philosophy :: psychology :: theology :: technology
So I hang out with her, and I’m marvelling at the fact that we can be so honest—that we have such rapport—that we can be so free.
Then Christ says, “So what?”
“What?” I ask.
“So what, you can be yourself? What now?”
“Oh. Right.”
And that, I think, is the point. The next stage is upon us. Not just of the relationship, but of life. After all these pseudo-relationships, all these pretensions, here’s something so honest it’s gorgeous, in and of itself. What to do with it? There’s the next step. I don’t think I’ve ever gone there. So I take my shield and my sword and enter the room. End boss? Hardly. Miniboss? Perhaps. Enemies? Certainly. And a puzzle.
Is she worth it? Aye. Always, and much more. If only I could convey beyond the “mush” what Christ is doing. But perhaps that’s for another time—or only for me, or for her.
I think I left the actual PPT on the server at the office, but my premise was, of course, that adverbs are activated in the same way that McKoon & Ratcliff (1994) saw their objects of their sentences being activated.
I’ll upload that shortly. 
How To Write Unmaintainable Code
Next to “Why I Hate Microsoft” and “The Hacker Manifesto“—this essay rates incredibly high on the list of all-time greatest Internet and cyber-culture essays. If you’re a coder, you can’t help but check this page out. Forget all the state up in your head—you don’t need to know where that last for-loop led anyway.
MS needs to be beaten about the face and neck for releasing a buggy console. Contrast this with the soul of Nintendo. I can’t believe it.
Living Photos Use Bacteria as Pixels
Scientists at UC San Francisco have engineered bacteria to create living photographs that weigh in at 100 megapixels per square inch.
The photos were created by projecting light on “biological film” — billions of genetically engineered E. coli growing in dishes of agar, a standard jello-like growth medium for bacteria.
The work is published in this week’s issue of Nature (Nov. 24, 2005), devoted entirely to the emerging field of synthetic biology. The new field focuses on identifying genes that control key traits and then engineering microbes to activate the genes in novel combinations to create useful tools for medicine and technology.
So what if you could type “thinkblog” instead of “thinkblog.org” to get to this site? That’s precisely what UnifiedRoot, a Dutch company, wants to do. I think top-level domains (TLDs) help differentiate the type of site. What do you think?
The BOG is a really big deal. Want to know how to optimize your BIOS? (That’s the screen that pops up before anything else when you throw the power switch on your computer.) Check this out. (You don’t actually have to subscribe to access the material.)
VLC Media Player 0.8.4 Released
Enough said. Enjoy.
Lego Mindstorms: What Went Wrong?
Legos are near and dear to my heart. If you haven’t constructed a $30 Lego set, you are missing out.
Two decades ago, as of the 18th October, 2005, Nintendo celebrated its domination of the video game market around the world. Look, Nintendo has a soul where others don’t. Microsoft is laughable unmentionable with “soul” in the same sentence; Sony is a huge, multifaceted corporation out to appease the consumer mind. Atari and Sega have since faded with their own consoles. When I was a kid of nine or ten years, I hand-wrote a letter (the first of a few) to Nintendo of America, Ltd., HQ in Washington state. I got a personal reply back, with the maps for the original Metroid game—without charge. Here’s to you, Nintendo—you were my favorite babysitter.
OpenOffice.org Training Videos
Having trouble with OpenOffice.org Writer, or Impress? (Equivalents of MS Word or PowerPoint.) One thing that stands in the way of a mass exodus to open source software is the lack of training. Here’s the answer to that, in part. Try these out for an introduction to OO.o.
My buddy WallyJ almost got Slashdotted directly when an article (the one linked) mentioned a “vomit pic” associated with the new Jack Thompson book. (Jack Thompson is the anti-gaming crusader who’s basically lending even more of a bad name to evangelical Christianity by waving a Constantinian cross-banner over his proud legal struggles against some perceived threat of damnation-by-perversion from violent video games. I’m an evangelical Christian. I’m not anti-games. There are bigger things to deal with than a handful of kids who can’t discern between reality and fantasy, or who indulge when they shouldn’t.) WallyJ posted an “action shot” of the book that was actually a pic of someone vomiting explosively. That’s not necessarily the best route, but it is worth noting, since it got past Amazon’s filters.
MIT Grads’ Program Decides Where Songs will Hit on the Charts
The program that Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan designed as MIT Ph.D. students can predict how you will react to it—and predict with remarkable accuracy whether it will be a number-one chart hit.
This opens a whole can of worms. Really.
If the computer says it’s good, it’s going off of recent data; but what if producers get stuck in an infinite loop whereby they pull data from an algorithm designed to connect with this one and produce music? Yikes.
“If we would always recollect that we live among men who are imperfect, we should not be in such a fever when we find out our friend’s failings; what’s rotten will rend, and cracked pots will leak.”
“Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend.”
You can kindle the fires of romance with anyone with social grace and intuition enough to know how to say what, when. But it takes two people submitting to Christ and really getting down into the trenches and sweating a bit to find a true friend.
It’s always been much easier for me to concentrate on the justice of God, Father-as-disciplinarian, than on the love of Christ. But the reason I don’t like it is totally unrelated to the actuality of His love; it has more to do with my own prejudices. Reading Gadamer is really eye-opening: if I don’t tolerate peoples’ interacting with their prejudices and understanding how they hinder them—am I then not willing to see the destructive ones in myself?
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about being a father someday. One of my best friends, a long time ago, swore up and down he’d never have kids because he was afraid he’d screw up. But, we all screw up. The only thing I can absolutely guarantee my loved ones is disappointment and hurt, because of the fall. But Christ guarantees ultimate love, love that has overpowered the fall—so a father yielding to Christ will be able to admit his mistakes, learn from them, and humble himself to seek forgiveness—aye, even from his own wife and kids—when he’s being a jerk (or worse).
But one thing that really struck me when I considered how to deal with my kids one day was that I was constantly applying a grace in my mind to the situation that I am unwilling to see God extending to me. Recognizing that I was able to, for instance, extend grace (with firmness, mind you) to my child when s/he disobeys me, I was caught off guard when the Father whispered, “And yet you, fallen mortal saved by My grace, make a tyrant out of me? Know you not that I love you more than you could possibly love your own?”
Reality check!
“Well, let me ask you this: is there any subject you can’t broach with her?”
::lying back, closing eyes thoughtfully:: “—”
“See, that’s not good: the correct answer is, `No.’”
“Well, thing is, I’m trying not to get ahead of myself. I can’t think of anything that I couldn’t broach with her, because we’ve already handled all the hard stuff where our hangups are, you know? I’m just trying to be fair, so I don’t jump the gun. Look, I’ve never known someone so honest. She’s so unjaded, so—I’m not used to not having things held against me, you know? So no, I’m unable to discover a subject we can’t talk about.” ::suddenly snapping to serious affect:: “Look, I’ve never been able to just `be’ with anyone like her before. We can read a book together and just—” ::deep breath:: “—be, you know?”
“Good. The important thing is that you feel more comfortable in your own house just knowing she’s around. […] You feel anxiety when she’s in the house, that’s a bad sign. But man, when she’s around, it’s just so good to know she’s right there with you. You know?”
::smiling broadly, almost unbidden:: “Yeah. Yeah, I do know.”
“You know, Maker’s Mark is to Jack Daniels like Kalashnikov is to Grey Goose. You drink Kalashnikov and you taste potatoes and rubbing alcohol and you think, `Good grief, no wonder this shares its name with an illegal, automatic weapon.’ Then you have Grey Goose and you sink into bliss thinking with a sigh, `Ah, that’s vodka.’ Same with Maker’s Mark. Straight Jack on the rocks is great, but it’s like a punch to the gut—you have to brace for it to handle it. Maker’s Mark is like two gentlemen dressed in three piece suits sharing their secrets in spite of themselves.”
::contemplating his glass:: “Cookie, I’ve got to go to bed. It’s almost three in the morning!”
“Yeah, ah, I think you’ve used it on me once or twice. Mmmm-hmm!”
“I know, right? Thank God those days are gone. But really, you know, Americans are just so weak about [Christian rock]. Germans—oh man, the Germans—they get a guitar and have the the neck of the thing behind their heads like this, wailing on the riffs, just growling `Praaaaaaaaaaaise Goooooooooooooooood‘!”
::thoughtful pause::
“Son, have you ever considered acting?”
::laughter:: “Yes, yes I have.”
I designed a presentation on a series of papers to give the class Tuesday. Next Tuesday is another presentation, but meanwhile, check this one out: PSYC572 presentation (220.7KB PDF).
The thesis is, if psycholinguistically we interpret objects of subject-verb pairs more quickly if they fit in context than if not—then do we interpret adverbs in the same way? Hmm.
References:
McKoon, G., Ratcliff, R., & Ward, G. (1994). Testing theories of language processing: An empirical investigation of the on-line lexical decision task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1219-1228.
Nicol, J. L., Fodor, J. D., & Swinney, D. (1994). Using cross-modal lexical decision tasks to investigate sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1229-1238.
Nicol, J. L., & Swinney, D. (1989). The role of structure in coreference assignment during sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 5-20.
Sharkey, A., & Sharkey, N. (1992). Weak contextual constraints in text and word priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 543-572.
“The Daily WTF” is, among other things, an RSS feed-enabled site with one royal programming screwup per day. It’s a great laugh for heady geeks who know that, for instance, “to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.” Enjoy.
http://www.spywareguide.com/creator_show.php?id=97
If you’re using Zango Messenger, consider switching to something not put out by 180 Solutions, Inc. That company is a huge producer of spyware. They disclose that fact clearly, if you look for it, so it’s not as shady as it could be—but with something like Gaim, why would you want to use anything less? 
Tonight at church I was able to lead a small group in the study of what the Bible means when talking about “the rest” in, for instance, “I have declared on oath in my anger, `They shall never enter My rest.’” More on that actual point after the papers and presentations are done; suffice to say tonight was a good bit of confirmation to me of a number of things, not the least of which is that I’m headed down the right path in pursuit of teaching.
Have a great week!
At my friend’s birthday party last night, we all got together and watched the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the one that came out in 1990. Some brief comments.
J. G. noticed how your typical Freudian psychoanalysis comes through when April is trying to figure out how she could be imagining the turtles and the huge rat (Splinter). She says she saw a rat in the parking lot, for instance—so that now she should be hallucinating a huge rat in front of her shouldn’t be surprising.
I’m interested in how the “bad guys” are depicted in movies, cartoons, and everything of this era. The bad guys are cool, serious, troubled, and have all the cool stuff. They smoke, they look like they’re on a mission, they reek of electric power—you can just see the ozone pouring off of Shredder in the final scene, for instance, as though his costume were ionizing the air before him. Not so the good guys. The good guys are a bunch of goof-offs whose concerns are pizza, babes, and fun who accidentally, that is, by way of Fate, happen to have the skills to triumph over the enemy and save the day.
When Casey Jones is in the warehouse, standing before the gang, having defeated the boss just under Shredder—he reprimands them all, asking, “You call this a family?!” But I remember distinctly as a kid that the point didn’t stick. There was no argument; he didn’t point out what it was that made this not a family. Here were kids who had each others’ backs; the only “family” that’s even depicted in the film itself is a nerdy, angry dad who pays more attention to his star reporter than to his own son. What, I’m fifteen, I have endless cigarettes, billiard tables, arcade machines, skate ramps, and friends—and I’m supposed to just magically “figure out” that Casey Jones makes a compelling argument by his sheer righteous vehemence that the best thing to do is to return to my single-parent home where I’d just get yelled at or ignored? Please. The good guys may win because they’re right, but the bad guys still won the kids who watched this movie—because any way you slice it, they were bad in the best way.
That said, the whole movie looked like a Public Service Announcement; any moment now, you’re ready for Alf and McGruff to pop out of the crates and shout “Don’t do drugs!” followed closely by a break-dancing penguin wearing huge black smoked aviators saying, “If you wanna be cool, stay in school. Woo!”
Photographs touch (bother?) me in a way that paintings cannot. Looking through some old photos on the computer this morning just before retiring, I realize these places in my life where I suddenly am caught in the moment. I realize, in that second, why I must have forgotten so much of the past. Its uncreatability is a blessing, but it nevertheless happened. There I was, holding the camera, perhaps at arm’s length, perhaps next to someone whom I never expected to bury the dagger so deep, always looking through the lens at a time before. Or even a gallery full of pictures of a time to which I wouldn’t even return if I could (e.g., Clemson 2000), but which I miss all the more because of its sheer irrecoverability.
Anyone else ever feel this because of some pictures? [[The ThinkBlog Gallery is coming to the public soon.]]
That’s a long query of a title directed at the heart of a fallacy any well-read person is exposed to over and over in fiction (or, for that matter, on-screen).
Whereas* in the popular media we are taught that the man must be dapper and witty, subtle yet charming—and that women must be seductive but innocent, beautiful and passionate; and whereas both partners are supposed to have neatly-packaged pellets of emotional distress, easily resolvable between the penultimate commercial break and the end credits: I submit to you that real people run deep, have concerns and fears, sometimes smell less than petunia-esque, get indigestion, and are wont to commit multitudinous faux pas.
I submit to you that sharing fears and doubts, along with laughter and fun, is more romantic than anything you read in the books—at least the ones that are meant to be romantic. Being caught up in feelings of romance—and they are feelings, mind you, much less to do with rational choice than with baser magnetism—is like watching a fireworks display that you’re both setting off together.
Maybe you giggle with nervous attention as he lights an M-80 and holds it in his hand till the last second before throwing it just above your heads; maybe you dazzle as she lights a dozen bottle rockets all in a row. You banter with scripted wit, you kiss and imagine it means more than it ever can, you do whatever it is you do to make those fireworks keep going. Meanwhile, all your emotional tender is going up in smoke. “Let not the sparks die out! We shall have more!” And you spend some bit of your heart you don’t have to give on more and more fireworks for this one moment—be it hours, days, weeks, months, however long you can both keep up without destroying one another—for this one night full of aluminum-powder flashes and gunpowder-reports.
You know what happens with that kind of romance? The next morning, you both wake up and realize that you’ve burned yourselves and each other; your clothes are pocked with ash-holes, and you both reek something awful of sulphur. You can’t find enough ice for all the little burns, your clothes are going to have to be thrown out, and you get this sickening, sinking feeling of remembering that you just blew all the money you had the night—the moment—before. Bacchanalian passion, warm and shadowy in the pale moonlight, gives way to a hunger and regret in the morning sun. You go outside and all the flashes of the night before lie in spent hulls around your feet, and you feel strangely like a spent hull yourself. Confused that what you thought was love that would sustain, never to want again, turned to ash on your clothes, in your mouths, in your hearts—you eventually turn one from another, disillusioned and just one notch more jaded. The kind of jaded that “can only be cast out by much prayer and fasting,” if I may be so bold.**
No, real romance, gentle reader, is in the patient, hard times that you both share. It’s in the daily living. It’s in the details. It’s the way you don’t have to keep up appearances. It’s the way you forgive him for being short with you when you’ve had just as hard a day as he has. It’s the way you show up at his place in pajama pants and no makeup and he’s so glad to see you he just melts into your arms. It’s the way he does chores you know he hates to give you tacitly something deeper than Sinatra could ever sing. It’s the way you both admit you’re scared or worried or apprehensive or have doubts about anything and everything and neither thinks any less of the other—because that’s life. It’s the way you take your 27 cards and he takes his, and you both leave the jokers in the deck just to spice it up a bit, and then you shuffle them and suddenly your deck is fuller together than any Hoyle ever pressed.
When you’re not wearing a scarlet silk tie and shiny black loafers to match your fedora; when she’s not wearing diamonds or eyeshadow or the high heels. When there’s nothing left in the martini glass but a lipstick stain and a toothpick bereft of its olives; when the lights go up and the band packs out. When you both take off the rose-colored glasses and your hair is tousled and you have broccoli in your teeth and sunlight burns off the “magic.” When you’re just one person sitting across from another person, each with your own burdens and joys but sharing them with one another—doing life. Together. That’s romance. The unshakable foundation of a solid friendship, secure brother/sisterhood in Christ—here’s the secret—makes for a pool of such emotional tender that you can put on your own fireworks displays, but without the desperation to do it all before the metaphorical morning burns the beauty away.
Notes
*(Reading Washington’s address makes me realize that not nearly enough sentences these days start with “whereas,” involve a colon, and are Faulknerian (Kantian?) in length while still retaining syntactical integrity.)
** It’s important to realize that I’m not talking about sex or even necessarily anything all that physical; but the building of castles in the sky, the chasing of a feeling for that feeling’s sake (thereby making a drug of the other person), the storing up of grain for oneself, as it were, when one’s soul will be demanded of him or her that night.
Shout out to my friend JR, who nailed it with her poem, “Wife for a Weekend.“
My friend John found this tonight as evidence that the founding fathers of the USA never intended religion to be pushed out of the public square, but political apologetics aside, it’s a great little document. Forgive the lack of blockquotes; it’ll likely be easier to read this way.
By the PRESIDENT of the United States Of America
A PROCLAMATION
WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”
NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;– for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our sasety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;– for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;– and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.
And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;– to enable us all, whether in publick or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us); and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.
(signed) G. Washington
I’ve had these bad habits in relationships, you see. First, when I was younger in my Walk, it was this confusion between the love of women and the Love of God. Then, it became a kind of pride that hid behind apologies that stumble all over themselves—apologies for “unloading” on someone.
Not to be unnecessarily cryptic, let me clothe those latter bones with a bit of flesh. I have this habit of opening up to someone I’m close to—and then backtracking through apology, offering my “sorry” for what amounts to being human. The concept that I’m not Atlas and, in order to have a meaningful relationship, I have to make myself vulnerable enough to be me without flinching at the potential disappointment in others, is still fresh, and difficult.
“I’m more aware now than ever,” I said, “that I can’t confuse [mortal and immortal love].” But then, having borne my soul tonight, I felt intensely the lack of armor, and began formulating an apology: “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to burden you; I know you have so much to deal with anyway; and besides, it’s not that big of a deal….” (By the way, that last bit would have been a lie.)
There are times when such an apology is apt, as when you overstep yourself at a cocktail party with some acquaintances who are now privy to the skeleton at the very top of your closet. But not so here, so when I realized what was boiling behind that coalescing apology and, indeed, behind most of them in the past (you know, while we’re being honest), I stopped up short, silent. What I really wanted to ask was, “Am I still worth the trouble, now that you know I’m so ridiculously, desperately, disappointingly human?”
And it was as if Christ stepped between her eyes and mine and said, “Behold my hands, and feet; and do you ask if you’re worth it? Whence comes your worth, brother? You are aware more now than ever, aye? Believe in God; believe also in Me. Behold, I am with you always. Now, get over your pride and express your gratitude, brother to sister. Tonight she has carried your mat.”
After a day of eyeborne daggers and of unseen flaming darts, the end thereof was salve. After long days of pacing outside, shivering, unsure of the invitation, tonight I cracked the throne room door and met with peace. Thank you, Jesus.
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