repair guy.

As you may imagine, we were quite unhappy with the situation, not least because we had a big party here Sunday afternoon. I was incensed and got into online chat with the sears repair crew, who went through their script and eventually offered me an appointment on July 7th. At this point I told him that it's not reasonable to ask us to wait another 11 days to have the problem looked at; I didn't have much confidence that they'd be able to fix it, actually.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and just order the replacement part(s) and fix it myself, since it would be another 11 days before they'd even consider sending someone out, who might not know any more than the first two guys.

Monday morning

Early the next morning, I went to the Sears website to look at the diagram, so I could locate the right part. If the pump was OK, the problem could be in the drain hose (the check valve seemed to be embedded in it), or maybe the air gap, orthe hose that led from the air-gap to the garbage disposal. Where was that blockage?

If I disconnected the drain hose from the air gap, I'd find out. So I cleared out the under-sink area and loosened the hose clamp. I eased the drain hose off the air gap and ker-pow! water flew everywhere. Fortunately I had an old towel already spread out, and a big dishpan. I swung the hose over to the dishpan, but by then the pressure had already been relieved.

You guessed it; the air-gap was clogged. Just to be sure, I hit the cancel/drain button on the dishwasher; sure enough, my dishpan filled with milky water.

thereifixedit.com

So, I found an old piece of hose, black-taped it to the dishwasher drain hose, andused some wire-ties to clamp it to the faucet. I also checked the other hose (which runs from the air-gap into the garbage disposal) to make sure it wasn't clogged. (It wasn't.) You can see the result at left.

So with that temporary repair in place, I called over to Plumbing N' Things in Redwood City. Did they have air-gaps in stock? Yes they did. I ran over there, and a very pleasant young lady took care of me. Air-gap, chrome? Polished nickel? Had we ordered things there before? She looked us up. "Oh! I sold you your kitchen!" I told her the old air-gap had clogged up, so she sold me a different brand name this time. $18.10 including tax. Dishwasher's running at the moment; I'll install it maybe tomorrow evening.

The moral of the story

For me, anyway, the lesson learned was: next time I call a warranty repair guy, to take enough time off from work to supervise him. (These guys do not necessarily all know what they're doing.) And if he comes up with a diagnosis I don't understand, to discuss it with him. "Couldn't the problem be after the drain hose?" or whatever.

If the guy knows what he's doing, I might learn something. And if he doesn't, he might learn something.

Love and Destiny

2011-06-24T08:34:00.001-07:00

Merton writes in No Man Is an Island 1.6 (7–8):

Charity makes me seek far more than the satisfaction of my own desires, even though they may be aimed at another's good. It must also make me an instrument of God's providence in their lives. ... My will must be the instrument of God's will in helping them create their destiny. ... My love must be for them the minister not of my own spirit but of the Holy Spirit.
Such a conception of charity is, above all, proper to a priest.

This is a really good point, one which I must remember myself: love isn't primarily about making someone feel good, or making them happy with me (though if my appearance makes them unhappy, that may be a sign I'm not loving them well). Instead my love must seek to help them create their destiny. Two more points, both obvious:

That's not all of what love is about, but it had better be a major focus. If I tell the lovely Carol, "I want to help you create your destiny," that's not nearly the same to her as "I love you."
My love is always mixed up with my own desire to be worthy, and to receive love in return. It's not pure.

If a module gets bursts of changes, it's more likely to have outstanding bugs

2011-06-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

The title is my attempt to summarize this paper from Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=137315. A colleague found it recently. Very interesting. I'll have to see how these results can be applied to, ah, non-microsoft code.

macbook hard drive upgrade

2011-06-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

My buddy Sylvia wanted a hand upgrading the HDD on her macbook. Having not ever done this before I was interested to see what it was like. Google pointed me at a bunch o' pages and I decided to emulate http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/45292-another-macbook-hard-drive-replacement-experience.html:

My MacBook came from the factory with an 80 GB drive (Fujitsu MHV2080BHPL), and I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to a larger drive
Sylvia is going from 120GB to 500GB. This is a WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM
1) I backed up my existing hard drive to an external firewire enclosure using SuperDuper.
Sylvia is already doing this, so we brought her backup up-to-date, which took under 10 minutes.
2) I shut down and rebooted, holding the "Option" key to see my boot device choices: I chose the external drive and booted from that, just to make sure everything on the backup worked okay.
OK, let's see... power on, hold down option key for a ... long ... time. OK, got a choice of boot devices, point at the external drive and double click.
Somebody asked how long it took; the (digital) clock on the range said 2:40 when I selected it; now it says 2:41 (hint: the sun is shining) and her desktop has the just-added SuperDuper! icon. Desktop background is the starfield one though, rather than Sylvia's usual background—a painting of a mountain scene.
It did. I shut down the MacBook and disconnected the external drive.
3) I laid out a clean cloth, turned the MacBook over and removed the battery. Then I used a small (jeweler's) Phillips-head screwdriver to loosen the three screws on the memory/hard drive bracket in the battery compartment. Then I removed the bracket.
shutdown... check; disconnect hard drive... check. disconnect power... check. remove battery... check. three screws... check. bracket... check.
4) The hard drive is in the left end of the case inside the battery compartment. I untucked the plastic tab and gently pulled: the hard drive slipped right out.
untuck tab... check. pull gently... hard drive slipped right out. Yessss!
5) The hard drive is mounted on a thin metal caddy: you will need a #9 Torx screwdriver to remove the drive from the caddy. I removed the four screws from the caddy and removed it from the old hard drive. Then I put the caddy on the new drive.
Some other website said you needed a #8 torx; I went to Ace Hardware and got their 6-piece set that had ['T'+`x` for x in range(5,11)] (pardon my Python). The T9 fits better, but T8 didn't slip.
6) I slid the new drive into its slot and tucked the plastic tab underneath the drive as the old one originally was.
Piece of cake. By the way, I put the old drive into the antistatic bag that the new drive came in.
7) I replaced the memory/hard drive bracket and battery, and put the unit upright again.
Ditto. Done.
8) I connected the firewire drive and powered up the MacBook holding the Option key. I selected the external drive (as I did in Step 2) and booted up.
Man, that's easier than I thought! Less than 40 minutes spent so far, and that includes taking the photo you see above and updating this posting.
9) Once running, the MacBook gave an error message that I connected an "invalid device." A dialog box asked if I wanted to initialize the disk, and when I clicked "yes" it brought up Disk Utility.
Or... "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." I clicked the "Initialize" button and Disk Utility came up.
10) In Disk Utility, I selected the new drive and chose "Erase." After a minute the drive was ready and MacOS mounted it: I could see it on my desktop and in the Finder.
I selected "640.14 WDC WD640..." Apparently the "500 GB" disk is 640GB. (There's an insert in the box -- 140GB free!) I selected "erase" with defaults (journaled FS, but I didn't say "case sensitive").
11) ~~I fired up SuperDuper again, this time making the external drive the source and the new internal drive the target. The restore took about an hour.~~
This didn't work! SuperDuper didn't let me select the new HD as the destination. I googled on "superduper help" (no quotes), which eventually led me to http://homepage.mac.com/dnanian/SuperDuper/SuperDuper.pdf from which I learned that the hot thing to do is select Disk Utility's "Restore" tab. Took about 20 minutes to figure that out (I'm slow).
Speaking of Slow, Disk Utility estimates 4 hours to restore. (10 minutes later, it says "2 hours.")
One more thing! Since the firewire ext drive was called "lacie ext drive" and it's getting restored to the WD internal drive, all aspects of the drive are getting copied; it now appears that "lacie ext drive" is getting copied to "lacie ext drive". Spooky, but it's OK. I hope.
We're now looking at a 6pm completion time. I'll put the rest of carabiner23's November 2006 post (shoulda looked at the date) into a different color...

12) Once completed, I shut down the MacBook, disconnected the firewire drive, and pushed the Power button. The MacBook booted perfectly with the new drive. Success!

13) Once I was up and running, I ran a "Repair Permissions" just to make sure everything was copacetic. It's all good.

Two bike cars on every Caltrain

2011-06-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

Lest you think I only complain about Caltrain and VTA, I was happy to observe the other day that every Caltrain now has two bike cars!

Now if I ride my bike to work, but don't want to ride it all the way home, I have the option to take the Lazy Man's way out and use my Caltrain monthly pass with my bike -- with no fear of being denied boarding because the one bike car is full.

Kenmore dishwasher won't drain: 665.13422k701

2011-06-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

After googling, and particularly after reading this post I decided to take a look at the pump. Here's what I did:

Turned off power at the breaker.
Removed the bottom access panel (two screws).
Undid the drain hose.
Dried the floor (you can stop laughing now).
Turned power on at the breaker.
Pressed the "cancel/drain" button and observed vigorous action from the pump.
Pressed the button again to make it stop.
Turned power off again at the breaker.
Re-attached drain hose.
Noticed troubleshooting documentation in plastic sleeve, attached to interior surface of the access panel mentioned in step [2]; it makes me think the check valve is bad.
Replaced access panel.
Turned power back on at the breaker.
Verified that it still doesn't drain.

Replacing the check valve in the drain-hose loop will probably require pulling the dishwasher out.

The good news is that this machine is still under (extended) warranty. The guy will come next Tuesday. Fortunately, we still know how to wash dishes by hand.

Nerd alert: Please try this at home: Python antigravity

2011-06-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you without access to python3, let me just say that http://xkcd.com/353/ is related....

Virgin Mobile "mifi" outage

2011-06-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

Short version: If you have a virginmobile "mifi" device, be sure to keep the admin password, your MDN, MSID and account PIN somewhere you can reach it, because sometimes your mifi card will need reprogramming after an outage!

Got this device a few months ago, and for the most part it works great. The speed is adequate for most of what I want to do, and for $40/month "unlimited" it's reasonable. (Photo is from testfreaks.com's review)

Tuesday afternoon May 31 (I think) there was another data outage. I tried calling tech support, using my Verizon (!) cell phone, but the call was dropped. Tried calling from home, but this time there was an automated announcement: data connectivity issues, try back in a couple hours.

Wednesday, didn't try it. (I drove the car to work -- Quelle horreur!) but on Thursday Mifi still didn't work. Another call -- the data access issue has been resolved—Yes!!—but please select "tech support" from the main menu to reprogram your device. Bah! They asked for my account number (which I wrote down on a little 5"x5" sheet and hid somewhere on my desk) -- I said I didn't have one, and then selected "tech support" and... I needed the admin password for the device.

You got it—the account number, MSID, account PIN, and admin password were all carefully hidden on my desk. So I was mifi-less Tuesday afternoon 'til now, when I discovered said 5"x5" card. (I was out just two days, really, since Thursday and Friday were the onlydays I'd wanted to use it--and that was partly my fault.) You can be sure I put all those magic words/numbers in a better place.

The TSA's worst nightmare

2011-06-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

That's what they're calling Phil Mosek, who tried to board an airplane without "proper ID". He was arrested, and acquitted on all counts; video recordings demonstrated that the TSA and police were lying.

Here's the report on his acquittal (see also Seattle Weekly's report) The TSA Blog unsuccessfully spins the acquittal, as you can see from the numerous comments. And check out the Q&A on this site, which points out:

Is there any law that requires you to show ID credentials to fly, or to the police?

No. In Gilmore v. Gonzales (decided at 435 F.3d 1125), a case involving the same airline, lawyers for the TSA swore to the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals that no Federal law or regulation requires airline passengers to show any evidence of their ID in order to fly.

Is there any law that requires you to answer questions from the TSA or police?

No. You have the right to remain silent. Mr. Mocek explicitly invoked this right.

Is there any law or regulation that prohibits or restricts photography or audio or video recording at TSA checkpoints or of police?

No. Prior to his flight out of ABQ, Mr. Mocek received written confirmation from Albuquerque TSA staff that, “There aren’t any state or city laws/ordinances that prohibit photography in the public areas of the airport.”

Gorgeous Adirondacks

2011-05-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

We just got back from the "Beaver Pond Lodge," about 11 miles off I-87 near Brant Lake, New York. It's beautiful up there -- lots of green, and various shades of green: the evergreen leaves are darker I think than the leaves that came out in the past few weeks. It's wet -- thunderstorms every day we stayed there and we got hail a few times too -- which I guess goes along with the green. The lodge is maybe a quarter-mile up an unpaved road. The stream setting at right is across the street from the lodge, no more than 50 yards up a trail. We went out in the evening and, in a tiny pool of water alongside the road, Jenny spotted the frog you see at left.

At the corner of Beaver Pond Road and North Beaver Pond Road is a path leading to a little floating dock with views of what I suppose is Beaver Pond, shown below.

These photos give an idea of how peaceful and quiet it is -- when the hail isn't falling and the thunder isn't thundering that is. One of these days I might match the exposures and stitch the photos together...

Dressing without vinegar (almost) and what to do with half an eggplant

2011-05-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

It's not camping, but when you're vacationing in a cabin and a trip to the store is an expedition, it almost feels like it. So on our way here we stopped in town and bought eggs, lettuce, cucumbers, olive oil, egglant, tomato, peppers, zucchini, tofu, sausage, ice cream, oranges, grapefruit, bananas, chips, spaghetti sauce, garlic... We already had soy sauce and rice and pasta in the car -- and, we thought, balsamic vinegar.

The first surprise came when we realized that there was already a nearly-full bottle of olive oil in the house. No problem! But the second, that we had no vinegar (balsamic or otherwise) in the car or house, was not greeted with much enthusiasm; how would we make salad dressing? Fortunately, there was some spicy brown prepared mustard (which already had some vinegar in it -- yay!) so, remembering back some 30 years and adapting it, we had

Low-vinegar vinaigrette

Put into a small bowl (no larger than a cereal bowl and preferably smaller):

2 tsp spicy brown prepared mustard
½ clove garlic, minced (optional)

Add:

2 tsp olive oil

and beat with a small spoon. (I used a table teaspoon -- not a precise measuring teaspoon.) You could use a small wire whisk, but this house ("cabin" doesn't do it justice; the rental agent calls it "Beaver Pond Lodge") doesn't have one

When you have what looks like rather a soupy version of spicy brown mustard, add olive oil, a little (no more than ½ tsp) at a time, and each time stir until thoroughly mixed, nearly homogeneous. But add no more than 1 Tbsp of oil beyond the original 2 tsp.

If what you have turns into mustard-colored bubbles in clear oil, you've added too much oil. Don't fret, but try to remember how much you added, and add a little less next time. A little pepper and salt won't hurt.

Leftover Pseudo-Italian Eggplant &c

Today, I contemplated what to do with a package of chicken sausage and half an eggplant. Roasting eggplant cubes in the oven worked well before, so here's a serviceable lunch entree.

Slice thinly:
- ½ eggplant
By "thinly" I mean maybe ¼ inch or so. 8mm wouldn't be too thick but I guess 1cm might be.
Dump the slices onto a baking sheet or some ovenproof dish. The lodge has a glass pie-pan so I used it. If you like, you can drizzle it with
- olive oil
and/or sprinkle with
- salt.
Set oven for 450°F and insert the eggplant slices. (You can preheat the oven if you like but that seems overly diligent). Turn the slices every 5-10 minutes, and cook for about 30 minutes total.
While the eggplant is baking, slice thinly (about ¼ inch):
- some sausage
We have sweet Italian sausage made from chicken, and I used two links from the package. These are fully cooked, so I added them to the eggplant slices for the last 10 minutes or so.
If your sausage isn't pre-cooked, you might add them to the oven earlier -- e.g., slice and add as soon as you put the eggplant in.
When done, top with
- leftover marinara sauce
if you have some. If you don't have any, no worries.

Forgiven, or just excused?

2011-05-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

Have you ever known someone who was never wrong? "Henry" was an engineer I used to know. If his program didn't work, it was someone else's fault; if something he said wasn't true, it was because somebody mis-informed him. But he personally never made a mistake.

I'll now remove my tongue from cheek and recall that "we all stumble in various ways," as James tells us, and these failures aren't always private. When a failing obviously and undeniably injures someone, my initial reaction is often to make excuses -- whether I'm perpetrator, victim or observer.

But even when I'm the perpetrator, is that what I really want? Excuses for my screw-up, whether a moral failure (cold-heartedness, impatience, unkindness) or mental error (forgotten appointment, miscalculation) or manual slip-up (spilt milk, shattered glassware)? Excuses minimize either the magnitude of the failure or its impact on others; they're unsatisfying because they're false.

Oh, an excuse may be factually true: maybe I really was under a lot of stress when I snapped at someone, and it could very well be true that "worse things have happened" to the one I hurt by a thoughtless remark. But the intent, the import, of the excuse is wrong. My stress doesn't give me license to snap at my victim. And that "worse things have happened" to them doesn't make the damage I've inflicted any less real.

No, what I need in such a case is to be forgiven. Forgiveness doesn't minimize the perpetrator's failure or the victim's pain; it offers authentic grace and sincere truth where an excuse has only half-truths and counterfeit grace.

And if I'm the victim, I need to forgive, not make excuses or pretend I wasn't hurt. Now an excuse is more comfortable because it papers over inconvenient truths -- that the perpetrator did actually fail and the victim was actually hurt. I don't like thinking I was actually hurt, and I don't like thinking that people I trusted have failed—especially if it's someone in a position of leadership. It hurts less, at least in the short term, to just deny both the pain and the failure. Indeed, forgiveness is very uncomfortable precisely because it acknowledges real failure and real pain. Yet ultimately only forgiveness brings real growth and real healing.

If there's been a real failure and real hurt, pretending otherwise is just denying the truth, and no good will come from that. Forgiveness is costly, but it may bring reconciliation. On the other hand, no good thing comes from denying reality, as Jeremiah reminds us:

They dress the wound of my people 
     as though it were not serious. 
"Peace, peace," they say,
     when there is no peace.

Jeremiah 6:14

A scary thought

2011-05-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

What if... you could only use one programming language for the rest of your life, and that language had to be either java or C++?

My future son-in-law asked me that. I think he has a future as a horror-film writer/director.

What is Spiritual Formation? Part 3: Intention and Method

2011-05-28T05:07:00.000-07:00

The whole Vision/Intention/Method thing is better explained in Dallas Willard's own words at http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=119 (I stumbled upon it while looking for a concentric circle diagram). So the rest of this post will be a few things that stood out from our spiritual formation retreat.

Some key assumptions behind Christian spiritual formation:

that we are "homesick for Eden" (to borrow the title of a book by Gary W. Moon); that is, deep inside we long for a state of open fellowship with God and authentic community with each other;
that God longs for us and weeps at the petty obsessions and distractions that take our attention away from him;
that salvation is our journey toward union with God.

Eden had two trees (among others): the tree of life (eating from that tree represents our willingness to engage with God and follow him) and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (eating from that tree represents our willfulness to turn away from God and to live life on our own) -- the willingness/willfulness language apparently comes from Gerald May (Rollo's younger brother).

In looking at some practices to further our union of God, it may be useful to consider the progress of a romantic relationship, which may include:

Conversation
To advance our conversation with God, Premack's principle may be useful: pairing a desired action (e.g., prayer) with a frequent action (e.g., swallowing coffee). So if I can remember to thank God (or reflect upon him, or whatever) each time I enjoy a sip of coffee, then I'll tend to pray more than I currently do.
Communion
This has to do with being intentional about my willingness to engage with God and to follow him. To further this, I'll need to embrace the pain of withdrawal from my most cherished idols.
Consummation
I think this corresponds to the part where we go to heaven and are fully united with God after we leave this earth.

The fact that we have disciplines for spiritual formation (or "spiritual growth" or "discipleship"), and that they take effort on our part, doesn't contradict the fact that salvation (our journey toward union with God) is by grace. As Dallas Willard wrote in The Great Omission, grace is not opposed to effort, but only to earning... ah, or in a more complete version found here: "Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone."

Here's a story that may be useful in considering one's vision. Though neither God nor prayer is mentioned (Hello Esther!), I thought it terrific. Is this the kind of man I'd like to be?

The point of the disciplines is to bring us freedom to live in the right way, to enable me to receive power from God to live a holy life. For example, I'd love it if my careless words (Matthew 12:36-37) -- that is, the words that just pop out when I'm not thinking -- are words that bring life and encouragement and healing, rather than corrupted, useless words (Ephesians 4:29) that serve only to justify or defend myself.

By the way, this is the difference between magic vs following Christ; in magic or sorcery, we try to get power over others; in following Christ, we try to get the power to surrender ourselves to God.

A few disciplines

There are disciplines of engagement and disciplines of abstinence. This is a good thing: people who are sometimes rather manic and subject to sins of commission may need abstinence; those who tend toward sins of omission may need disciplines of engagement. Disciplines of abstinence include

silence (this one is easy: just don't make any sounds and don't listen to any sounds and don't read or write anything. "You can't do it wrong")
fasting
solitude (this would be easier for extroverts if they could take a few friends along)
slowing (e.g., spend 5 minutes to eat a raisin).

Disciplines of engagement include

celebration because it's really good to remember the many blessings we receive;
examen, enjoying God's presence, looking back on the day (or the morning) and considering my attitudes, those points where I was most/least grateful, etc. A fuller treatment is here
confession
study
worship
servanthood.

It's helpful (for me anyway) to think of these disciplines like training for a marathon or to work a ropes course (as described in another post) -- training being a set of activities which I can do, which will give me the power to do the things I cannot do by direct effort.

I hope that was helpful, and I hope you read Dallas's article, which is certainly more complete. My other posts on this topic are:

What Is Spiritual Formation? Part 2: Vision

2011-05-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

So if Christian spiritual formation is the process of shaping one's character (spirit, will, heart) to be more like Christ, what does Joe or Jane Believer actually do to promote their own Christian spiritual formation? As previously noted, the will isn't very good at carrying out decisions like "I will not take another drink for the rest of the month" or "I'll run 26.2 miles tomorrow (though I've never run more than a 10K before)." But it is pretty good at decisions like, "I'll go to tonight's AA meeting" or "I'll jog a half-mile today."

In the same way, willpower alone isn't enough to transform someone like me (or you?) into the loving, joyous, peaceful, patient, kind, benevolent, compassionate, steadfast, gentle, courageous honest person that I want to be. So what does it take? Three words:

Vision:
a vision of God, yes, but also a vision of what life with God could be like for me;
Intention:
a desire -- a decision -- to move toward that vision;
Method (or means):
concrete actions, tools, practices to get us there.

So if I want to learn a language -- Italian, say -- then I'll need a vision: maybe a mental image of spending a month in Siena or Venice or Florence or Rome, seeing beautiful things, enjoying delicious food, chatting with the natives and so on.

Then I must form an intention to pursue that vision. Otherwise, like Walter Mitty, I can spend my life daydreaming and never realize the vision. I also need a method to progress toward the goal. I might take classes, buy a book with CDs, get some software for my computer, find a conversation partner. I need all three -- vision, intention, method -- to learn Italian.

But it all starts with a vision. Without a vision and intention, the books will sit on the shelf, the lessons will be skipped, the conversation partner will be abandoned.

It's the same way with spiritual formation, or discipleship, or growth: without a vision of life with God, without an intention to follow God all my life, the methods (means, disciplines, practices) are useless to me. Either I'll abandon them, or they'll turn me into a Pharisee.

So the vision is really important. What would I like my life with God to be like? How does God want my life to look? What aspects of that are attractive to me? I don't want to say "envision your future and God will give it to you," but if what God wants for your life doesn't attract you, it won't form a useful vision for your spiritual growth.

Please don't short-circuit this step! Otherwise you may find yourself, like me, doing some "spiritual" practices for the wrong reason, or for no reason. I suggest taking half an hour or more to write down what you'd like your life with God to be like. You may want to read through Matthew 5-7, John 14-17, or some other Scriptures to give you some confidence around the content of your vision. At a retreat we each took 15-20 minutes to write down "what I'd wish for in my life with God" -- after which I saw that I really want a lot of things in my life to be different, and that I had merely scratched the surface.

For my vision, I read through parts of Colossians 3 and came up with a few of the ways that I'm not there yet. For example, it says "As God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience" (Col. 3:12) so I wrote down that I want always to be aware that I'm dearly loved by God. That I want to be less selfish, less self-absorbed, more compassionate. That I would remember that my worth is not measured by accomplishments, and to be more patient as a result.

By even just this one verse of Scripture, it's obvious that my current life with God is "not OK" -- but the other thing is to remember that that's OK! That is, God loves me as I am, even though he's still got more work to do on me. If, when I die some decades from now (Lord willing), I haven't grown or changed at all, then, well, that would be sad.

But it was exciting to me to think that one day I could actually be like what the Scriptures say. And for the people who know me, it's even more exciting because then I'd be a lot easier to work with and live with and be with.

A lot of what Jesus did in his preaching was to correct people's vision. "You have heard... but I tell you..." Jesus said over and over in Matthew 5:21-43. Jesus says in Matthew 13:44 that the kingdom of heaven is like a man who found a treasure in a field, and in his joy went and sold all he had. So again, if the idea of life with god doesn't bring joy, it's not going to be very useful.

The problem with a life apart from Jesus is that any soul is damaged by sin. When Jesus talked about gaining the whole world but losing my soul (Mark 8:36), he wasn't saying primarily that I'd go to hell after I die; his point was that my spirit will be out of whack with my mind, my mind with my body with my social relationships, and so on. I'll be confused because I won't know why I do things, my feelings won't make any sense, my soul will be cast down and fragmented.

So that's "the vision thing." It's really important. I used to hang out with a group called The Navigators, and they gave me some really clear detailed explanations on the methods -- I learned a lot about how to do Bible study, how to memorize Scripture, and so on. But I think that many of us took the practices as something you just do.

Nobody said, "God will love you more if you memorize more verses," but some of us got to feeling that our worth was tied in somehow with how many verses we memorized, how accurately we could quote them, and so on.

So the vision must come before anything else. Can the practices reinforce the vision? Certainly! That's why I'm trying to memorize the first part of Colossians 3: to solidify the vision in my mind.

And may the Lord help us to be transformed, and not to lose sight of the vision for why we do all these things.

What is Spiritual Formation? Digression: Models of a Person

2011-05-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

Dallas Willard's model of a whole person is diagrammed as a series of concentric circles, as shown below (from http://www.raycowan.org/Christian/Dallas_Willard/Healing_The_Heart_DVD_series_slides_v5.ppt).

In the center is the will (because it makes decisions) or the heart (i.e., the center of things) or spirit (non-physical).

Surrounding the will in this model is a concentric ring representing the mind -- this includes the thoughts and feelings. The spirit, or will, can decide to forgive someone, but when that person appears, unhappy memories, hurt feelings and vengeful thoughts may arise unbidden--thus the distinction between spirit/heart/will on one hand and the mind on the other.

Next is the body, which is one's own kingdom ("kingdom" being the range of one's effective will). The body has habits, not all of which are under the full control of the mind. For example, some youth camps have a "ropes course," which includes platforms 30' or more off the ground. When you go there, the kids running the course give you a safety lecture so your mind knows that you're safe: the ropes are strong enough, and all the hardware they put on you is secure enough to stop you from falling. But when you get up on that platform, your palms, your armpits, and your feet may not know this.

Surrounding the body in this model is the set of social interactions. I'm a little fuzzy on this, but the soul is the integration of all these human functions. The psalms have in more than one place "O my soul" e.g., "Why are you cast down, O my soul?" or "Bless the Lord O my soul" -- but the spirit isn't addressed in this way.

Someone has observed that the will is not very good at making decisions like "I will not drink the rest of the year" and followingthrough on that. The will can, however, make a decision like "I will go to tonight's AA meeting" and get the body there. For most of us non-marathoners, the will can't carry out a decision to run 26.2 miles, but the will can decide to get up today and run a mile or two... and after some days to decide to run three or four....

There is another model featuring circles -- this one due to Larry Crabb Jr. and diagrammed at left -- but as I recently figured out, it's more of a diagnostic model--focused on psychological (from the Greek ψυχὴ/psuche, soul) problems. Anyway, in this one, the innermost circle refers to a one's Personal needs; it's full to the extent that someone feels their needs for security and significance have been met. These are two crucial longings that every human being has.

The next circle, the Rational one, has to do with models and beliefs; it's full to the extent that those models and beliefs in fact match reality.

If my mental model of the world says I'd be happy if only he did more of this, or she did less of that--if I believe all my problems are somebody else's fault--I can be quite sure my rational circle isn't full.

The next circle, the "Volitional" one, is full to the extent that one's goals are acknowledged. Suppose my father built a multi-million dollar business, and as he lies dying he tells me, "I have no doubt you will drive my company into the ground and destroy all I've built"(none of which is true by the way). Do you think I might develop a desire to show him he was wrong? And if I did, how likely is it that I'd say that to anyone -- even myself? Lots of people have lots of unacknowledged goals -- many of them not as extreme as that -- and to the extent they're not acknowledged, the volitional circle is empty.

The last circle in this model is the Emotional one. When an event impinges upon me, my feelings depend not just upon the substance of the event, but upon my goals (acknowledged or unacknowledged) which in turn are based upon my beliefs (rational circle) about where Life with a capital L comes from. My emotional circle is full to the extent that I consciously experience my feelings.

Someone with a non-full emotional circle may habitually yell, “I'm not shouting!!” Or if you ask how they feel about something, might reply "You sound like my daughter. Do you mean, ‘What are my thoughts on that?&rsquo"

There are lots of reasons why any of these circles may not be full, but as you've probably surmised, a healthy person has all four circles close to full.

What Is Spiritual Formation? Part 1: Definitions and Goals

2011-05-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

It is not

...a set of practices favored by contemplative, academically-oriented white males who like to read Nouwen and Merton.
(name redacted)

What is body formation? It's the shaping of the human body, and it goes on all the time, whether I want it to or not. If I sit on the couch all day eating hot dogs, chips, and onion dip, that will shape my body a certain way. If I do a lot of aerobic exercise, drink lots of water and eat leafy greens, that shapes my body another way.

Similarly, spiritual formation -- the shaping of my character, my spirit, my will -- goes on all the time, whether I want it to or not. Consciously or unconsciously, my spirit is being formed continuously. (Since when we talk about spiritual formation we usually include habits of thought and speech and action, "soul formation" may be a more accurate term. But we'll stick with "spiritual formation" here to avoid confusion.)

What kind of spiritual formation goes on in my life when I watch "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" or meditate upon the photos in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? How about when I spend time thinking about the many ways my wife forgives my self-absorption and the ways my friends accept me with my quirks? Or when I consider how fortunate I am to be able to attend church every week without fear, and to be able to afford brown sugar and milk and frozen organic berries with my oatmeal every single day? When I take time away from my own "important" pursuits to serve the poor and the lost, to feed the homeless, or help someone build a house for their family?

Anyway, if spiritual formation is the shaping of the human will or character or spirit, what is Christian spiritual formation but the shaping of the human character, will, spirit, heart to be more like Christ?

By the way, Christ's #1 teaching point, the gospel, was that you can enter the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:15) -- that place where God's will and your will are in perfect alignment. Paul's #1 teaching point, the mystery "which is Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27) was another side of the same coin: "I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you" (Galatans 4:19). Indeed Jesus told his disciples to remain in him "and I will remain in you" (John 15) and Paul wrote that God chose us "in him (Christ)" (Ephesians 1).

With Christian spiritual formation thus defined, its primary goals should be:

To dearly love the Heavenly Father and delight in him, in order to:
Remove my automatic anti-kingdom responses/reactions, so that I can:
Fully experience life with God.

Love my neighbor?

2011-05-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

From The Great Omission, by Dallas Willard:

Some time ago I came to realize that I did not love the people next door. They were, by any standards, dangerous and unpleasant people—ex-bikers who made their living selling drugs.
They had never tried to harm my family, but the constant traffic of people buying drugs, a number of whom sat in the yard while shooting up, began to wear down my patience. As I brooded over them one day, indulging my irritation, the Lord helped me see that I really had no love for them at all, that after “suffering” from them for several years I would secretly be happy if they died so that we could just be rid of them. I realized how little I truly cared for nearly all the people I dealt with through the day, even when on “religious business.” (23)

Ow, owowow. I actually like our next-door neighbors, but I remember some run-ins I had about 20 years ago with a woman who lived a few blocks away. She fed a half-dozen stray cats -- filling a paper plate with cat food and leaving it in my front yard -- thus effectively filling my wife's vegetable garden with cat-poop. When I heard my then 3-year-old refer to her as "the stupid cat-lady" (words she could have heard only from me), I knew I really was not loving my neighbor.

And how am I doing today? I hope I've made some progress since then, as the Lord has helped me and I've been willing. And as he continues to help me and I continue to be willing, in the next 20 years I'll be less selfish and self-absorbed, less cold and intolerant, than I am today. Which is good news for everyone who knows me.

A certain kind of sanity

2011-05-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

Just back from a retreat, where the rules of a Wesleyan Band (a small group, not a big collection of musicians) were mentioned. I looked them up and found this posting that describes a really high level of commitment. Here's an excerpt (the poster at deeplycommitted.com says these are in the public domain):

Some of the questions proposed to every one before he is admitted among us may be to this effect: –

Have you the forgiveness of your sins?
Have you peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ?
Have you the witness of God’s Spirit with your spirit, that you are a child of God?
Is the love of God shed abroad in your heart?
Has no sin, inward or outward, dominion over you?
Do you desire to be told of your faults?
Do you desire to be told of all your faults, and that plain and home?
Do you desire that every one of us should tell you, from time to time, whatsoever is in his heart concerning you?
Consider! Do you desire we should tell you whatsoever we think, whatsoever we fear, whatsoever we hear, concerning you?
Do you desire that, in doing this, we should come as close as possible, that we should cut to the quick, and search your heart to the bottom?
Is it your desire and design to be on this, and all other occasions, entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?

Contrast that with a certain kind of madness described in Roxburgh and Boren's Introducing the Missional Church:

... where the focus has been on our rights, our needs, our freedom to choose as we please, our freedom to cut and run whenever we get bored or it gets sticky and tough or things aren't quite working the way we expect. It is assumed that the appropriate means of living in a tolerant and open society is to create an environment that does not step on or over any specific set of personal rights, feelings, or desires. (71)

Ouch! The idea of a high-commitment Wesleyan band is like a polar opposite to the "needs-centered, seeker-driven mentality that has shaped so much of the church in North America" (loc. cit.) and is thus a certain kind of sanity.

Is it a sanity you or I would sign up for? Or are we -- am I -- unwilling to forsake "our freedom to cut and run whenever we get bored or it gets sticky and tough or things aren't quite working the way we expect"?

Vent stuck open on GE JVM3670SF08 over-counter microwave oven

2011-05-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

We have one of these -- installed in 2008. It's a pretty nice appliance, easy to use. It has a vent fan that blows steam (etc) from the stove to an exhaust vent outside the house, and when the fan (or the microwave oven) is running, a vent above the microwave door angles open to draw steam/fumes/etc that drift up past the front of the microwave. The other day I noticed that the upper vent was stuck open, as seen in the photo on the right. I climbed up and saw the problem -- a broken plastic part (photo below). See the piece my finger's on, with the screw in it? It's supposed to be rotated back 90° or so away from you -- that is, what's nearly horizontal should instead be vertical. It's like the spring just pulled too hard and tore that whole part loose. And a look on top of the appliance showed more cracks -- a screw at upper right looks like maybe it was over-tightened, too.

To take it off, I undid 3 downward-pointing screws, then shoved the grille assembly slightly to the left. It then came straight out, except for one piece that simply fell to the floor, and another that had broken off completely and was still wedged. The whole grille sub-assembly had a thin coating of grease.

Well, I thought, guess I'll go looking for the part. I found the model number -- JVM3670WF08 -- on the inside of the microwave oven, and did a web search on that plus the word "parts".

Some websites offered parts for JVM3670WF06 or something like this, apparently a countertop model. But one site, partselect.com, had the right model number, and this picture gave me enough information to order the grille sub-assembly confidently. Just for kicks, I searched on the part number (WB07X10444) once I had that info. Sure enough, some other websites had it at a lower price. But since the partselect.com guys showed me what the part was, I went ahead and ordered from them. I want that website to be around the next time I need a part.

Meanwhile, I used some spray cleaner to get rid of the grease, and krazy glue™ or similar to put 3 or 4 of the cracks back together. That's probably enough to hold 'til the new part arrives.

If your clipper card has a monthly pass, how can VTA cite you?

2011-05-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got chewed out by a fare inspector on the VTA light rail for not tapping (tagging, swiping, scanning) my clipper card before boarding the train, as their FAQ says I must.

I confess, I'm cranky and have a Bad Attitude about this and am thus disobeying both Philippians 4:4 and 1 Peter 2:13. How much money do Caltrain and VTA (and thus the taxpayers) spend on all the fancy electronic equipment to load, read [etc] these cards? They still need ticket machines at each station, at which by the way you cannot buy a monthly pass or load it onto the clipper card.

And why do VTA insist that you tag on every time you board, even if you have a monthly pass? If they cite you, what kind of fine can legally be imposed? I googled "fare violation santa clara county" (no quotes) and first up was California Public Utilities Code section 99580, which says that agencies can pass ordinances to fine you for activities defined in subdivision (b), among which is (aha!)

(2) Misuse of a transfer, pass, ticket, or token with the intent to evade the payment of a fare.

So they couldn't get me on that one, because I've already paid for the monthly pass. If I engage in an argument with the fare inspector, they could presumably get me under

(6) Willfully disturbing others on or in a system facility or vehicle by engaging in boisterous or unruly behavior.

But if I get off the train at the next station with the fare inspector and tag my card at that time (the reader will confirm the pass is good to the end of the month) then 99580 doesn't apply, right?

Am I missing something here? Besides having a bad attitude I mean?

Update 2011-06-06: sent to VTA

Sent this morning, after I had to run like heck from caltrain, to get onto the light rail:

From the faq http://www.vta.org/clipper/faq/index.html#q4

Do I need to tag my card even if I have a monthly pass?

Yes, regardless of whether you use cash or a monthly pass, you must tag your card to a card reader every time you board a bus or before you board light rail. Your tag is your proof of payment.

This is disingenuous. the "tag" machines know that I have a monthly pass, and the fare inspectors would know that too, if their machines were programmed to recognize monthly pass holders (as the caltrain fare inspectors' machines are).

Can you help me understand why it's reasonable for VTA to impose this additional burden on monthly pass holders? I don't believe that citing for failure to tag on would be supported by either spirit or letter of CPUC 99580(b)(2) (or any other part of (b), (c), or (d) for that matter -- since by failing to tag on I would not be evading payment of fare).

Why does VTA program the fare inspectors' machines to reject valid paid monthly passes on Clipper?

I'll see what they say, if anything.

Jesus the Logician?

2011-05-15T21:44:00.000-07:00

That's a chapter title from Dallas Willard's The Great Omission. Our pastor has said in at least one sermon that if we believe "Jesus is Lord" then we must also believe Jesus is smart -- that is, if Jesus says one thing but I think another thing, guess who's wrong?

But Willard explains this point further: it's not just that Jesus is smart about moral issues or what we call "wisdom"; he also is smart in those areas we normally call "skill" or "expertise" or "technology." In the book he mentions an experience Catherine Marshall had, wherein she was trying to design something. She prayed, and several ideas came to her about how to proceed.

A former housemate told me some years ago about something even more unusual (in my view anyway) than that. His computer program was not working -- something was not quite right about it for some days. He prayed and complained, and one night, he had a dream. In the dream, he heard a voice: "Do you trust me, or not?" And there in front of him was a printout of his computer program (this was some years ago) and a finger indicated a particular line of Fortran.

You see where this is going -- that was the defective line, as my former housemate confirmed the next day. Jesus the Programming and Computational Fluid Dynamics Expert? Hey, why not? For by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1).

And speaking of "hold together," he knows how the Strong force works; he knows why a moving electron creates a magnetic field; he knows not only why software has so many mistakes, but he knows what each one is. He knows which books will become best-sellers, and which ones will be 99% remaindered. He knows (and I mean knows) to what extent our changing climate is the result of human activity, and of increasing CO₂ concentration in particular.

Jesus is Lord. And Jesus is smart. It's true.

Spiritual formation -- what doesn't work

2011-05-15T17:40:00.000-07:00

From Dallas Willard's The Great Omission:

Bible study, prayer, and church attendance... generally have little effect for soul transformation, as is obvious to any observer. If all the people doing them were transformed to health and righteousness by them, the world would be vastly changed. Their failure to bring about the change is precisely because the body and soul are so exhausted, fragmented, and conflicted that the prescribed activities cannot be appropriately engaged in and and by and large degenerate into legalistic and ineffectual rituals. Lengthy solitude and silence, including rest, can make them very powerful. (153-154)

Capellini farce

2011-05-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

The other day I got a hankering for angel hair with marinara, so when I saw some of this stuff at the store I jumped at it. But I didn't read the directions at right until the water was already boiling.

Does it look to you the way it looks to me? Boil water, add the pasta, then after water returns to a boil, cook 2 or 3 minutes? I tasted it every few minutes, and I'll tell you, it was more like 10 minutes.

Maybe if I'd had the stove on medium-low, so it would take almost 10 minutes to get it back to boiling... and cook 2-3 minutes after that? SO WEIRD.

But it was delicious, with sauce from a bottle.

postdrop: warning: uid=1234: File too largesendmail: fatal: somebody@example.com(1234): message file too bigfetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 75

2011-04-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm an old Luddite™ who still has email on their ISP and uses fetchmail(1) to get it onto the home network, as previously confessed. So last night I saw this on my ISP's server under /var/spool/mail/12/24/myuserid, much to my dismay:

$ ls -o
total 37760
-rw-------    1 myuserid   13404171 Apr  5 16:29 1302046178.9463_2.b.lds,S=13404171
-rw-------    1 myuserid   13404127 Apr  5 16:59 1302047989.1423_2.b.lds,S=13404127
-rw-------    1 myuserid   11769582 Apr 17 15:07 1303078027.25619_2.b.lds,S=11769582

Right, two messages over 3 weeks old, and one almost 2 weeks old. But why?

$ fetchmail
3 messages for <me> at ISP-pop-server.my-isp (38577880 octets).
postdrop: warning: uid=1234: File too large
sendmail: fatal: somebody@example.org(1234): message file too big
fetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 75
reading message myuserid@localhost:1 of 3 (13404171 octets) not flushed
postdrop: warning: uid=1234: File too large
sendmail: fatal: somebody@example.org(1234): message file too big
fetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 75
reading message myuserid@localhost:2 of 3 (13404127 octets) not flushed
postdrop: warning: uid=1234: File too large
sendmail: fatal: somebody@example.com(1234): message file too big
fetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 75
reading message myuserid@localhost:3 of 3 (11769582 octets) not flushed

So these messages are too big for my Mac OS X's MDA. But apparently they're not too big for my ISP's MDA/MTA.

I searched on postdrop: warning: uid: File too large mac os x and found the answer here on ubuntuforums.org. Fortunately, postfix (which is what we have) has this parameter in the right place:

mini1:~ postman$ uname -a
Darwin mini1.local 10.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.6.0: Wed Nov 10 18:13:17 PST 2010; root:xnu-1504.9.26~3/RELEASE_I386 i386
mini1:~ collin$ grep message_size /etc/postfix/main.cf
message_size_limit = 10485760
mini1:~ collin$

So I'll just double it.

mini1:~ collin$ sudo vi /etc/postfix/main.cf
 …
663 mydomain_fallback = localhost
664 ### message_size_limit = 10485760  ... a bit too small
665 message_size_limit = 20971520
666 biff = no
667 mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8
@
"/private/etc/postfix/main.cf" 669L, 26491C written

Then I guess I need to restart... Oh, but wait! On Snow Leopard postfix doesn't run continuously -- only when somebody tries to connect to port 25. So in the time it took me to think about this, fetchmail ran ~~and connected to port 25, restarting postfix~~ (Should have read my own posting first; it actually runs /usr/sbin/sendmail) -- which read the new message_size_limit, and accepted the messages, as I saw on the ISP's server afterwards:

$ ls -Ro /var/spool/mail/12/34/myuserid
/var/spool/mail/12/34/myuserid:
total 36
drwx------    2 myuserid   4096 Apr 30 11:01 cur
drwx------    2 myuserid  28672 Apr 30 11:01 new
drwx------    2 myuserid   4096 Apr 30 11:00 tmp

/var/spool/mail/12/34/myuserid/cur:
total 0

/var/spool/mail/12/34/myuserid/new:
total 0

/var/spool/mail/12/34/myuserid/tmp:
total 0

Yippee! Fortunately these weren't anything urgent or dire, but hopefully it'll be a long time before something like this happens again.

Newark Airport to Long Island

2011-04-28T06:16:00.000-07:00

Impatient? Click here.
So we're staying on Long Island, and I spend two days in Pittsburgh. The plan was to fly back Tuesday night, 7:30, arrive JFK 9:19pm and take LIRR to Ronkonkoma. But then I get a text message from Delta: flight delayed to 8:53pm, arrive at JFK 10:47pm.

OK, whatever. Our future son-in-law emails me with the LIRR departure times. But then Delta sens me another text message: 9:53pm departure, JFK at 11:47pm. Well, as they say in Japan, shikata ga nai (nothing to be done for it).

The cab's a little late picking me up from the office, but so what? I've got a two-hour wait -- minimum? So we get to the airport, I pick up my boarding pass (it still says 7:30pm departure) and go through security. I'm sitting at the gate and then: "Attention, Delta passengers on flight 4326: your flight is canceled. Please proceed to a Delta ticket counter..."

You don't have to ask me twice. "We have you protected on a 6:00am flight tomorrow," the lady says. Just what I want -- another night away from the lovely Carol. Not. It's hard on me not to be able to reach over in the night and enjoy the feeling of her perfect curves... OK, that's not going to help me now, I think...

Back to the current problem: "Anything to LaGuardia or ISP?" I ask. No, but there's a Continental flight to Newark, leaving at 8pm. Where do I sign up?

She does the needful and I walk over to the Continental gate. The Continental lady gave me a new boarding pass -- hooray! and said "Update at 8pm."

Wait. Update--what's that mean? It meant that Newark is on a "ground stop" -- at 8pm they'll tell us whether the flight is actually going. The airplane was already at the gate, but there's no point in getting on until we know it can take off!

I informed our future son-in-law, who got back to me with extensive information on how to get from Newark to the LIRR. Meanwhile, as I looked over at the flight status, the departure time changed from 8:02 to 8:03. I looked again after a while to see it change from 8:21 to 8:22. "Update at 9:00pm," they said.

Eventually, we took off on a propeller-driven plane, flying near a thunderstorm (it's weird seeing nearby clouds light up -- from lightning -- while riding in an airplane) to land safely at Newark right around eleven.

Newark to LIRR

Once at the gate, I exited security and followed the signs to "AirTrain" and took the one that went to "RailLink" (trains go in two directions; check electronic signs).

At the RailLink station I had the opportunity to transfer to Amtrak or New Jersey Transit, maybe some other options. I couldn't tell whether the ticket machines were all alike. By now it was after 11pm; whatever intelligence I'd had in the morning was gone. I did, however, notice a slender young woman, an employee, chatting with another agent, a young man. I walked up to her, and she turned toward me. "I have no idea what I'm doing," I said, giving her my helpless middle-aged uncle look.

"Where are you going?" she asked, as she walked me to the nearest ticket machine. I was going to Penn Station in New York; I may have mentioned that I wanted New Jersey Transit (I'd read somewhere that Amtrak was a lot more expensive). "It'll be $12.50," she told me, adeptly selecting "N" on the screen and tapping "New York - Penn Station." Next she asked me about payment type: "Cash, debit, or credit?"

I inserted my credit card, and removed it smoothly, per her instructions. The machine spat out my ticket, and a credit card receipt. "11:34, Track A," she said, and I thanked her as another middle-aged guy approached her with a puzzled look. I'm sure she gets a lot of that.

Through the wicket (or however you say "かいさつぐち" in American) and down the stairs, I saw a waiting area with a lot of empty chairs. A big screen showed when the next trains were coming; one was canceled but mine was showing on time. The P.A. system announced that a train for New York Penn Station would be arriving in ____ minutes, with the track number, etc.

It pulled in, right on time. I saw a car with lots of empty seats -- it looked good to me, but a dour conductor called out: "This way. This way!" Sure enough, doors on the empty car weren't opening. The car wasn't full, but neither were there many quiet seats.

It made just a few stops -- Newark Penn Station at 11:41, Secaucus (?) Junction, maybe one or two more. Near the end, we stopped for a while and I heard an announcement that we were single-tracked into New York. A few minutes later a train passed going the other way, and we started moving. We arrived at New York Penn Station right on time, 12:06am. I followed the signs to the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), and found the 12:14am Ronkonkoma-bound train waiting at the platform. I took a seat and we were on our way in a few minutes.

Really, it wasn't hard, but I was glad to have schedule info from our future son-in-law.

Remembering, Phaedrus, and other IT issues

2011-04-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I had dinner with Bob and "the Doctor", and the conversation turned to videoconferencing -- more broadly, the impact of technology on how we do our jobs.

The doctor asked us, when you visit another office (Waltham, Durham, etc.), what's the main purpose? Is it to see people face to face? You use video conferencing sometimes, yes?

Well, yes -- but it's really not the same. For one thing, it doesn't work all that well. Bob and I then went into all the ways it doesn't work. It's not full-motion video; sometimes it's just a few frames per second. Sometimes the video doesn't work at all. The audio is often fuzzy.

The Doctor talked about remembering patient histories and so on. In the old days, charts were hand-written. "I'd write the patient information," she said, "writing" with an imaginary pen in her right hand, "and the act of writing is what helped me remember." The physical motion, in other words. Kinesthetic memory.

Then came printouts. She'd circle this or that piece of information on the printout, and that would help her remember. Now everything's on a screen, and she's got a different way of remembering that information.

This put me in mind of something Plato wrote (!) about writing. In... Phaedo? No... eventually I found Phaedrus. In this dialogue there's a discussion of how, once some young punk learns how to read, he will sound wise, but he won't necessarily be wise. He won't have had the experience of hearing words in context; he'll see only what's on the papyrus. It has, in other words, lots of disadvantages.

And so it's been with every information technology ever invented. Personally, I think writing was the greatest invention of all time. How about electronic calculating-machines? Is google making us dumber? Smarter? Both?

This blog is in favor of new technologies that improve learning outcomes; who could disagree with that? Personally, I'm afraid of technologies that leave one always connected. I suppose it could become like a drug -- hard to quit. (I don't have an iphone but I'm using a mobile wifi device on the train as I type this.) Always the balance...

Seeing or Being...

2011-04-26T03:53:00.000-07:00

A word from Merton's No Man Is an Island hit me the other day:

The reason why men are so anxious to see themselves, instead of being content to be themselves, is that they do not really believe in their own existence. (118)

I see that I've written about this before but I have to ask: am I content to be myself, or must I "keep looking in the mirror for reassurance" (119)?

Am I at peace with the idea that I'm a finite human being, or do I busy myself in the hopes that it will make me Real? What is Real, and if I'm not sure I am real, what do I think I lack?

A Certain Kind of Madness

2011-04-23T19:51:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post, I mentioned an alarming critique of the (post-)modern church in North America: that the prevalent hyper-individualism of the surrounding culture has invaded the church and, like a beaver colony in a river, dammed up the flow of life.

I got as far as page 71 today before my head exploded again, as the authors pointed out some energy around the question: What are ...

... some of the simple but profoundly transforming habits that might shape us as a sign, witness, and foretaste in our neighborhoods[?]
This ... runs against the currents we have lived in to this point where the focus has been on our rights, our needs, our freedom to choose as we please, our freedom to cut and run whenever we get bored or it gets sticky and tough or things aren't quite working the way we expect. It is assumed that the appropriate means of living in a tolerant and open society is to create an environment that does not step on or over any specific set of personal rights, feelings, or desires. This is part of the madness of the needs-centered, seeker-driven mentality that has shaped so much of the church in North America.
Roxburgh and Boren, Introducing the Missional Church, p.71

Can you say "ouch"? I resemble this remark! Fortunately, the authors give us a cure for this madness, in the form of examples of how people have taken up some of these "simple but profoundly transforming habits": one is about a largely white church in a neighborhood that had become mostly black. A small group wanted to reach out to the neighborhood. After an initial rebuff, one couple went onto the main street to pick up litter.

They did this for a year as people watched and then began to nod at them as they went by. Twelve months later the shopkeeper who had told Mary to leave invited her in for coffee.
…
This is not the story of a church with a program to reach the community through its building; rather it is the story of Christians living in and with the people of their neighborhood so that the gospel changed everything. (73)

At this point you may be wondering what the definition of "missional" is. Well, I'll tell you: I don't know.

Here's what I mean: What if we read the gospels and ask, "How did Jesus define the Kingdom of God?" Well, he didn't. He described it in stories. He didn't draw a Venn diagram or give a Platonic characterization or a formula in the predicate calculus. So far I haven't read a definition of "missional" either. But the examples, the narratives, certainly make me think about what we're doing as a church, and what I'm doing as a follower of the Lord.

Modernity Infiltrates the Church: It's all about Me!

2011-04-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Reding Roxburgh & Boren's Introducing the Missional Church, I was stopped short by this on page 59:

Modernity replaces mission with self-actualization of the expressive, autonomous individual. When we attend to the way people talk about the gospel, it does not take long to discover just how much the focus lies on meeting personal needs. During testimony sessions about mission trips, people explain how it changed them or how it gave them an experience they will never forget. In modernity the purpose of life is to fulfill one's personal destiny, goals, or needs. … For moderns, it's almost impossible to read the biblical narrative without assimilating it to the modern categories of the self and the fulfillment of its needs.

OUCH! Their trenchant critique isn't just about missions, and just about modernity; there are, they say, two beaver-dams gumming up the works in the Church today: a modern one and a postmodern one (57). Self-centeredness, alas, is a key feature of both modernity and postmodernism; the very individualistic worldview prevalent in North America—yes, even in the North American church.

How can we fix this? We need to fix ourselves -- rather, we need the Lord to change us.

Is life a series of problems to be solved?

2011-04-20T21:10:00.000-07:00

My mind was on problems as I steered my bicycle homeward. One problem was solved, but another popped up. Was life a series of problems (or since I took engineering classes, problem sets) to be solved?

Well, I've looked at life that way: from the time we're born, how to get O₂ into the lungs, how to get fed, how to get changed, how to avoid needing to get changed, how to get around, how to get attention (this one never ends), how to get my point across, how to avoid becoming or causing red asphalt... One big category of problems that gets bigger after forty is how to keep the old ticker ticking.

Oops! That last one has only temporary solutions. Another issue with all this is that life becomes one damned thing after another.

Well, rather than indulge in denial or despair, let me consider a third way: redefine the problem! Rather than "how to stay alive (forever)" which can't be fulfilled in this life, take it up a level by saying "how to live well" -- including how to die well.

Of course, the catechism was way ahead of me: the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, so life has to be about that.

So life is not a set of problems or tasks, as I am wont to consider it; it's not a job. It's more like an adventure, a party. Or at least it can be. A quest?

This job business has its roots I think in the same corruption whence came the old Babylonian creation myth wherein the gods created human beings as a race of slaves. This is why the Israelites needed the Sabbath, and I still do today: to remember that life is more than work, that life is not work. Though life has work and tasks and problems, that's not what life is.

And thanks be to God for that!

Tithing? and how to be less of a rich fool

2011-03-31T17:44:00.000-07:00

Links: my other postings on Lent ; our church's reading plan

In a recent sermon, our pastor pointed out the internal inconsistency when someone says, "Jesus died on the cross to give me eternal life; I'll take that and all the other gifts God gives, but I won't give to His work -- to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, freeing the captives, proclaiming the good news to the lost."

"I don't get that," he said. Well, here is an area where through personal experience I can say that I do get it. I mean, it's easy to see how it happens. Does it make sense? No. Is it consistent at all? No. But can it happen? Sure it can happen, and you don't have to be an exceptionally wicked person for it to be true in your life. Just ordinary wicked (and selfish) will do.

Because it's easy to deceive ourselves; heck, we want to deceive ourselves because we simply don't want to think of ourselves as selfish, greedy people, as Colbert pointed out last year.

But enough about me. The parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21) came in today's selection from our church's reading plan. This fellow, the rich fool, is -- well, there's no other way to say it -- he is us. He's got some real ~~cognitive issues~~, uh, sin going on here, which is how I see myself in him:

The ground of a ... rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, “What shall I do?”... (Luke 12:16-17)
This first line would have been shocking to its first-century audience. If the ground produces a good crop, any normal person would celebrate with his friends and share the bounty with his less fortunate neighbors.
So how do I resemble this fool? I sometimes forget how important a community is to me. Folly! Solitude is good, but "It is not good" to be alone too much.
“I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my boods.” (Luke 12:18)
Okay, so I don't have all my money in retirement accounts -- but neither have I given away more than what, 10-20% of my income. I hate to think of myself as stingy, but how many hundreds of millions live (or die) today on less than a dollar a day? An entry-level professional in the United States makes more money than something like 99% of the households on the planet. True, our expenses are higher, so after adjusting... OK, maybe 98% of the households on the planet. I just made that up, but you know it's not far wrong. How much should we give away?

Well, that's not a lot of similarities, but we in the United States are the most individualistic society I've ever heard of -- so much so that we need someone to explain point #1 above to us (at least I did). How did we get that way? One day at a time, over a couple hundred years.

And about not giving -- how do we end up choosing that? Well, we all know that we're "rich" by some definition, but we don't think about that. Instead we think about things we want but don't have, we think about those with more money that we have (there'll always be someone)... and we can turn into this silly caricature of a selfish, spoiled child.

What can we do about it? For money, the answer's easy: give some away. it doesn't have to be a lot, but how much do you think the top 1% income earners (besides you, I mean) should give? If you're giving less than that, give a little more.

For community, here's my plan: when I'm going to some gathering I'm not particularly interested in, I want to ask the Lord to show me what he has for me. Will I learn something from someone? Will someone's character bless and impress me? Can I be a blessing to someone?

And then watch for what he does. Because he's always at work, and if I'm watching he'll show me.

Freedom to act (at work) -- whether you want to be a VP or not

2011-03-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

About 30 years ago, I saw some fabulous presentations by William Oncken on the subject of "Managing Management Time." This was before I knew I didn't want to be a manager. But the videotapes had valuable information for anyone in organizational life. One such concept was that of the "Freedom scale."

You can find this scale online, for example on page 2 of this PDF or page 7 of this one. The scale looks something like this:

Wait until told.
This means don't ask, don't even think.
Ask what to do.
Don't suggest, don't recommend. Just ask.
Recommend, and act with permission
That is, don't act without permission
Act and advise immediately.
The boss hates surprises
Routine reporting only

Conflict arises when the boss and a subordinate have different ideas of what freedom the subordinate should be working at. This can happen because the boss doesn't communicate well; or maybe the boss is internally conflicted. The issue could be with the subordinate, too: if I'm a subordinate who's lazy or afraid to act, I'll tend to operate at level 1 or 2 whereas the boss may want me to operate at level 3 or 4 (or maybe I'm just accustomed to being told what to do all the time). If I tend to be rash and not to have good judgment, I may want to operate at level 4 or 5, but the boss may want me to act at level 2 or 3 instead.

Some of these things can be made better by communicating directly what level of freedom someone should be working at with regard to certain issues. Maybe it needs to be put in writing. On a sign in the employee's office/cubicle.

But when someone has to operate at a different level than they're accustomed to, that takes some adjustment. Someone accustomed to waiting (level 1) or asking (level 2) may have to make a recommendation (level 3). Or in case of an error in judgment, they may have to switch from "act and advise" (4) to "recommend then act with permission" (3).

And the boss may have some adjustments to deal with too, if for example a subordinate asks what to do and the boss wants recommendations rather than just problem statements. Of course, adjustments take work from everyone. I'm not sure who it's harder on.

But whether you're only a subordinate or you're both a subordinate and a boss, the freedom scale can provide a way to clarify expectations.

Creating a mirror-image truetype font: the wrong way and...

2011-03-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to do anything:
• the wrong way, and
• your mother’s way.
(redacted)

There are actually a lot more than two ways to code anything. But first here's the story: my elder daughter was talking about writing poetry "as the ox turns" (more here) and wondered how hard it would be to visually flip every other line left-to-right. Just reversing the letters is easy; something like this would do it:

#!/usr/bin/python -utt
# vim:et:sw=4
'''Reverse every other line.  Like a filter.'''
import sys
flipIt = False
for aline in sys.stdin:
    aline = aline.strip()
    if flipIt:
        alist = list(aline)
        alist.reverse()
        print ''.join(alist)
    else:
        print aline
    flipIt = not flipIt

It works like this:
INPUT:

The skies they were ashen and sober;
the leaves they were crisped and sere -
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:

OUTPUT:

The skies they were ashen and sober;
- eres dna depsirc erew yeht sevael eht
The leaves they were withering and sere;
rebotcO emosenol eht ni thgin saw tI
Of my most immemorial year:

But what if you wanted to flip the pixels as well? Something like this?

Then you'd need a mirror image font. Right. A web search yielded BackBod, and I think I found a reversed Dabbington font, too. But she wanted something that looked more like Times New Roman.

The Wrong Way to Code This

Naturally I went looking on the web for "truetype file format" and proceeded to pick a font file apart, using information from Apple and Microsoft. I began like this:

def main(filename):
    global font_data, flip_data
    font_data = [ord(X) for X in list(file(filename, 'rb').read())]
    # offset subtable
    scaler_type = u32(0)
    assert(scaler_type == 0x74727565 or scaler_type == 0x10000)
    numTables = u16(4)
    print 'numTables', numTables
    startTabDir = 12
    print 'table list'
    glyfStart = None
    tables = dict()
    toffset2name = dict()
    for tabEntryOffset in range(0,numTables*16,16):
        mystart = startTabDir+tabEntryOffset
        tname = l2s(font_data[mystart:mystart+4])
        tstart, tlen = u32(mystart+8), u32(mystart+0xc)
        print '\t%s offset=%#08x len=%#x' % (tname, tstart, tlen)
        assert(tname not in tables)                     # duplicate => evil
        toffset2name[tstart] = tname                    # to sort by offset
        if tname == 'glyf':                     # flip glyphs left-to-right

Basically, I read the entire file in as a bytestream, then created an array (a "list" in Python-ese) of the bytes. That u32(0) call means "give me the 32-bit integer formed by reading 4 bytes starting at offset 0" (that's way later in the file).This program knows where tables start, and looks for certain tables by name (e.g, "glyf"), and...

So what's wrong with coding like this? The problem is that it's re-inventing the wheel. What I should have done, had I known of it at the time, was consult stackoverflow.com; I would have found questions and answers like this one, which gave me theclue that maybe there was a module out there that already handles truetype (though that question was about PERL) or (aha!) this one which led me to TTX, a fabulous package that turns ".ttf" files into XML and back.

So I was doing a bunch of work (and a lot of it was empirical, based just on what I found in this one file) rather than following the possible versions (etc) that the specs allow. Before I stopped working on the wrong way to code this, I had 476 lines in "flip.py" -- of which 398 were nonblank, noncomment lines. Besides, the fonts it produced weren't quite right.

Not so Wrong

So here's the new plan. Rather than writing all that code to parse the (mostly binary) TTF file, ttx would turn (e.g.) times.ttf⇒times.ttx; I'd modify the XML inside times.ttx, creating, say, semit.ttx ("times" backwards) and ttx would turn that into "semit.ttf".

Besides flipping each glyph left-to-right, I'd also flip the kerning table. Why? Consider the character pair ‘P.’ -- we want the ‘.’ closer to the ‘P’ than it would be without kerning, right? Now imagine if the ‘P’ is flipped left-to-right so it "sticks out to the left" like ‘¶’ -- in this case we want the characters moved closer when the ‘.’ comes before the (flipped) ‘P’. Thus the pair we want to look for is not {‘P’,‘.’} but rather {‘.’,‘P’}.

It's now about 121 lines (nonblank noncomment lines), after trying it out on a few more fonts (one of which didn't have a kerning table). The fonts look good, too. Here's the result of "pydoc -w flipttx":

flipttx

index
/mnt/home/collin/fonts/flipttx.py

Flip a true type font (ttx) horizontally. Usage: flipttx.py [-d] {-o oldname} {-n newname} [infile [outfile]] -d (OPTIONAL): add debugging output oldname (REQUIRED) is original font name, e.g., "Times New Roman" newname (REQUIRED) is new (flipped) font name infile (OPTIONAL) is name of old font's ttx file newfile (OPTIONAL) is name of new font's ttx file OPERATION Given a truetype font, named "Foo", in a file "fontFile.ttf", create a flipped font (call it "Oof") in "oof-flip.ttf" as follows: 1. ttx fontFile.ttf => will create fontFile.ttx 2. flipttx.py -o Foo -n Oof fontFile.ttx oof-flip.ttx => will create oof-flip.ttx * and "Foo" in fontFile.ttx's NAME table becomes "Oof" in oof-flip.ttx 3. ttx oof-flip.ttx => will create oof-flip.ttf Use spadmin (for OpenOffice.org) or FontBook (on Mac OS X), etc. to get oof-flip into your system. In your application (OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, Micro$oft Office, etc.) specify font name "Oof" Why are oldname/newname required? Because you need a way to specify the flipped font name (e.g., "Oof"). GUIDES FOR THE PERPLEXED * "ttx" -- see http://www.letterror.com/code/ttx/ * what's in a truetype font file? http://developer.apple.com/fonts/ttrefman/rm06/Chap6.html (2002) http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/otff.htm (2008) HOW TO AVOID UGLY ON-SCREEN DISPLAY 1. On a system like Mac OS X 10.6 you can just do what comes naturally: add fonts using the "Font Book" application. Then NeoOffice, Aqua (maybe even X11) will be able to display the new font just fine. 2. On a system like OpenSUSE 11.3 where OpenOffice.org gets fonts from "spadmin" but you need to "xset fp+" or similar for display fonts, be sure to run mkfontdir(1) then add the directory to your X server's font path, lest your screen look truly ugly. But at least on my system, "print" and "export to PDF" from OpenOffice.org both produced nice enough output. BUGS 1. Doesn't handle a too-short hmtx table, such as might be the case with some monospaced font. (But Courier New was OK -- maybe ttx creates a full hmtx table?) 2. Doesn't do anything with composite glyphs. Maybe they'll "Just Work" -- but probably not. 3. Doesn't do anything with GSUB so ligatures, if your font has any, will probably look goofy. VERSION $Id: flipttx.py,v 0.5 2011/03/26 20:05:07 collin Exp $

Modules

getopt

sys

_xmlplus

Functions

DPRINT(what): Print onto sys.stderr if DEBUG is on.

flipGlyphs(glyfNode, hmtxDict): Use hmtxDict to flip glyphs left-to-right (modify in place).

flipKern(kernNode): reverse the order of the pair, i.e., L<-->R, in each entry.

main(): Parse the input XML, flip glyphs, flip kern table, give a new name to the new font, write the XML tree to output file. How did I know what to do here? Lots of it came from web info on truetype fonts, especially http://developer.apple.com/fonts/ttrefman/rm06/Chap6.html

makeHmtxDict(hmtxNode): Return a mapping of name to node in horiz. metrics table

tweakNames(nameNode): Change all instances of OLDNAME to NEWNAME, in nameNode. If font's original name="Times New Roman", OLDNAME="Roman", NEWNAME="Namor" then new name would be "Times New Namor" -- i.e., OLDNAME/NEWNAME can be substrings of the font's name.

usage(): Print help message to stderr and exit.

Data
		DEBUG = False INFILE = <open file '<stdin>', mode 'r'> NEWNAME = None OLDNAME = None OUTFILE = <open file '<stdout>', mode 'w'> progname = 'flipttx.py'

Leave a comment if you want the source, which is currently 264 lines (wc -l) and about 121 noncomment nonblank lines.

And maybe an even less wrong way...

A search on "poetry oxturn" (no quotes) led me here which in turn led to this program which does the whole thing for you -- flips every other line and creates a postscript or PDF of the result. Apparently you can just try it online without having to download it and run under Tcl/Tk.

But... currently it gives you a typewriter-like font, not so pretty. This may change soon, as I'll send my program to the site's webmaster.

So you want to be a VP, part III

2011-03-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

link to part II
Just read this terrific post summarizing a talk by Patty Azzarello on How to be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life. Two sentences from amazon.com's "About the author":

Patty Azzarello became the youngest general manager at Hewlett-Packard at age 33, ran a $1B software business at 35 and became a CEO at 38 (without turning into a self-centered, miserable, jerk). Whether leading massive business transformations or advising CEO’s 1-to-1, her insights, integrity, and generosity have fused with her work to create life-changing impact on the careers of thousands of people in large and small companies across the world.

All that's impressive, but I really liked her advice to DO BETTER, LOOK BETTER, CONNECT BETTER (details on the above post on compscigail's blog).

Patty has a short video on her home page introducing her (November 2010) book; amazon.com hosts an author page with links to her book, blog posts, etc.

This looks like great advice, particularly if you want to become a VP without ruining your life.

Limits of Divine Power

2011-03-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

Links: my other postings on Lent ; our church's reading plan

Today's reading includes Mark 5:21-6:6, which put me in mind of a message I heard over 30 years ago, at my first Christian conference, where LeRoy Eims talked us through this area of Scripture; it shows the power of Jesus over the wind and the waves (Mark 4:35-41), his power over demons from hell (Mark 5:1-20), over sickness (Mark 5:25-34), over death itself (Mark 5:35-43).

What an exciting passage! Now the people in the land of the Gadarenes demonstrate one limitation on the Lord -- well, it was self-imposed, actually; they asked him to leave (they wouldn't listen to him!) and he did.

Here's another limitation on the power of Jesus. Wait, don't pick up stones to throw at me quite yet -- tell me if this doesn't mean Jesus couldn't...:

He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.
Mark 6:5

Right? Verse 6 says he was amazed at their lack of faith.

I think this an astounding truth. If I have no faith, I can actually limit the power of God to do things in my life. I can grieve his Holy Spirit (as Ephesians 4:30 says).

And on the positive side, I can bring him joy and delight when I take him at his word. Imagine that -- you and I can bring joy to the creator of the universe. We can please him by the way we live (Hebrews 11:6; Colossians 1:9-12).

A pastoral word

Does that mean if I pray and nothing seems to happen, it's because I don't have enough faith? No! And I can prove it.

Look at 2 Corinthians 12:7-9; why didn't God grant Paul's request to be freed from his "thorn in the flesh"?
Consider the girl who was raised from the dead in Mark 5:35-43: how much faith did she have? Zero!
Finally, let me get mathematical. We observe that if I drop a rock on my foot, it hurts. Therefore if my foot hurts, I must have dropped a rock? Uh... no. Maybe I stepped on something sharp. Maybe an insect or some other animal bit it. Maybe something hot was spilled onto my foot, or maybe a golf ball just flew into my yard and hit my foot. That is, [P⇒Q] does not imply [Q⇒P]. Lack of faith may inhibit God's activity, but if God doesn't do something, it might not have anything to do with how much faith I have or haven't got.

Resisters Are Futile. I think.

2011-03-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't about electronics, and that isn't a typo. "Resister" comes from Flory and Miller's Finding Faith, chapter 4. I'll simplify their characterization of this group, of which I'm sometimes a member (when I forget...) by calling them moderns fighting the transition to the post-modern era. We moderns have the fantasy that someday facts and logic will once again win the day. (In other words, “Never mind this ‘experience’ stuff; let's discuss the facts.”) Here's a sentence from Flory and Miller's Summary and Conclusions of their Resisters chapter in Finding Faith:

...Resisters are intent on resisting a changing social and cultural order where their conception of reason and rationality is under attack, or more accurately (at least according to their analysis) completely disregarded, and are trying mightily to regain a voice for a commitment to reason and rationalism that legitimates everything they believe in and, they argue, legitimates everything anybody should believe in. (117)

Yes, I sometimes resemble this remark. But when I do, I think I (and they) miss the point (to borrow a phrase from Campolo and McLaren) in a few ways.

First, facts and logic have never really carried the day. As I've often said when reading, say, John 11:45-46 -- “When the chief priests and Pharisees heard that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, they said, ‘Whoa, boys! We've been all wrong about this guy! He really is from God!’”
No they didn't; facts and logic meant nothing to them in this area. Or when the Roman guards told the priests about the empty tomb in Matthew 28:4,11 -- same deal; God was really working but the priests refused to understand.
Second, society really isn't heading in that direction; it really is heading toward story as the way of understanding truth, as Fallows points out in this great article on the new media (more in this previous posting). This quote from that article bears repeating:
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert ... don't fact-check Fox News, or try to rebut it directly, or fight on its own terms. They change the story ... by presenting the facts in a way that makes them register in a way they hadn't before.
Third, much as people don't apprehend truth presented in the style and structure I'm familiar with (and like), logic isn't 100% ineffective among young people today.
A few summers back, we had a terrific time discussing parts of Keller's The Reason for God with some college students. Granted that these folks weren't exactly a random sampling, yet in areas where they weren't overly invested in their position, Keller's trenchant critique did gain traction. Some people really do want to know if their thinking is a little too fuzzy.
But these folks would never pick the book up on their own; they came partly because of the material but also partly because it was at our house, they're friends of our daughters, etc.

Flory and Miller say "the relative success or failure Resisters remains to be seen" (122) and I suppose they are right. Though I don't ever see our society returning to a condition where people at least pretended to be logical more of the time, some people really are interested in truth, and facts and logic, if presented in a palatable way, can change people's minds, and sometimes, eventually, their hearts.

Yet as someone said, nobody ever decided to follow Christ or feed the hungry because they lost an argument.

Sort of Python - part deux

2011-03-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Continuing from part 1...
Now suppose you wanted to do something a little more useful, like a case-ignore search. Well, you'll need, of course, a case-ignore comparator function. Fortunately Python strings have a method called "lower()", which returns a string that's been shifted to lower-case. So rather than comparing the original strings using cmp(), we could pass in stringX.tolower() and stringY.tolower() to cmp() and use that return value, as shown below in compIgnoreCase:

#!/usr/bin/python -utt
# vim:et
'''Program to sort a list of words using various criteria.'''

def show(listA):
    print "\tlistA:", listA
    print

def compLen(x,y):
    '''Compare words for length'''
    return cmp(len(x), len(y))

 def compIgnoreCase(x,y):
    '''ignore case in sort'''
    return cmp(x.lower(), y.lower())

def main():
    '''Create a list of words, then sort using various criteria.
    Display the contents of the list after each sort.'''

    # Easier to type than ['In','the','beginning' (etc)
    listA = 'In the beginning God created'.split()

    print "Before sorting:"
    show(listA)

    listA.sort()
    print "after default sort:"
    show(listA)

    # Sort for length
    listA.sort(compLen)
    print "after sort by length:"
    show(listA)

    # Sort ignoring case
    listA.sort(compIgnoreCase)
    print "after case-ignore sort"
    show(listA)

    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Note the code added in this color;we compare the lower()'d version of the strings; the new results are shown in this color below:

% ./sort1c.py 
Before sorting:
        listA: ['In', 'the', 'beginning', 'God', 'created']

after default sort:
        listA: ['God', 'In', 'beginning', 'created', 'the']

after sort by length:
        listA: ['In', 'God', 'the', 'created', 'beginning']

after case-ignore sort
        listA: ['beginning', 'created', 'God', 'In', 'the']

Now what if we wanted to put the words with the highest proportion of consonants at the end, and the more vowel-heavy words at the beginning? I'd write a routine to calculate consonant density, and, like the other comparators, include it in a call to sort(). Added code and results are in this color:

#!/usr/bin/python -utt
# vim:et
'''Program to sort a list of words using various criteria.'''

def show(listA):
    print "\tlistA:", listA
    print

def compLen(x,y):
    '''Compare words for length'''
    return cmp(len(x), len(y))

 def compIgnoreCase(x,y):
    '''ignore case in sort'''
    return cmp(x.lower(), y.lower())

def compConsonants(x,y):
    '''compare words for consonant density'''
    return cmp(consonantDensity(x), consonantDensity(y))

def consonantDensity(astring):
    '''how many consonants in astring?'''
    ret = 0.0
    for abyte in astring.lower():
        if abyte in ('a','e','i','o','u'):
            continue
        ret += 1.0
    return (ret / len(astring))

def main():
    '''Create a list of words, then sort using various criteria.
    Display the contents of the list after each sort.'''

    # Easier to type than ['In','the','beginning' (etc)
    listA = 'In the beginning God created'.split()

    print "Before sorting:"
    show(listA)

    listA.sort()
    print "after default sort:"
    show(listA)

    # Sort for length
    listA.sort(compLen)
    print "after sort by length:"
    show(listA)

    # Sort ignoring case
    listA.sort(compIgnoreCase)
    print "after case-ignore sort"
    show(listA)

    # Sort by increasing consonant density
    listA.sort(compConsonants)
    print "in order of increasing consonant density"
    show(listA)

    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

So consonantDensity calculates what proportion of each word's letters are consonants, and compConsonants(x,y) compares the consonant proportions of the two strings passed. The results look like this:

% ./sort1d.py 
Before sorting:
        listA: ['In', 'the', 'beginning', 'God', 'created']

after default sort:
        listA: ['God', 'In', 'beginning', 'created', 'the']

after sort by length:
        listA: ['In', 'God', 'the', 'created', 'beginning']

after case-ignore sort
        listA: ['beginning', 'created', 'God', 'In', 'the']

in order of increasing consonant density
        listA: ['In', 'created', 'beginning', 'God', 'the']

That looks about right: "in" is 50% consonants; "created" is 4/7 or about 57% consonants; "beginning", "God", and "the" are 2/3 (about 67%) consonants.

Finally, I wanted to mention "pydoc", a terrific documentation aid. When run on the above code, it produces this:

% pydoc sort1d
Help on module sort1d:

NAME
    sort1d - Program to sort a list of words using various criteria.

FILE
    /Users/collin/tmp/sorting/sort1d.py

FUNCTIONS
    compConsonants(x, y)
        compare words for consonant density
    
    compIgnoreCase(x, y)
        ignore case in sort
    
    compLen(x, y)
        Compare words for length
    
    consonantDensity(astring)
        how many consonants in astring?
    
    main()
        Create a list of words, then sort using various criteria.
        Display the contents of the list after each sort.
    
    show(listA)

Pretty cool, huh? Just put the "documentation strings" in the function declarations, and voila -- instant manpage!

Sort of Python

2011-03-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the title; I couldn't resist. My nephew and I were talking about sorting in Java, a language which I can't even spell. But I remembered, when talking about the idea of passing a function to another function, that this concept takes some getting used to. I decided to write a little example this morning, using a language I actually write code in, viz., Python. Here's the first part:

#!/usr/bin/python -utt
# vim:et
'''Program to sort a list of words using various criteria.'''

def show(listA):
    print "\tlistA:", listA
    print

def main():
    '''Create a list of words, then sort using various criteria.
    Display the contents of the list after each sort.'''

    # Easier to type than ['In','the','beginning' (etc)
    listA = 'In the beginning God created'.split()

    print "Before sorting:"
    show(listA)

    listA.sort()
    print "after default sort:"
    show(listA)

    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Let me explain briefly. "show" is just a helper that displays the list in a certain way -- i.e., with a tab in front and an extra newline after the word list. I wrote "show" so that, in case I wanted to do something different (e.g., put the extra newline before, rather than after, the list; or use some spaces rather than a tab character) I would just change the layout once, in show(), rather than changing a bunch of print statements throughout.

"main" creates the list, which I creatively call listA, by taking a string (a sentence or phrase will be fine) and splitting it based on whitespace (this is like PERL's "qw"). Then it calls "show" to display the list's original contents.

Finally, it calls the list's sort function, passing no parameters. This sorts according to the default ordering, which may depend on your $LANG or $LC_ALL environment variable. Here's what happens when you run it:

% ./sort1a.py 
Before sorting:
        listA: ['In', 'the', 'beginning', 'God', 'created']

after default sort:
        listA: ['God', 'In', 'beginning', 'created', 'the']

%

Now what if you want to do something different with the sort -- rather than sorting based on the natural ordering of these words, what if you wanted to put longest words last?

Well, sort() can still help you, but you need a comparator function -- one that, given two words, tells whether the first is shorter (or "less than", or "comes before") the second word in the desired outcome. Let's add that in like this:


#!/usr/bin/python -utt
# vim:et
'''Program to sort a list of words using various criteria.'''

def show(listA):
    print "\tlistA:", listA
    print

def compLen(x,y):
    '''Compare words for length'''
    return cmp(len(x), len(y))

def main():
    '''Create a list of words, then sort using various criteria.
    Display the contents of the list after each sort.'''

    # Easier to type than ['In','the','beginning' (etc)
    listA = 'In the beginning God created'.split()

    print "Before sorting:"
    show(listA)

    listA.sort()
    print "after default sort:"
    show(listA)

    # Sort for length
    listA.sort(compLen)
    print "after sort by length:"
    show(listA)

    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

See how that works? I created a routine compLen, which returns -1, not when the first word would precede the second in natural ordering, but when the first word is shorter than the second word. By the way, Python's cmp does this comparison/return thing on whatever we pass it -- hence by just typing cmp(len(x), len(y)) I've created a routine that does what we need to sort by length.

The second change, within main(), calls sort(), passing in this comparator routine. When sort() does its thing, it will put them in ascending order, as defined by compLen().

Does that make sense? When sort() wants to decide if, what's currently say, element#2 should go after what's currently element#3 (i.e., if 2 and 3 are in the correct order), it calls a function. If you just say someList.sort(), then sort() will call a function that returns -1 if element#2 is "less than" element#3, whatever that means. But if you pass in a function like compLen, then sort() will call compLen, which will say whether element#2 is (in this case) shorter than element#3, and so you'll end up with a list sorted in order of increasing length. Here's how it looks when run:

% ./sort1b.py 
Before sorting:
        listA: ['In', 'the', 'beginning', 'God', 'created']

after default sort:
        listA: ['God', 'In', 'beginning', 'created', 'the']

after sort by length:
        listA: ['In', 'God', 'the', 'created', 'beginning']

%

Did that all make sense? More examples in part 2

Cinema: the new church?

2011-03-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

Two statements:

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert ... don't fact-check Fox News, or try to rebut it directly, or fight on its own terms. They change the story ... by presenting the facts in a way that makes them register in a way they hadn't before.
Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media
by James Fallows, The Atlantic April 2011
More theology is discussed at Starbucks on a Saturday night than at most churches on Sunday morning.
Ralph Winter (or maybe Chap Clark)
pre-Windrider Festival film event 2011-03-14

It's not quite fair to say that people don't care about truth any more, but the way we take truth in, the way we decide what's true -- those have changed. Here's another snippet from the same article:

“There is actually a lot of energy released by opposing ‘settled facts,’” I was told by Jay Rosen, of the journalism school at NYU. “The more ‘settled’ it is, the more furious the energy. When someone points out an error in what Sarah Palin has said, that becomes another example of the liberal media, and it becomes another tool for organizing.”
Fallows, op. cit.

In other words, people don't decide what to accept or not based upon facts and logic. Instead, it's about something else entirely, which is where we have a lot to learn from the world of film.

We evangelicals have a hard time with this concept. (Which one? Yes.) First, we are (at least where I'm coming from) all about facts and logic to understand issues of importance. What happened about 33 AD after they crucified this man called "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews"? The body was never found by highly motivated, powerful people. They were well-connected and focused enough to get him killed, and producing his corpse would have wiped out that troublesome sect—which instead has lasted nearly 2000 years.

Jesus's empty tomb stands as a serious challenge to to the likes of Dawkins and Pinker, men who say in their hearts, "There is no God."But facts and logic on their own are impotent to change the heart of man.

Yes, it has ever been thus. Those highly motivated powerful people from the 1st century were also unswayed by facts; Semmelweis had facts to prove hand-washing saves lives, but died unemployed and destitute. And so on.

But it does seem worse in our current century than it was, say, in the middle of the previous one.

We evangelicals (some more than others) think of weekly gatherings as being about The Content in The Sermon—surrounded by some music and stuff on either side. We don't give enough thought to the entire experience, which echoes something I heard before about sensory experience. People like me need to think of the entire experience of coming to a meeting -- the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the story all these tell -- rather than focusing only on the propositions contained in the sermon.

Second, the idea of listening to those outside the church, to learn how to communicate truth... well, I can't say we're always as open-minded as we should be. I think we humans -- not just the church by the way -- tend to think too much in terms of "us vs them" in echoes of what Judy Harris calls "group socialization theory." We are very concerned about getting facts straight about our faith, but we're not always so sure about their theology for example. Or on the other side, we put a lot of energy into welcoming the alien and stranger as Jesus and Peter and other Biblical writers, but we're not so sure how a newcomer would feel at their church.

Either of those preceding statements may be at least partly true, but what's worse (besides the smug attitude) is that we add, in our hearts, ...therefore, they can't teach us anything about ________.

Which comes under the heading of "biting off your nose to spite your face" or something like this. We all need to be about following Jesus, and that means taking off our blinders and prejudices, setting aside our pride, and looking for anything we can learn about how to communicate, serve, love, worship.

... that we may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in our knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might in order that we may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light -- that in all things he may have the glory.

Right. So what do we learn from film? The film world, as Ralph Winter told us the other night, are very interested in the structure, the style. Whatever the substance is or isn't, if the style and structure are good, you've got a hit.

So what do you think of Avatar? Is it too much about tree-worshiping, or is it about hope and redemption, resolving one's inner conflicts, rebirth? How about the first Star Wars film from the 1970s? Was that one about a false impersonal deity (The Force) and occult religions? Or was it about self-discovery, self-sacrifice (e.g., Obi-Wan sacrificing himself so Luke could get away)? These are great stories, brilliantly told.

So are The Little Gorilla and Kavi by the way. If you can see these -- or better yet, see them with friends -- they can provoke more discussion of theology than one typically gets on Sunday morning.

Reading Luke 5

2011-03-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

Links: my other postings on Lent ; our church's reading plan

The other day, I was parked behind a car whose license plate read "LK 5 31" or something like this. I wondered, was that the one about "I have not come to call the righteous?"

Well, today's reading included Luke 5:31 -- I just read Luke 5, due to sloth; it involved a lot less page flipping than this list from our reading plan (read down, then across):

Mark 2:1-12;
Matthew 9:1-8;
Luke 5:17-26;
Mark 2:13-17;
Matthew 9:9-13;
Luke 5:27-32;

Mark 2:18-22;
Matthew 9:14-17;
Luke 5:33-39;
Mark 2:23-28;
Matthew 12:1-8;
Luke 6:1-5

I don't want to discourage anybody who wants to read that, but I'm afraid I'd still be looking for the next selection when the train arrived at my stop.

Anyway, Luke 5 is a terrific chapter. We've got Jesus teaching Simon how to fish, Simon saying "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" (Luke 5:8) -- I can certainly identify with that! Suddenly coming to see that someone you thought you knew is actually totally other and totally holy -- it was a terrifying experience, and he wanted to run and hide. Yet when Jesus told him to follow, Simon and his crew left everything to follow him (Luke 5:11).

Then there's the man with leprosy ("If you are willing, you can..." he said). What a great example for us today! Some fault the leper for doubting God's goodness, but I say the man had faith (the "you can make me clean" part) and guts, and like today's 27 million slaves, had reason to wonder whether God is actually good, whether Somebody out there cares about him. And Jesus healed him, right there.

As he did the guy lowered through the roof. And it's not just the physically sick Jesus cares for, but those who, like Levi (aka Matthew) the tax collector, have other kinds of problems (Luke 5:27-32). In case you didn't know this about tax collectors in those times, they collected tax for the hated Roman oppressors. They collected money from each person or household, and sent part of that money to Rome. The rest was their profit, or service fee, or whatever you want to call it. They were well-hated by their countrymen.

Yet Jesus called him to follow -- think of it, the Son of God, taking on a sinner like Levi (or like me) as a disciple. Wow! By the way, that's where Luke 5:31-32 fall: "It is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners [to repentance]."

A few words on marriage. And sex.

2011-03-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

We drove a couple of hours into the valley yesterday for a wedding -- the last remaining single nephew of the lovely Carol is now officially unavailable. Besides the important point that marriage is for "as long as we both shall live," the pastor gave the rest of us a short reminder regarding our duties to support the marriage: the point I remembered was not to ah, "talk steenk" (as we used to say as kids) about one partner to the other.

This could be a very poisonous thing to do -- particularly if we suspect there's some strain in the marriage. I mean, if "Don" and "Mary" might be having some issues, and we send Mary the subliminal (or not-so-) message that if she decided to dump Don, we could certainly understand, what with all the stunts he's pulled recently, etc. -- that could be a terribly destructive thing to do. (On the other hand, it could also be a brilliant support of the marriage, if we know for sure that she'll rise up to defend her husband from these unfair accusations, etc., but that's a risky proposition.).

Instead, we should remind each other that the vow is "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health" and that it really is a permanent deal, a promise.

This morning I heard a brilliant sermon on "I believe in God but I'm in charge of my sex life," where our pastor reminded us of the concept of "chastity" and how it applies to all of us, whether single or married. He explained that the exhortation to us in 1 Corinthians 6:18 ("Flee immorality... ") was not because sexual sins are more heinous in God's view; it's because the consequences are greater upon me, the sinner. It's a helpful reminder to me about the importance of chastity -- I don't want to be hobbled in my pursuit of God any more than I already am.

Something else I liked from this morning's sermon was a bit of dialog between a young, "modern" person who expressed incredulity at the idea of saving sex for marriage. "Nobody's a virgin when they get married these days. I mean, were you and your wife virgins when you got married?" Upon hearing that in fact John and Nancy were, he replied: "No way! There is no way I could live like that!"

So John asked, "How's your way working out for you?" It wasn't working very well at all, as it turned out. Another pastor, Andy Stanley, was quoted as asking a congregant, "Has having sex outside of marriage made your life better, or just more complicated?" Just more complicated. A lot more complicated.

Not everyone can see the damage that's being done; some just enjoy the pleasure of the experience. But as Cameron Diaz's character says in Vanilla Sky, "[W]hen you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise, whether you do or not." Something profound happens there. "Casual sex" is an oxymoron.

Or, as Lauren Winner writes in Real Sex, "in Christianity's vocabulary the only real sex is the sex that happens in marriage; the faux sex that goes on outside marriage is not really sex at all..." (38). Don't take that too literally! Of course it's real in the sense that it can produce a child, that your body makes a promise, that it can destroy relationships and families, that it can produce intense pleasure. But it's out of place; it's wrong in a fundamental way because it's out of context.

Christmas stories

2011-03-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

Links: my other postings on Lent ; our church's reading plan

Yesterday's Scripture reading according to our church's reading plan included verses from Matthew and Luke: Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 2:1-20; Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38; Luke 2:21-40. Why just Matthew and Luke, and why ordered like this?

Well, Christmas -- the birth of Christ -- is only mentioned in these two gospels. That's right -- Mark and John do not talk about the Lord's birth at all. All four gospels talk about Christ's death and resurrection, but only two talk about his birth. Yet, as Buechner says, Christmas is as much of a miracle -- it's the invasion of the Creator into his created order.

Why start with Matthew 1:18-25 and then do 1:1-17 afterward? I guess it's so that the day's reading starts with some action. Here's how Jesus was born, Matthew tells us, recounting the unexpected pregnancy, Joseph's thought of possibly divorcing Mary quietly (rather than having her shot), the various revelations Joseph got through dreams, the Magi's visit, the flight to Egypt, and so on.

Next we get Luke's account, the passage millions of Americans heard and perhaps memorized from A Charlie Brown Christmas: Luke 2:1-20, including the shepherds' visit. An interesting thing I heard recently, from a Christmas eve sermon actually, is that "no room at the inn" (Luke 2:7) might be better be translated "guest room was already occupied." Apparently, in towns like Bethlehem, people might have an upper room or guest room. The entire family (including domestic animals) might live on the lower level. And a manger (Luke 7) is where a newborn child might normally be placed.

So the message of Luke 2 isn't so much about rejecting Jesus (as John 1:11) -- that came later -- as it is about how when Jesus came, he came in the way any peasant child might come, wrapped in cloths ("strips of cloth" or "swaddling clothes" in other translations) and placed in a manger, as any peasant child would be.

The genealogies come next; tradition has it that Matthew's list describes Joseph's lineage whereas Luke's list describes Mary's. This is consistent with a totally uninformed theory of mine, viz., that Luke got a lot of his information through interviews with Mary, and that she lived long after Joseph had passed away. (Here's a short piece summarizing my understanding of what Matthew's genealogy tells us about Jesus's identity.) In any case, I think the editors of the reading list did well to give us the genealogies after the birth story.

What I got out of these readings is Jesus's radical identification with us: he is at once the Savior and Sacrifice, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and yet also came through a line of ancestors that included Rahab and Ruth and Tamar, arrived as any peasant child, fled like a criminal in the earliest part of his life.

What an amazing love our God has for us, to enter into this sorry world during a dark time, to have to flee for his life, and eventually to die for our sins. How fortunate and blessed we are to be loved like that!

Not giving anything up for Lent

2011-03-10T20:28:00.000-08:00

Links: my other postings on Lent ; our church's reading plan

Our pastor is encouraging us to focus on some Scriptures during Lent, and I think this is a terrific idea. A few years ago I heard an essay on NPR (yes, on National Public Radio) about Lent: the speaker was talking about giving up this or that when he was in college (I think beer was one of the things he gave up). But decades later, he wondered if the focus of Lent ought to be "more _________" rather than "giving up __________". For example, rather than drinking less, or going to the movies less, he thought he would pray or meditate or serve the poor more.

So I like this "more Scripture" idea. Yesterday's reading was Luke 1 and naturally I'm already behind. I read Luke 1 this morning, and Mary's song impressed me, again -- particularly Luke 1:52-53:

He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.

I can't imagine how this must have sounded to its first-century hearers, She switches the order in the two couplets:

brought down rulers... lifted up the humble
filled the hungry... sent the rich away empty

and I think the folks in the middle -- the humble and the hungry, rather than the rich and powerful -- are the focus ofthis song.

And I suppose it felt like bad news to the rich and powerful; in a way it's unsurprising that the Guatemalan government banned its recitation in public for a while in the 1980s. Considering recent events in northern Africa and western Asia, the Magnificat is as timely today as it was in the first century. "He has brought down rulers from their thrones" -- I'm sure many people are longing for that today. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Today's reading is is Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 2:1-20; Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38; Luke 2:21-40. I'm not sure about the order, but more on this later.

Gratitude

2011-03-06T13:02:00.000-08:00

The transition to being "empty nesters" is not instant, but it is inexorable: within a month, our sole remaining teen-ager will start her third decade.

It is bittersweet, this transition. We raised our girls to go off to college and become independent, and they've done the first. The ex-teenager will be married within the year, and that's good, too; I just hadn't thought all this would happen so soon. It was nearly three years ago that I wrote this sentimental piece about the then younger teen, and I certainly miss the days when I'd come home to the lovely Carol, and also to little (and later not-so-little) girls, who would sit on my lap, or want to be carried around ("運んでもらう!"), or tell me about their day.

Which reminds me of a story. One day, a man came down the street and gave me a hundred-dollar bill. The next day, he did it again. For something like twenty years he did this. I got accustomed to it.

Then he stopped coming so regularly. He'd come during the summer, then stop. He'd come again toward the end of November, and then in January he'd stop. Sometimes he'd show up for a week in March or April.

These hundred-dollar bills (an inadequate metaphor but please bear with me) were not earned or deserved, so the appropriate attitude is gratitude. We are so fortunate to be able to enjoy these exceptional girls (I imagine every parent thinks his or her kid a genius, a spiritual giant filled with zeal and compassion; I am no exception) -- and to know that they're gone doing what we raised them to do.

Though I sometimes mourn the passing of those truly wonderful days, I know that I've received more and better than I deserve, and when I remember this, I can be thankful.

"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!" Amen.

Is your firefox3 slowing your computer down?

2011-03-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

Apparently firefox can slow down not just firefox, but your whole Linux computer, according to the results posted in this thread. I read the "vacuum" tip here and tried it on my computer at home. Here's the "before" picture:

-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     7168 2011-02-16 19:50 content-prefs.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users   576512 2011-03-05 21:56 cookies.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     5120 2011-03-05 20:30 downloads.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     4096 2011-03-05 21:56 formhistory.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     2048 2010-12-28 10:54 permissions.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users   446464 2011-03-05 21:56 places.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     2048 2011-03-05 21:41 search.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users    18432 2011-01-18 18:39 signons.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users 15332352 2010-11-02 16:04 urlclassifier2.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users 46837760 2011-03-05 21:44 urlclassifier3.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users   412672 2011-03-05 20:29 webappsstore.sqlite

And here's the "after" one:

-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     7168 Mar  6 08:02 content-prefs.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users   445440 Mar  6 08:02 cookies.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     2048 Mar  6 08:02 downloads.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     4096 Mar  6 08:02 formhistory.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     2048 Mar  6 08:02 permissions.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users   151552 Mar  6 08:02 places.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users     2048 Mar  6 08:02 search.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users    18432 Mar  6 08:02 signons.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users  3257344 Mar  6 08:02 urlclassifier2.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users 35360768 Mar  6 08:03 urlclassifier3.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 collin users   412672 Mar  6 08:03 webappsstore.sqlite

Just a few files had a significant reduction, but I thought I'd tell you about this anyway.

So, if your computer is slow and you use firefox3, this might help. btw there are instructions at the link above for how to "vacuum" firefox on Windows, too.

How to Overcome Envy -- expanded

2011-03-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

I'm giving this talk Friday 04 March 2011 to a group that's just finished hearing a series on mission.

How to Overcome Envy

I understand from Jeff that you've been hearing lately about mission: the reason you're sent, the message you bring, and the mission you're to accomplish. Sounds like a great series.

My topic for this evening is about envy. Envy will slow you down: it will dilute the reason, compromise the message, and impede your mission.

What Is Envy?

Envy is pain at the good fortune of others. (Aristotle, Rhetoric)

Envy is like this: My friend wins a brand new Mercedes-Benz in a raffle — a raffle that I also entered. If that makes me unhappy, if that makes me less contented, that's envy.

What if my friend's kid gets into an elite university, or gets a 100% scholarship to an elite university, and I'm unhappy about that? Or if a colleague gets a promotion or an award? If I was happier before I heard about their good fortune, that's what makes it envy.

Why Do We Envy?

Let's look at an old example from Psalm 73, a psalm of Asaph:

Psalm 73:1-5

    Surely God is good to Israel,
        to those who are pure in heart.
    But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
        I had nearly lost my foothold.
    For I envied the arrogant
        when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
    They have no struggles;
        their bodies are healthy and strong.
    They are free from the burdens common to man;
        they are not plagued by human ills.

Psalm 73:12-14

    This is what the wicked are like—
        always carefree, they increase in wealth.
    Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure;
        in vain have I washed my hands in innocence.
    All day long I have been plagued;
        I have been punished every morning.

(Psalm 73:1-5,12-14)

The psalmist sees others with good things he doesn't have. He sees his own problems and thinks others don't have them.

It's like that with us, too, and by the way the person you envy doesn't have to be arrogant or wicked. Here's an example, a guy I'll call "Nick." Nick wrote a novel. His agent called one day, "The publisher wants to offer you a million dollar advance." Nick quit his day job and wrote one best-seller after another. Nick is a real person, by the way; I think he's a Christian. I'll tell you more about him later.

So I compare myself with somebody who has more than I do, and I feel envious. What would happen if I compare myself with somebody who has less? I might thank God for blessing me with abundance. I might be more contented. I might become more generous. I might wait a little longer before buying my next expensive toy.

What's Wrong With Envy?

I'm an engineer, so here's an engineering answer: envy doesn't take all the facts into account. Asaph knew this too:

Psalm 73:16-18

    When I tried to understand all this,
        it was oppressive to me
    till I entered the sanctuary of God;
        then I understood their final destiny.
    Surely you place them on slippery ground;
        you cast them down to ruin.

(Psalm 73:16-18)

In other words, in the case of the arrogant and wicked who seem to have no troubles—at least for now—their end won't be all that good. I'm not saying to rejoice when calamity hits them; I'm just saying that their situation isn't as good as it looks.

Even if someone isn't blatantly evil, arrogant or wicked, we don't usually know much about their problems. I mentioned "Nick" — that's Nicholas Sparks, who wrote The Notebook. Have you read it, or seen the movie? He's written a bunch of best-sellers, and they're pretty good reads.He also wrote Three Weeks with my Brother, where I learned about...

his marriage in 1989; the loss of Nick and Micah's mother two months later after a horseback riding accident; the death of Nick's first baby and the physical problems of his second son; the death of their father in a car accident; and the passing of their younger sister from a brain tumor.
(from Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Whoa, Nick was about 25 when his mother died; the rest of that stuff happened before he was 40. I'm a lot older than that, but I still have both my parents; my sisters are still alive, my children are both healthy and following the Lord. I would not trade places with him.

Psalm 73:21-22

    When my heart was grieved
        and my spirit embittered,
    I was senseless and ignorant;
        I was a brute beast before you.

(Psalm 73:21-22)

Senseless and ignorant that's not a good way to be. Or like a beast.

Here's the thing: it's hard to follow God when I'm coveting or envious and embittered. In other words, like other sins, envy makes us stupid.

Envy is the enemy of just about any good thing I can think of. It even goes against the Ten Commandments.

What To Do About Envy?

I'm indebted to Kathy Collard Miller for most of these steps.

Remember that God is in control.

Charles Swindoll wrote,

Sovereignty means our all-wise, all-knowing God reigns in realms beyond our comprehension to bring about a plan beyond our ability to alter, hinder, or stop.
(also quoted on p.103 of Becoming Myself; Becoming His: Living the Life God Designed for You, by Kay Watson — per Google Books)

When I recognize that God is at work, that he's in full control, and that he will accomplish his plan concerning me (Psalm 138:8 NASB), envy will lose some of its steam. He's got good plans for me.

Here are some more verses; you probably know them. Daniel 4: "All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth." There are a lot more — Isaiah 14:24 says "As I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand." Isaiah 40 talks about how all the nations are regarded as nothing. Psalm 75 says that he brings one down and lifts up another. He is the one who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will — from Ephesians 1. And so on.

Decide to Bless

Kathy suggested a prayer along these lines: “Lord, bless them. Give them many more opportunities. Expand their ministry.” This is a way of applying 2 Corinthians 10:5 — one method we can use to "take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ" (NASB).

Since Jesus told us to love our enemies and bless those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44), how much more should we bless those who didn't hurt us in the first place?

I would like to suggest that we ask God even before we face the situation, to make us the kind of people who can bless rather than get mad.

Remember that we each have a role

The Apostle Paul talked quite about this in 1 Corinthians 12; here's verse 17 from the NIV: "If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?" There is no "appendix" in the body of Christ!

In particular, you have a role, and your role is essential.

Grow in Grace

On my blog I write, "do the above for 20-30 years and repeat as needed", which also applies here. I've put in the handout some helpful commands from the Scriptures...

If I'm practicing these, it's hard to be envious:

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5)
Rejoice in the Lord always (Philippians 4)
Let your mind dwell on: whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely... (Philippians 4)
Remain in Christ, and let his word remain in you (John 15)
Love one another as he has loved us (John 13)
Bless your enemies, and your peers and friends (Matthew 5)
Humble yourself under God's mighty hand, and he will exalt you at the proper time (1 Peter 5)

Really important: There is no condemnation

Romans 8:1-4

Summary

Remember God's in control
Be determined to bless your rivals
Remember that your role is essential
Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
When you fall, remember there is no condemnation!

My prayer for you is: that you may grow in the knowledge of God's will through all spiritual wisdom and insight... (Col. 1:9-12)

Addendum: How it Went

I had 40 minutes to deliver plus Q&A. Last year I talked way too long, but this time I was done in about 25 minutes. Afterward someone stood up at the mike and said, "We're definitely gonna invite you more often."

During the question/answer section, someone observed that "victory" in this area comes and goes. I replied that there is no magic formula, but we practice the disciplines, we grow in grace, we do it for 20-30 years and repeat as needed.

Another question was: How do you respond if somebody is envious of you? Maybe you don't think you're in such an enviable position, but suddenly a harsh remark comes out from someone who thinks they know you well? What came to mind was the idea that we often feel that we have to act like we've "got it all together" and don't have any problems. If someone shares with me that they're feeling envious, it may be time for me to be a little more transparent, tell them about my struggles, ask them to pray for me.

Now that I think of it, someone remarked how our kids got along so well together. "It wasn't always this way," I replied. "There was a while when we couldn't turn our backs or one of them would be biting the other. We prayed a lot in those days." Which reminds me of this verse from 1 John 1:

If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin.

You haven't had enough trouble in your lives...

2011-02-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

In Kent Haruf's marvelous Plainsong, a high-school teacher visits two bachelor ranchers to ask them to take in a homeless pregnant 17-year-old. They're about to realize it:

All right then, Harold said, you got our attention. You say you don't want money. What do you want?
She sipped her coffee and tasted it and looked in the cup again and set it back on the table. She looked at the two old brothers. They were waiting, sitting forward at the table across from her. I want something improbable, she said. That's what I want. I want you to think about taking this girl in. Of letting her live with you.
They stared at her.
You're fooling, Harold said.
No, Maggie said. I am not fooling.
They were dumbfounded. They looked at her, regarding her as if she might be dangerous. Then they peered into the palms of their thick callused hands spread out before them on the kitchen table and lastly they looked out the window toward the leafless and stunted elm trees.
Oh, I know it sounds crazy, she said. I suppose it is crazy. I don't know. I don't even care. But that girl needs somebody and I'm ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you—she smiled at them—you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It's too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You're going to die some day without having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance. (109-110)

They are speechless for a bit, and then Harold has a counterproposal:

Hell, Maggie, Harold said at last. Let's go back to the money part. Money'd be a lot easier.
Yes, she said. It would. But not nearly as much fun.
Fun, he said. That's a nice word for what you're talking about. More like pandemonium and disruption, you mean. Jesus God. (110)

Maggie leaves, asking them to call her if they change their minds. Of course you know they will. Raymond decides to take the girl in, and Harold puts up a bit of an argument:

Why wouldn't she be as much trouble? As much trouble as what? You ever had a girl living with you before?
You know I ain't, Raymond said.
Well, I ain't either. But let me tell you. A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose. And goddamnit, there's the baby too. What do you know about babies? (112)

Of course Harold is right. Their lives will change beyond what they can imagine. For the most part, at least as Haruf tells it, their lives have been mostly in control. No, they can't control the weather, but they have technology, like barns and a house and a waterproof box with a gas flame to keep the stock tank from freezing over.

Those are anyway only technological challenges; for relationship challenges they just have each other. Taking this girl in will turn out to be an exciting adventure for them. There's heartbreak, too, but then life is like that.

Especially if we want to live in relationship with God: He loves us too much to let us stay in the same condition we are, so he will bring things into our lives that will help us grow. Our part is to trust him and walk through the door. Not to be foolish or rash, but to trust and obey.

Easier said than done, but the result is goodness.

Opensuse 11.3: Software upgrades should always be this easy

2011-02-22T20:40:00.000-08:00

Now that I've been running opensuse 11.3 at home for some months now (link from Dec'10), I've been thinking about installing it at work. After some recent frustrations with the printer (I've had issues printing from both thunderbird and firefox on opensuse 10.2) I started thinking more seriously about it, and when it became interesting to try installing shapado at the office... well, let's just say I looked at the prerequisites and decided to pull the trigger. Oh, the other thing is that 11.4 is due out next month, so it's about time to install 11.3 on the office desktop.

Why opensuse? It's a matter of personal preference, really, but here are a few of my thoughts.

I'm accustomed to SuSE Linux, having run 5.3, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.1, 9.3 and then opensuse 10.2; it has packages I've become familiar with (can you say "asclock"? "fvwm2"?)
I seem to remember being pleasantly surprised once that SuSE's build of ksh had some capabilities enabled that weren't turned on by default in Red Hat. To get those features in RH I had to rebuild ksh from source. This wasn't hard, but since I've occasion to upgrade over the years (and maybe I saw it coming) I just decided to go with a distro that I wouldn't have to tweak as much.
During the sco wars (see http://groklaw.net) I read that Novell (the purveyor of SuSE Linux in the 9.3 days) had been instrumental in bringing down the bad guys. Upon reading this, I sent off for their latest boxed set (SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional), paying whatever they were asking.

I'd had some bad experiences with Linux upgrades on some old Dell boxen, but the recent IBM lease-return I have at home seems to be sufficiently recent to play well with 11.3, so I was optimistic. Also, I loaded up an old NetVista box at the office with 11.3, and it worked fine -- hence my not-quite-as-old primary desktop (a thinkcentre I believe) would probably work.

Before even thinking about it

The previous Linux install on the old IBM (I think this is a pre-Lenovo box) had /home in a separate partition. This is where my home directory was. The thought was to be able to upgrade the system SW without touching my personal data. A bunch of other stuff is on NetApp filers, accessed via NFS, so no worries there. If you have a chance to put your home directory in a separate partition from the system partition -- better, if you have enough space to carve out multiple areas where you can install various system versions -- you're all set for playing with multiple distros. But for me, it was enough to have one system partition and one for my personal stuff.

I had some quirky stuff which is less so now: Privoxy, which I don't believe was on the opensuse 10.2 install media; tkremind; dovecot. Some of these were installed under /usr/local. Also I think some configuration might have been kinda special -- automounter and this sort of thing. So I copied or moved all of /usr/local/src under $HOME; also I copied the /etc/ tree to a place under $HOME for future reference.

Now I wanted to remain productive during the transition (yeah, I know, too much multitasking makes you stupid. But I figured that since I already hit bottom I'm likely immune) so I turned off fetchmail on the primary desktop, rsync'd the maildir from the desktop to my temporary workstation, then ran "fetchmail -d 60" on the temporary.

Now I could insert the DVD and reboot my primary desktop. I hit <ENTER> to interrupt normal boot, and chose to boot from CD-ROM drive. I selected "Install" from the boot menu, agreed to "no warranty", and selected my timezone (hwclock set to UTC).

KDE is the default desktop (they don't have an fvwm2 option) so I chose KDE, and then told the installer to leave /home alone (mount it as /home in the new world) and to go ahead and format the system partition, /. Before clicking the "go do it" button, I clicked the box to enable sshd and open a hole in the firewall.

Then I went back to work, using the slower and louder temporary workstation. After a while, the installation was pretty much done.

First happy surprise: it saw that /home/collin existed and figured out my uid from the files there -- it didn't blindly assign me 501 or 1000 or something, so I didn't have to go back and change it. Kudos to the OpenSUSE team for this nice touch!

I had to add a group, though, with a number less than 100. This is supposed to be reserved or something, but to be compatible with the assignments on the Linux/Unix boxen in the compute farm, I tried to create a group with gid=30. The installer wouldn't let me do it, so I created a group with a different id; later I'd become root and "vi /etc/group".

I tweaked the LAN card configuration for static IP, and had to enter the netmask and default gateway in by hand. I'm willing to put up with that in order to have a static IP address. Anyway, I made the mistake of enabling NIS before trying to configure the mail stuff. When we got to the part about which local users to masquerade, it tried to download all the userids that NIS knew about -- this is over 10,000. I went to the terminal that kicked off yast2 and said ^C... turned off ypbind and then went through the mail config -- much better. The key part was selecting delivery to be through procmail.

With yp turned on, the automounter could work -- I just put the saved versions of /etc/auto.* back in place and "/etc/init.d autofs start" and yes, that was it! A few more adjustments were needed, like opening privoxy up for remote connections, letting dovecot use plaintext authentication (only from localhost though), this sort of thing.

But overall, a piece of cake.

How to decide?

2011-02-16T17:42:00.000-08:00

From Merton's Witness to Freedom:

[T]here is one basic idea that should be kept in mind in all the changes we make in life, whether of career or anything else. We should decide not in view of better pay, higher rank, "getting ahead," but in view of becoming more real, entering more authentically into direct contact with life, living more as a free and mature human person, able to give myself more to others, able to understand myself and the world better.
pp. 254-255, quoted in
Echoing Silence, Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing
edited by Robert Inchausti

What a beautiful word of advice! Why do I need to read this? I guess that I (and maybe you?) have been paying too much attention to those other things -- "getting ahead" or the like.

Why do we do that? I think of the command in Colossians 3:2 Give your heart to the heavenly things, not to the passing things of earth (Phillips I think) and as my friend Jim says, there's a reason that's a command. We tend to look at what's right in front of us, and if everybody around us is talking about status and toys and money, after a while we start believing that stuff is what's important. More than that, we get into the habit of measuring ourselves by status and toys and money -- silliness.

How can someone like me change into someone more real, more authentically engaged, more generous and all that? As I've written before, this isn't something you or I can do on our own; we need help. Monitoring and changing what goes into our minds (reading the World Vision newsletter, rather than watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, for example), prayer, fellowship, the Scriptures... That's my plan, and will be for the next 20-30 years.