Christianity: Mind, Body And Spirit

“Mind and Spirit”–> Consistency Of Purpose

2011-07-27T18:49:00.001-07:00

The remarkable thing about the Bible is that it is a book of wisdom and not necessarily an instruction manual. Those of the faith have understood this, and they have understood that wisdom is something that you mine, not something that you are given. Unless you are willing to dig in the dirt, you will not find the gems. This rather harsh picture above (yes that is a head on the ground) is a story that we can all learn from in our modern age.

The two men standing beside a head are Baanah and Rekab, who were the Rimmon the Beerothite from the tribe of Benjamin. While this picture is found on several websites (and I cannot find the artist), there is a ring of truth about it. You can see two men who are proudly standing by a severed head. Although they believe they understand how the story will unfold, they are sadly mistaken in it's outcome.

The story is told in 2 Samuel 4, and because it is very short, we will paste it all here from the NIV:

5 Now Rekab and Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, set out for the house of Ish-Bosheth, and they arrived there in the heat of the day while he was taking his noonday rest. 6 They went into the inner part of the house as if to get some wheat, and they stabbed him in the stomach. Then Rekab and his brother Baanah slipped away.

7 They had gone into the house while he was lying on the bed in his bedroom. After they stabbed and killed him, they cut off his head. Taking it with them, they traveled all night by way of the Arabah. 8 They brought the head of Ish-Bosheth to David at Hebron and said to the king, “Here is the head of Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, your enemy, who tried to kill you. This day the LORD has avenged my lord the king against Saul and his offspring.”

9 David answered Rekab and his brother Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, “As surely as the LORD lives, who has delivered me out of every trouble, 10 when someone told me, ‘Saul is dead,’ and thought he was bringing good news, I seized him and put him to death in Ziklag. That was the reward I gave him for his news! 11 How much more—when wicked men have killed an innocent man in his own house and on his own bed—should I not now demand his blood from your hand and rid the earth of you!”

12 So David gave an order to his men, and they killed them. They cut off their hands and feet and hung the bodies by the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-Bosheth and buried it in Abner’s tomb at Hebron.

David was called a man after God’s own heart. Now, David did some horrible things, but the general reading of the scripture is that David generally would react to situations as God would have him react. This story is clear. David was not the type of person that was about intrigue or plotting. He had enemies and people that strongly disliked him. I know in my own life, I also have people that dislike me in my work, although I would say that anything I face is much, much more mild than anything that David ever faced. I have found that much of this type of strife in the work place is due to jealousy. While we all have competition in the marketplace, it is easy for people in any job to forget this. They are concerned about how they are perceived or if they are valued. Therefore, if somebody else seems to shine more, then they are resentful and try to figure out how to make the other person look worse.

This was the situation in Israel. David was obviously the right choice to rule the nation. He had wisdom and courage, and he could lead the people in a great fashion. Those who came to him, followed him, and they succeed in their nation because of this. However, David had a rival. This rival Ish-Bosheth, who was the son of the previous King of Israel, Saul. In this situation, there were two guys who thought, “Well I’ll do something under the table to wipe out David’s rival, and thus David will be happy with us.” So they put together the assassination team, and they wiped this guy out.

The problem is that they didn’t understand that David simply did not like dirty tricks. Now mind you, David was a horrible violent man. He wipe out towns and people. He killed with impunity. He was so violent, God said “you’re too much of a man of blood, I will not allow you to build a temple (or church) for me.” David was a very hard man.

However, David had a code of ethics. He did not participate in under the table dealings. He was tough, but always tough with rules.

The morals from this can be applied to our country. Some say that under cover actions are reasonable and necessary in this day and age. They think that torture and dirty tricks are okay. To them, we can point to this story and say that being strong does not mean being dirty. Dirty tricks are really a symptom of a nation that is unwilling to think God can protect. Therefore, we depend on our own bag of foul items. However, this is not the message of the Bible. The message of the Bible is one of consistency of purpose. We cannot play dirty in one part of our nation, then expect it won't have problems in another part of our nation. We need to be consistent. This means that we are not the nation of dirty tricks.

However, it can even be applied to our own life? The answer is yes. Is there a rival that you have? Are there others that are willing to play against this rival with a bag of dirty tricks? Then the Bible is clear. You are not to deal with these people. This is so hard, and yet so right. We are supposed to have a secret clubs, one against another. All social beings try and do this. Yet, when we look at the biblical model, it is one of being transparent.

It is simply the right thing to do.

"Mind" -> Back To Narita To Yokohama Part III

2011-05-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

As you cross over the bridge, you can look back at the station, or look down the street. The night we came, there was a little bit of rain, which reminded me of Seattle, and was neat. The building with the big billboard has a bunch of electronic shops in it. I didn't go, but Atilla said it was cool.

You'll need to vere to the left to find the entrance. When you enter, it'll be on the second floor. Either take the stairs in the middle, or go to the other side, like this, and jump in and elevator.

Jump in line. Your ready to check in.

With any luck, you'll see this the next day.

"Mind" -> Back To Narita To Yokohama Part II

2011-05-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Now, if you haven't read the first part of this blog entry, you'll need to go and catch up here.

Once down to the ticket office, you can tell the person taking the orders to get you a ticket to Yokohama. You'll need to make sure to call out the right place, otherwise you'll not be able to get through the gate on the other side of the trip when you are done. You'll need to go the the ticket office on the arriving side and pay more money.

The key to the Narita Express or NEX, is to look for the green JR signs. Should say "Narita Airport Station."

Not a really good picture, but if you look ahead, you'll see the ticket turn style. For somebody that doesn't take a lot of trains, this can be a little confusing. If you have a season pass there is one that has a sensor pad. What you want is the turn style with a slot infront. Sorry, I didn't get a picture.

With the printing upwards, slip the ticket into the slot in the front of the turn style. The slot is much bigger than the ticket so you can't miss it. Then walk forward, and you ticket will magically pop up in the middle of the turn style. Take your ticket, as you'll need it on the exit turn style.

Go down the stairs to track 1.

Double check the board, because it'll flash English also. Look for the time it will be leaving.

If you look at the LED boards over the train doors, you'll see that it lists the car number.

You can see that my ticket says car 2, seat 7-B. So this is my car.

There is a really cool luggage lock. You simply put the cable through the handle of your luggage, then place the loop-end of the cable on a peg behind the little door. Then dial in a secret 4 digit number. Then twist the dial to lock and set the numbers to all zero. If you put back the original 4 digit number, it'll open the door. Don't forget the number, or you'll miss your station for sure.

Look there some guy in the seat next to me.

They have improve the monitors. It really shows you where you are at.

The train cars separate at Tokyo station, and because you bought the right ticket, you stay on the same car which goes to Yokohama.

Look the turnstyles are ahead and to the right.

When you put your ticket in the turnstyle this time, it will not give the ticket back. It eats it. This is so people don't use dead tickets.

Unfortunately, we couldn't remember where to go, and we started to go to the east exit. Then we wondered where we were at.

Luckily, they have maps every where, and we saw it was the west exit we wanted.

Even late at night, the subway station is always a buzz. Youl'll need to climb some stairs to get out.

Wind your way outside on the west station.

When you get outside, walk 30 yards to the left, and look up. The Sheraton is above you.

If you walk through the open court yard to the left, you'll see a stairs down (to go under, which I never take), or a stairs up. I normally take the stairs up. This will take you directly to the Sheraton.

"Mind" -> Back To Narita To Yokohama Part I

2011-05-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Time to update my post on how to get from LAX to Japan. Only this time, we are going to the Sheraton in Yokohama.

You start off at LAX, or Los Angeles Airport. In my case, I start at Tom Bradley terminal.

I always suggest that you get some cash before you go so you can catch the subway. In my case, this currency exchange is right after security in LAX and charges a very large charge of $5.95, but what are you going to do once you are at the airport?

If you are fortunately enough to fly business class, they let you sit in the lounge. In my case, this is the Korean air lounge.

This will be my home for the next 12 hours. Buckle up and get ready to fly.

You land at Narita airport. This is my plane.

Get off the plane and up the elevator. Nice that there is no bus ride. I don't think I've ever had a bus ride at Narita, as all the planes land at the terminal.

You'll see a green sign and a yellow sign. The green is for transfers. You want the yellow.

Follow the yellow when it splits. Take the elevator down.

This is passport control. In my case, they asked to see my form before getting to the officer at the desk. I had forgotten to fill in the back of the customs form.

Wait for you baggage if you've check bags. Korean air doesn't have a lot of overhead bin space. I like the 747, which have big closets to store the bags.

Pick up your Santohk, who comes from San Franciso an hour after you do.

Look around, and see the exit for going outside, but you are not going to go there.

Wait in line while your Santohk gets his money exchanged.

Look for the sign that says railways.

Follow the elevator down.

You want the JR Line.

Big area. Look around.

See JR?

Closer to the office.

"Mind" -> Outlier

2011-05-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

The picture to the right is Christopher Langan, who is reported to be the smartest man in America. He is also one of the characters in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers." To most of you, the term "Outlier" needs no description, because you know what it means.

An outlier is anything or anybody that separates themselves from the rest of the data. We have a deep need in our culture for outliers. These are the great men, the deep thinkers and the leading athletes that everybody in this world aspires to be. From stories in the Bible to the page of USA Today, our culture and our history is about outliers. As a parent, most people will want children that are outliers. Yet, what makes an outlier?

We have examined this idea before in this blog, and I'm happy to announce what I discussed in a very few words, Gladwell has expounded into a rather profound book. (With my blog posts happening a year before the books publication. This does not mean that I was in front of Gladwell, but it is to point out that this understanding of outliers is trickling through popular culture. But what was spoke about in some backroom forums, is now viewable on your Kindle.)

However, it is not just my feeling that he has touched on the same subjects as I have that make this book remarkable, but that it touches on subjects that each one of us should know about before we try and educate ourselves or our children.

After reading "Outliers," I wanted to force every leader in the USA to read (and be tested) on the concepts explained in this book.

Gladwell's work focuses around three main thoughts:

He repeats Anders Ericsson's research on IQ vs practice. In a nutshell, it is better to work hard than to be super bright.
People are either reinforced or victims of their environment. Related to this idea, and reinforced is that is the idea that being a little better at the beginning can have massive impact later. So, what looks like a small difference, can have a major impact.
Culture matters, and Asian culture will yield more practice.

I have often wishes that I was super bright. Now mind you, I am not dumb, as my testing would indicate an IQ of around 118 or the upper 10% of the population. Yet, Gladwell makes an excellent argument from the research that much of an IQ above 105 doesn't matter.You can't be deficient, but once you are to a certain level, the brain importance becomes less, and the hard work component becomes dominant.

To return to Langan above. He is really remarkable, and yet because of a series of misteps and cultural issues, he was not able to finish college. So, here we have the brightest man in America, and he does not have a college degree. He was, for many years, a bouncer. While he is self-studied, there is a profound lack of justice when such a bright person gets dropped from college. Gladwell does a nice job of exploring what happened with Langan, and the USA is poorer for not spotting his talent, and others like him, and integrating this talent into our culture.

But how did such a bright person get dropped? What happened? Why didn't a super high IQ simply pave the way for Langan?

Part of it is because having a super IQ is really neat, but does not generally mean that you will be successful or valued.

Why a super high IQ does not matter lies in the idea of the principle is called "Diminishing Returns" and alternative path learning. The principle is simple and used in the business world every day. It has a derivative called the 80/20 rule. The idea is that if you need a hole dug, one man might take 8 hours to dig it. Two men might take 6 hours. Three might take 5 hours. Four or five men may not help the time at all.

Basically, as you add more resources, the people get in each others way. More does not mean better or faster. Yes, a better IQ allows you to see things faster than the other guy, or it allows you to see relationships that they may not. However, like that hole that needs to be dug, being 3 times as smart may not allow you to make 3 times the accomplishment, just like 3 times the number of men don't always 3 times faster. More than this, even if you are not as smart as your peer, you can still put in a few more hours to catch up.

The same is with IQ and success. Just being bright does not mean that the nature of the problems that one may solve every day needs to have brilliant insight. Often a smart man can solve a problem in about the same time as a brilliant mind. More than this, devoted time is more important than being bright. As an example, let's say you have two students, with one student learning in 8 hours what the smarter learns in 6.

While both students with have a gap if they study the same time. However, if the slower student is willing to study twice as long as the faster student, the slower student will always be ahead. Number of hours, can make up for mental horsepower gaps.

Why wouldn't smarter spend as much time as the less smart? There are two reasons that this happens:

a. Lack of desire, which Gladwell goes on to contrast various cultures about this axis
b. Lack of opportunity, which we'll look at next

But why shouldn't somebody have opportunity? Gladwell points to programs that place children in one category (streaming) or another at a young age to point why we can arbitrarily remove opportunity. Unfortunately, we will often make choices about children and their "gifts" at such a young age that is then sets the path for them in their life.

To start the proof, he turns to the world of hockey in Canada. In Canada, your hockey group is decided by your year. You must play against kids born in the exact same year, January 1st to December 31st. When you go back and look at the data of hockey players in Canada, you find out that the all the kids born near the beginning of the year fulfill all of the all star slots and best player slots in Canadian hockey. In other words, you are basically in trouble if you have a child in hockey, and he was born on December 31st, like my Father and my son.

The reason is that some sports put "talented" kids on special teams. Generally, if the kid is a little older (and a little bigger and stronger) they will be placed on special honor teams. Once they get onto this "best of the best" team, they practice a lot more than their peers which were not selected. Once they got more time to practice, they did better than their previous lower ranked team mates. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This can happen with intellectual pursuits. There are cut offs for different grades. We've examined the brain a lot in the blog. The reality is that the brain is an growing mass of growing neurons, and a gap of a year into school will mean that a young child simply will not be doing as well as an older child in any given year. Once a child starts to be pegged as the "bright kid," they then strive to keep it up and study more. Once they study more, they become brighter compared to their peers.

As a personal vignette, my Mother did not think that I was ready for school at a young age. There was something about the way that I acted that caused her concern. Rather than pushing me into school (like my Father, who was always young in his grade), she simply held me back one year in preschool. My father at the time was not all that happy, but there were a couple of things that he didn't fight my Mom, and this was one of them.

I was always big for my age, and in the younger grades there was a couple of teasing moments about the idea that I was held back because they thought that I was older due to my size. However, I was very sharp, and very quickly I got the reputation for being a brain and smart. Unfortunately, I did not apply myself as much as I should have, but I never had doubts about my mental capabilities and brights.

This was even helpful years later, when I decided to go back and get my engineering degree. My wife told me that she never considered me a math brain when we first got together, but when I got my second degree in engineering, she thought that I was a technical geek. However, the secret was not that I was smart in math and science (I had not studied hard therefore I was not capable), but that I had the reputation of being smart. Once I thought I was smart, I knew the only thing holding me back from getting good grades was studying hard.

It is a wonder self-delusion that turned out to be true.

But back to Gladwell's book.

Because the habit of hard work is so incredibly important to being an outlier, Gladwell spends the second half of the book going into some very interesting, and some might say dangerous territory. In a nutshell, Gladwell suggests that Asians are not intrinsically smarter than the rest of the world. Now this might seem a little off, because if you look at test results from most standardized tests, generally, the Asians come out ahead of those from the USA. Gladwell really says that this is true because you can see it in Asian math test scores.

It is true that Asian cultures generally test well in math. Interestingly, Gladwell states that generally the Asian do not generally have super high IQs in general. He may have something here, as he cites studies that show most of the IQ testing done on Chinese people center around a select group. However, he states that all Chinese do well on math, regardless of their IQ.

Gladwell says that the secret to the Asian success in math scores is that they eat rice, or more specifically, he says that because they eat rice, they were forced to grow rice, and this habit forced deep learning and hard work into their culture.

Gladwell cites studies that show to work a rice paddy can take up to 3000 hours per year. This hard work was very different than Europeans. The Europeans did not work rice, but they did do farming. However, farming did not require the same amount of work to feed the worker.

Europeans, in the middle of the middle ages, would only put in around 1200 hours per year. In addition, Gladwell claims that working on a rice paddy requires a lot more learning about the mechanics of growing something. He simply states that rice farming is harder and more intellectually challenging and precise. Thus, the rice paddy placed some long term significant cultural bounding around the Asian culture that continues to this day.

On the last point, I think Gladwell stumbles greatly. He tries to make out in the book that the long work hours of the rice paddy and the concentration required for the unique rice paddy farming taught a special skill. In my mind, you need to look at the factory acts of England to realize that even if the working of the class of Europe did not put in the heavy hours of the Asian rice paddy worker, once the industrial revolution took off, there were many people that work at least 3000 hours per year. (This is just 60 hours per week times 50 work weeks during the year.)

Regardless of the vehicle of WHY the Asian culture works longer, I do believe that Gladwell has the right outcome. Cultures that encourage hard work are going to succeed in the end. I think the point that Gladwell misses (although he even mentions it in his book) is the idea that constant work stunts the ability to be creative.

There is more than just sheer hard work, otherwise, Germany and France would be extremely poor by now. Germany is amazing in terms of the work that they do versus other countries in the world. As in most complex systems, a simplification is simply inadequate to hold true. Most economies and cultures are much more complex than Gladwell makes them out to be.

As you know, I watch too much anime, and one thing that I am in agreement with is the idea of the centrality of rice to the Asian culture. I think that Gladwell somehow has become confused with the centrality of a foodstuff and somehow try to wrap this into doing well on math.

If you watch much anime, you'll constantly see images of the rice field. Then again, in Japan, "rice paddy" is literally a part of many names. The beautifully drawn calligraphy on the left is the symbol for "rice field" or "rice paddy" or commonly called ta. If you look at rice paddys from the sky, they will often be in nice grids, so the character is a wonder representation.

According to Wikipedia, it was during the Meiji period (1868 to 1912), when all people were to label themselves with a last name. Because most of the population was farmers, and most farmers would label their geographical areas by virtue of the rice paddy they were near. When they decided to give themselves a last name, they often said their last name was tied to their area. Therefore, ta was absorbed into many people's last name.

In my case, I know a Tanaka in my work. Tanaka means in the middle of the rice paddy, or if you were to see it in Kanji it looks like this 田中. Rice is central to Japan. Then as you get to other culture, you will find that rice also is central in China and Korea also.

Yet to make the leap from rice as a cultural phenomenon that is central to China, Japan, and Korea and hard work and translate this into why they are better on math scores completely misses the point that the same can be said of the Filipinos and rice. While cultivating rice for nearly as long as these other places, filipinos do not nicely fit into Gladwell's rice tracks the ability to work hard which means testing well on math box.

The problem lies with the fact that Filipinos are notoriously bad test takers. This can be seen in their IQ scores, which rank at the bottom of the pack. I have my own thoughts on IQ and success, which go beyond the scope of this post. However, the short of of my beliefs is that fundamental nutrition may also have an extremely important impact on the computational power of people. As I have posted before, when your brain is 75% fat. Half of this is Omega-6, which your body can't make, but western culture has in spades. The other fat of your brain fat is Omega-3, which your body can't make, and western culture often is starving for because fish consumption is much lower than Asian cultures that are coastal based (where most IQ testing is done.)

Gladwell also points to the fact that from a linguist standpoint, the Chinese may have a more number friendly etymology to numbers. Yet, by this time, he has so badly mangled the data that I have fading hope that he is onto something.

However, this is a profoundly thought provoking work, and the first half of the book is very, very strong. And what is clear is that Gladwell has called out a wonderfully written book on the value of hard work and understanding the culture that we work in.

I cannot recommend his book highly enough, if you only read the first half.

"Mind" -> Getting to the InterContinental COEX in Seoul

2011-04-25T17:44:00.000-07:00

This is one of those very practical blog posts for the very specific reason of getting from the Seoul internal airport to the Intercontinental Hotel near COEX. When we asked the office to help us get to the office, we found out that it would cost $150 for a dedicated limo. Our company culture is basically cheap, so we said that we would take a bus from the Incheon Aiport. Going by bus would cut $135 out of the fare.

So I was into the country first, with my travel companion 12 hours behind (he says he can sleep on the plane). I figured that the least that I could do was document how to get the bus trip done for somebody that wants to follow.

Now, I was coming in from LAX, but is really doesn't matter, because obviously the first thing you need to do is get off of the plane. They should give you a couple of forms to fill out on the airplane before you land. One is a normal form to present at passport control and the other is a folding form for customs. Pretty standard stuff and not worth pictures or more description.

Now, I don't try and take a lot of pictures around airport security people because I think they are told to tell everybody no pictures. There are so many people with cameras, however, they can't catch everybody. However, I normally don't take super obvious pictures.

It was interesting this year as they had a quarantine type area behind me. I stopped to get our my passport and boarding pass. Once I got into the terminal, they completely waved me through as they waved everybody else through. What was going on.

You keep going looking for the baggage claims signs like every other airport in the world. I always marvel how English is used as such a universal language. Good for me.

The picture below is where I'm trying to be subtle, but the purplish/red video sign is for foreigners. We didn't tarry long here, as the line was quick.

Once you get through passport control, you should see some type of a arrival sign, which is just above the baggage claim. Because I fly business class, I take two pretty good sized bags with me (one for basically electronics and the other is a standard rolling bag.

I'm not showing the baggage and customs area, because it is like any other customs and baggage area in the world. I'm also worried that they'll spot me as a crazy picture taking guy and take away my camera. However, I will say that you should look at the people taking your customs declarations. There were two exiting the area before you get out to the transportation area. One was a young eager guy that was backing up quick as he was looking inside bags and looking suspiciously at little children and checking their stuffed animals. I looked up and I was in this line.

I quickly switched to the other line which had an old guy grabbing the forms and waving people through.

Once you get out of customs clearance, you have the normal areas for arriving passengers like about any other AP international airport. To get the ticket for the bus you need to go outside. Any door like the following

The ticket booth is in the picture below. The great news is that they take all credit cards, including American Express. The most important thing to know is you bus number. If you look at the very first picture in this post, you can see that they highlighted bus is 6103. I'm glad that I had my PC, because this what the guy at the window wanted, and without this picture, I probably couldn't have communicated as well, although he did speak some English.

The ticket looks like the picture below, although I have no idea where 6103 is listed. The most important thing is the gate to leave, which is really just a sign on the street behind me. And that number is circled. It was 10B. Although you can walk out into the middle of the street, these bus are the ones right next to the airport. So don't go out too far.

I have no idea why the image is rotated up, because this was not how it was taking, but I don't know if there are assigned seats. It really didn't matter as there was only three people on the bus including the driver. They will put your bags down under the bus and hand you a claim ticket. Make sure to hold on the claim ticket! Although I was the only one with the check bag, at the other end they really wanted my claim ticket. Must be the rules.

As you can see the bus was deserted and the hour was fairly late at about 7pm.

I took the video above, but my voice is a little hushed. I didn't want to seem to be the crazy American tourist taking pictures, although I guess that I am. I was surprised at the length of the trip. Although it was 8pm when going through Seoul, the traffic was pretty strong during the final 30 minutes or more. It took 1:22 hour:minutes to get to the picture below.

Although this is an express, they do stop about 2 blocks before the final stop for the Samsung subway entrance. One guy got off and I was the only one left. They only minor tricky part, is once you are in the bus terminal, make sure to take the following elevator down to the first floor so you can walk the final distance. If you just go out the doors, you will be taken to the taxi stand, which may be okay if you want to take a taxi. There are a lot of them ready to go. Really slick.

Now the hour was late so I look these the next day. In my case, I have a Blackberry from work and the great thing is that I have Google Map loaded. Because my work will allow international data, my google maps was working. However, it was dark by the bus stop, so I didn't take any pictures. The only thing you should know, is you go down the elevator and it will take you right outside. If you go to the right, you will be going south. If you go right, you will be going north. It is about a 5-7 minute walk to the north.

Here is the front of the hotel.

The check-in is to the right. You just right over my collar is the elevator.

If all goes right, you should be in your room in 17 minutes after leaving the bus, and the next morning you should wake up to the local scene looking like this.

"Spirit" -> David and Saul

2011-04-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri painted this picture of Saul attacking David around the 1600. For thousands of years, the divide between David and Saul has been talked and preached about. However, I wonder if we really understand the gist of the real difference between them.

The challenge of Christianity is that a bunch of stuff is written down that you don't want to have written down, and what you want to have written down isn't.

However, the tradition of our religion is that you can extract meaning and insight from reading and meditating on it. For example, an important story in the Bible is the foundational story of Saul and David. This story can be read or talked about 100 times, and still something new can be pulled out of it.

It is easy hear the differentiation between David and Saul that is preached every Sunday.

"Saul was a bad man who didn't wait for the Lord's prophet to sacrifice to the Lord," says the preacher on one Sunday.

Wait a bit longer, and you'll hear, "David did a horrible thing of taking another man's wife and killing her husband."

It strikes me that both of these guys were pretty bad in their own way. David had a problem with women and his children. When his son rape his half sister, David did nothing other than banish his son. If we look at Saul's most noticeable child, Jonathan, he turned out pretty good. Contrast that with most of David's family, Saul may look he produced the better family, in the long run.

So while neither one was any type of an angel, it strikes me that a critical difference is the way that they handle demotion. Once Saul had gotten to the pinacle of his career, he was desparate to hang onto what he had. He was going to fight any and all people that would take away his power.

The idea that somebody must "step aside" and give up power is a remarkable principle that seems to be a post Christ driven event. Not that I'm saying that people didn't give up power and position before Jesus walked the earth. However, I am saying that once it is know that the Godhead emptied themselves so that the Logos could become flesh, all other sacrifices seem trivial.

However, Saul was not of this elk, and he was like a mad man in trying to hold onto power.

No where better is this shown is the story of Samuel and Saul. Samuel had told Saul that God would no longer support him. The question at this point is "What should have Saul done at the point that God's hand was no longer on him?

I hope the answer could be obvious to us today. He should have stepped down. However, as can be seen in the story, Saul was desparate to hang onto power, so much so that a prophet of God, worried for his life.

See I Samuel 16:2-4a (NIV)

But Samuel said, "How can I go? Saul will hear about it and kill me."
The LORD said, "Take a heifer with you and say, 'I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.' Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what to do. You are to anoint for me the one I indicate." Samuel did what the LORD said.

Here we have a man who of God, and he is afraid of the King. Saul attacked his own priest, and his own son. He attacked David, and Saul had his people kill anybody that was protecting David. I find it important that through all of this, David refused to act against King Saul. David had this incredible respect for authority.

I you step through the 10 commandments, which one did Saul break so strongly? In case you can't remember all of them, here they are below from Exodus 20. So, which one did he break?

3 “You shall have no other gods before[a] me.

4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

7 “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

13 “You shall not murder.

14 “You shall not commit adultery.

15 “You shall not steal.

16 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

To me the answer is obvious. He was somebody that coveted his neighbor's position. I think that Saul's sin is a sin that we should all be able to relate to, and even relate. There are many things that the Lord have given us in our life. The key thing is when the Lord says he no long wishes us to have those things, the goal must be for us to give those things (or positions) up to him.

Otherwise, we risk becoming a little Saul in ourselves.

"Mind" -> Sharing Other People's Stuff

2011-04-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

"What's a torrent?" my friend asked me at work.

This question is at the center of attention for everything today. Not the specific question of the torrent, mind you. The question about "what is this thing that you are talking about that I don't know about although a million people are using it?" This question is a question of the Internet, of changing culture, or a digital gap and divide. Technology is merging into our lives, yet the culture is not quite ready to deal with it. My friend is about 10 years younger than me, so to my mind he is a young kid. However, what I don't realize, as I approach 50 years of age, is that I am one of the few of the digital elite that treat the cloud like some of my peers treat sports. For them, it was sports that they grew up, and watched, and loved. They stay up on all the new teams and players, and they will be talking about them until they retire. I don't like sports, but I do watch high technology.

However this blog post is not about me. This post is about cool things that I think that you should have on your web 2.0 list. Because I start off talking about Torrents, I will start talking about this.

If you have never heard of Torrenting, here is my advice. Don't do it.

Torrents are devices for sharing files. They allow you to download information from many other people computers on the web. The assumption is that any file you have may be stored on other peoples computers, therefore, if you want to get a file, you can ask many people to send you a part of it. By doing this, you aren't requiring anybody to store this file in one spot. Now, the big driving force behind torrenting is media sharing. Whenever you hear somebody talking about massive fines being levied because of a lawsuit by the RIAA, is it normally because of torrenting activity.

However, let's say you have to know about torrents because of your curiosity. You aren't going to apply them, but you want to sound savvy to your 15 year old. So with that being said, here is a bit more description on the torrent subculture.

Torrents are normally for people to pick up either pirated music, pirated video, or pirated books. One of the most popular clients for Torrents is uTorrent, and this is the defacto standard in the industry. If you must, you can Google uTorrent and download the client. It is painless and fast to find it.

Can you find information on torrents that is NOT of a pirated nature? The answer is absolutely. The problem is that you need to ask "why?" What ever you can get on a Torrent, normally you can find with a direct download from some aggregator some where. You need a Casio manual for some lost watch of yours? Better to go to Casio or look on the manual tab at Amazon. You have a much better chance of find the data that you want there.

However, let's say that you want to see what is up with Torrents. You've download uTorrent, and the question is "now what?"

For a torrent to work, it needs to be handed a tracker. This tracker has is a signature files that basically allows uTorrent to say "I want this particular set of files." Torrent tracker sites are where all the action happens. To make torrents effective you need this file. Without this small file, programs like uTorrent don't have any ability to download (or upload) any files. For purposes of this post, I don't even want to mention all of the major torrent sites, as it would only indicate that I support piracy. I don't want to indicate that I do support piracy in any fashion. However, I do find myself using torrents for a special subsection of files: Anime and Anime OSTs.

Here is the old logo of the Nyaatorrent site found at www.nyaa.eu. This is a torrent site just aimed at anime, which seems to be on a strange side of the law because generally Japanese anime creators have chosen not to aggressively pursue their IP rights on this. (See this post.)

To get the torrent going, assuming that you've found something that clearly will not be pursued for IP issues (which is beyond the scope of this post, but generally, you should see if there is a USA distributor, then you'll been treading on toes), all you need to do is click on the "Download" button, and it will find your uTorrent software and go out and find other computers on the internet that have the same file or files.

As your client finds other computers on the internet, it makes two choices: who will I download from and who will I upload to. In other words, once you start downloading a file, you also start to upload the file. Let's say that you start to download the file, and you get only 5% of it. Your client is smart enough to be able to pass the 5% of the file you have to somebody else who doesn't have any of the file. Therefore, the original person with the file can immediately offload sharing all of the file by the people downloading sharing whatever they've already gotten downloaded.

Now, you can chose not to upload anything at all. Then you'll be called a leacher, for obvious reasons. Generally, you need to know something about the client to be able to turn off the uploading part, therefore, newbies will not turn it off.

Most of the lawsuits on music is on this tracking issue. Because Torrents get pulled both ways (you download and you upload) the RIAA goes after not the download, but the uploading portion. In other words, there is an limited amount of damage that they can claim if you steal the music from them for your own personal use. Basically, you've stolen one copy. However, as soon as you start uploading, they claim that you have become a distributor, and therefore have kept them from multiple sales.

Now, some of the above is a moot point. The major legal arm of this was the RIAA, and they were pursuing individuals. However, the lawsuits were very expensive, and at the end of the day, suing the average american doesn't bring in a lot of money. To the other side, it was creating a lot of negative PR. On top of this, it was forcing a lot of people to get creative and perhaps create a whole new technology for sharing files.

So, the RIAA stopped suing individuals at the end of 2008. Any lawsuits in progress are still going on, and this is where the last publicity on individuals being sued is coming from. Also, the RIAA was basically picking up the smaller individuals who simply weren't all that tech smart. The smart guys were using alternatives.

Four major alternatives were coming to the forefront:

1. VPNs
2. Newgroups

3. Sites like Megaupload
4. Private trackers

The way that the RIAA was finding the individuals that were downloading is by becoming a downloader and uploader like everybody else. Once you get in the middle of the torrent, you can see everybody that is uploading or downloading.

This can be seen in the picture above. In this case, I've found a file that I am downloading from Nyaatorrents, which all the downloaders can be seen under the "IP" label. uTorrent even puts a little flag to show what country the people send you bits of the file live in. As you can see, because this is a anime site, most of the people for this torrent live in Japan.

Once you have somebody's IP address, you can sue their Internet provider.

However, it is possible to change your IP address by running a VPN. A VPN allows you to make all of your requests for data come out of a certain place in the world. For example, you may live in Washington state, but you can find a VPN service that would make all of your requests for data come out of Russia. While the RIAA will sue a USA company, they really don't want to start an international lawsuit. This will be very true of Russia, where they don't care about USA copyright laws today. Why should they spend time on this? Let the Americas deal with American pirates.

Therefore, rather than going after the people, the RIAA and other trade associations are going after the people that list the prementioned "torrent tracker." This is like the key for the car. If you don't have a key to start the engine, you won't be able to download anything. This is starting to take effect. For example, Isohunt (a bad name because an ISO is a CD image) was sued and was found to be hosting piracy. They are now blocked in the USA. (Interestingly, though, they are not blocked outside the USA, and individuals with VPNs can poke their heads out in Russia, find the site, and then they can download just like they would have if they were in the USA.)

There are three other ways that individuals are getting around these problems. As mentioned above, there are now clients to download media files from Newgroups. Newsgroups are part of the history of the internet, and to make a long story short, they are like forums. In this new avenue, individuals upload a bunch of special text that can be recompiled into a binary video or music file. Because there is no trace of who posted the information, it is difficult for the RIAA to go after anybody. (Difficult, but not impossible with enough time and money.) Generally, the copyright people are too busy to shut this down today.

Similar to newgroups are a bunch of file hosting services that simply store files. The best known one is Megaupload. If you find the right group of people, they will tell you where either music or video is stored in these file sharing sites. While these sites will take down material if asked, generally, they are not being sued because the sole intention of these sites are not for piracy. Therefore, it becomes a temporary shelf allow pirates to deliver stuff for a while.

The final option are private trackers, in which a smaller group of individuals share files. The problem here is that if the group is big enough to have a lot of stuff, then it is not secure. If it is not large enough, then it is secure but you probably don't have all the material somebody would want.

Finally, this list is not done. I haven't even touched on getting books over IRC. Quite frankly, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is really a niche part of the internet. However, I mention it here, because the innovation of the pirate.

"Mind" -> What Should We Lend

2011-02-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

"But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back" --Luke 6:35

There are many things in life that are easy to talk about: What are you doing this weekend? What is your favorite type of music? Where do you want to go on vacation?

However, some areas of conversation will immediately throw off negative interactions in many circumstances: What is your religion? Why do you believe that? What do you think about race relationships? What do you think about sex and when it can be used?

And there is the money questions.

Money signifies our time and effort. It is our focus of power. It allows us to control or not control our lives. A flow of money can make one highly dependent or highly independent.

"The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender."--Proverbs 22:7

When you give money to somebody, and you expect them to pay you back, they become indebted to you. This indebtedness is power over them.

Now, I was raised with very simple rules on lending to people. I was the son of a depression era child, and a grandson of a man that made his money with only an eighth grade education. On my maternal side of the family, my mother would agree with my father on this, but only for opposite reasons. My father did and trained pretty much what his father taught him. My mother saw the problems from not following these rules on her side.

Rule 1: Give and never expect it back

I really only broke this rule once, and it was a complete disaster. Here is what happened. I was in a circumstance where a friend wanted to borrow some money to buy a computer, when computers were first coming out. The kids of today may not remember, but the first personal computers were very expensive and didn't do much other than word processing and spreadsheets. There wasn't even and internet.. He was an extremely likable person, and seemed to have a very good reason for why he needed to borrow the money. I lent him the money, fully expecting to get the money back. However, as it became the time to pay back, there was a problem, and suddenly he could not pay the bill. Now, the amount of money that he wanted was worth maybe 3-4 days of my salary at the time. I had a good job and my wife had a good job.

The problem is that I expected to be paid back, and when it did not happen the way that I expected, it made me upset at the person. I could afford to give the money, but somehow I felt that the person had really let me down and had misled me about their ability to pay me back. It was as if this person had stolen from me, and it made me mad. It had permanently ruined any possibility of a relationship with this person.

Recently, I had a friend come to me and ask me if he could borrow a substantial amount of money for an investment idea that he had.

"I'll pay you back in 3-4 months. I just need a bridge loan," he said.

Now, this person is generous and generally reliable, but he wanted a big chunk of money, roughly a month's worth of salary. He is well placed at my company, and he should be able to have money to to do stuff. The risk, I would imagine, would be low.

"You know, I've been taught by my Grandfather and my Dad to never lend money," I said. "I'll think about it overnight, but I want you to know that this is just something that I've been taught never to do." I did think about it overnight, and I went back and told him no.

"I am proud of my heritage," I said. "I just can't do something like this because I've stressed to my own kids that this isn't the type of thing that you should do with friends."

Interestingly, he understood. He said that he knew that lending money is risky to friendships.

Let's say that you think I am too hard nose. Well at least I hope you aren't stupid. While this was a friend with a good job, I still don't know what is really going on in his life.

If I lent a large some of money to him, I would want to make sure that he was spending it on the right stuff. I would be watching him everyday and wanting him to show that he understood that this was a big chunk of money. If he went out for lunch and didn't bring a brown bag, I would be thinking to myself "He's spending my money. I don't think he should be doing that."

If he played golf, I would be thinking, "He playing golf with my money."

This is the reason why you need to give without expecting it back. If you don't expect it back, you won't sit and say "Well that person is spending it wrong." Once you give the money away, it is their money. This means that you need to let it go, and the worry and stress is gone from you.

However, this is an interesting experiment, because it made me think about how much my friendship with him was worth. I made up my mind that I would be willing to give him one day of my wages if he really needed it. This was free and clear. In some ways, it would be like going over to a friends to help them move for a day. You shouldn't expect that you'll get a return.

Rule 2: Give to those that are needy

"If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. 36 Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. 37 You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit." -- Leviticus 25:35-37

The interesting thing about my friend that was borrowing money is that there is not reason for him to borrow money. If I had agreed to lend money to him, I would have asked him a series of financial questions.

"What is your salary?"
"What are you buying?"
"What is your leverage?"
"Why do you think this is a good deal?"
"Have you plotted out your cash flow?"

I'm sure if I dug into his reason for having money, he would be making choices that I found very unsatisfactory. Thus as I found more and more, I would be convinced that he was making a bad decision. Generally, people that try to borrow money like this don't have good money sense. In this case, I know this individual is very heavily leveraged, and if the economy goes a bit south again, he will be destroyed. He is gambling that the economy will stay the same or get better.

Thus once I started to get into his finances, I would have had a conflict. Not because he needed money, but because I felt he was doing something stupid. He was doing something that I would never do.

Therefore, if you are going to lend, you should lend to the those that are needy. The poor are not trying to blow their own money (in most cases). They are trying to simply figure out how to live. If you combine this with the original passage from Luke at the top of the post, you'll have what God's plan is for us.

We lend to the poor. Now, the poor may chose to pay us back. If they do, then they say something about themselves. I believe that their reward is just, and God will honor that they wish to own no man a debt. However, if they cannot pay you back, you have done your duty as a Christian and allowed them to live.

No, I did not lend to my friend with a good job. However, my wife and I do contribute to sisterschools.org and make this our place of giving. There is no more important calling that to wish our Brothers and Sisters both spiritual health, but also heath of physical body.

"Mind" -> Robert A Heinlein Lives Again In John Scalzi

2011-02-05T11:19:00.001-08:00

I often wonder if the modern age has lowered our ability to think and imagine. Not that all electronics and web is bad, but that when our children sit in front of a PC and play games for an extended period, they are living other people's visual experience rather than creating their own internal experience. We don't have the data on the new breed of children that we are raising, but we will have the data in the future. So, we'll just need to wait to see what our culture reaps.

One of question asked in the "Old Man's War" universe is about the integration of technology into the human genome. In many ways, Scalzi paints a picture of technology naturally extended, and provides a straight-forward and exciting read in the style of Robert A Heinlein.

But I get ahead of myself.

As a young child, my entertainment was either 7 channels of television, or the local library. If seven channels don't sound like much (and we had no VCR kids), you are right. You couldn't depend on video for entertainment. We gravitated towards reading.

The Newport Library was just a mile away, and although I didn't often walk it, my mother would drive me down there so I could devour the science fiction section. While I loved the short stories of Ray Bradbury with both of his books "R is for Rocket" and "S is for Space", the author that I loved to read best was Robert A Heinlein.

Heinlein's juvenile fiction often would feature a geeky type boy that would know more than those around him and was subversive for some greater good. I felt like I was one of these individuals in my own young life. I quickly wore out the young adult science fiction and I moved into books like "Stranger In A Strange Land." Unfortunately, I found myself disliking Heinlein move toward sexuality and free love as a young unmarried Christian. In addition, his writing simply started to get a bit sloppy and unfocused. However, I always longed for the days of my earlier Heinlein, where he would write tight narratives of people struggling and planning. Much of Heinlein did not have confused characters that were unfocused, but instead had people that reacted and moved with purpose.

John Scalzi could have scrapped his name off of the "Old Man's War" trilogy, and many individuals would have assumed that we had found another Heinlein book (ignoring the updated technology). Scalzi did this on purpose and mentioned in his book that it was influenced by Heinlein.

Now it is with deep regret that Scalzi's writing references enough sex that I cannot suggest that my young Christian children read the books. Not that there is an overabundance of sex. If one chose, a bowdlerized version would leave 99.9% of the writing intact. For those that can blow past a small amount of this, the book is just simply a great read. Scalzi is not what I would call hard core technology. However, he is thoughtful in his science. In the blog post below this I mentioned Suzanne Collins. Unfortunately, Collins is almost painfully ignorant of science in her books. For all practical purposes Collins would have been better to describe her technology as magic, to give it some sense.

Scalzi, in contrast, actually shows science in the science fiction. While his characters are not deep, they do show some great gedanken experiments on what will happen as we evolve our technology and what this means for life and the universe as a whole.

There is one section that borrows heavily from Gulliver's Travels that is less than believable, but overall this section is mercifully short, and may even be a wink at the audience.

The interesting thing about Scalzi is that he had no contract to publish his first book. He simply wrote something and published it up on the web. This was discovered by TOR, and they published the book. The book then went on to be nominated for a Hugo award. Sometimes talent will be found out.

The first novel simply dealt with the question of "what would happen if the end of your life just happened to be the beginning of a new life as a soldier?" From this simple premise, he is able to weave a compelling action-adventure story about the human race. We are introduced to the main character, which plays through out the entire book. His character is introduced to a potential love interest, and he nicely sets up the idea that this love interest may some day be introduced into the main characters life. The book ends, however, without resolution of this theme.

Having a following, Scalzi then goes off to build on this universe and focuses the second book more on the love interest and leaves the first character behind. This also allows Scalzi to ask the question "What is the nature of being human?" Scalzi does not drive into some deep psychological driven discourse or spend lots of time navel gazing. Instead, Scalzi puts force clear ideas of man's intrinsic human nature and places it immediately into context of an action-adventure theme.

I am a member of goodreads.com--as my daughter introduced me to this site--and I checked out the reviews of this second book of the series before dedicating 3-4 hours of my time reading the book. Most of the readers said his second book has not as good as his first.

I disagree. Scalzi was on a roll in his universe when he was writing the series, and his second book lends itself nicely to his constructs. Overall, another great page turner.

Although there is no clear lead character to the novel, the love interest in the first book is prominently displayed in the second book and is one of the leads. We get a bit more hint of this person's background, and there are a couple scenes where we can see Scalzi's thoughts about what makes a relationship tick, trickle into the picture.

"The Last Colony" is the last book. It is nice that Scalzi is now able to pull the original character lead from the first book and the love interest into a final story to resolve his final question of "What is family and how should a family relate?"

In some sense, because he attempts to place the characters into a situation that is more analogous to every day life on earth, the science becomes pretty thin. However, at the same time, I think he does a nice job of introducing politics in a new age.

After all, the theme of the book is family, and we can see that Scalzi is favoring what his view of a family should be: The parents are wise. The kids are respectful but fun. The situation is critical all the time, and bring out the best in our heroes.

In conclusion, there will be people that criticize Scalzi for not having much more dysfunctional heroes, which seem to be the trend these days. I kept waiting for some horrid secret to come out during the dialogs, but Scalzi felt no need for these types of plot twists.

Scalzi simply decided to layout a strong and clear story. He did this in the style of Heinlein, and if you are willing to overlook a small amount of sex, I can strongly recommend the books for any person that likes a does of SciFi every once in a while.

"Mind" -> Series Review: The Hunger Game Trilogy

2011-01-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

"[JK] Rowling is terrific writer" is the quote often thrown around the internet. It was said by Stephen King, one of the most successful writers of our time. It may seem misplaced to start off a review of Suzanne Collins extremely popular series with a quote by Stephen King praising a different author, but because both Rowling and Collins are women born 2 years apart, who wrote a series to the same young age group, during the end and early part of the 21st century, it is an interesting comparison.

I started to read the Hunger Games on the recommendation of my voracious daughter who will gobble down a serving of fiction in a day. When she states something is good, then I find my self also attracted (and it is obvious she has my genes) to the same reading material. She was enthusiastic about the series, and was waiting for the final book last year. My daughter believes that The Harry Potter series of books are exceptionally strong, and so I'll often ask her how any given book or series stacks up against JK Rowling to find out the literary strength of the new books.

By all comparisons, Suzanne Collins should be the better writer. She received her MFA from New York University in Dramatic Writing. Rowling, by contrast, attended secondary school, but describes the time as lonely and miserable. She did not get the training that Collins received. After reading some of her contemporaries, you can realize that Rowling has something that few writers have been able to grasp. She has a tremendous sense of story and character evolution.

But this is not a review on Rowling, so let us look at the work that Collins has done. With such a start, you might think that I am going to write that you should not read the Hunger Games Trilogy. Contrary to this, this is one of my must buy reads. While I will be careful to stay away from spoilers, I would suggest that there are few easier pleasures that immediately going to Amazon and either downloading or buying the books. The review will probably be much more easy to read, if you read the books first. And I can wholeheartedly, suggest that they are a good read.

A word of warning, however. The books are exceedingly dark. I don't mean exceedingly violent, although there is enough of this to warn off the youngest viewers. And for those of us that are Christians, the sexuality is low enough that I have no problems recommending this book to my own children. However, Collins effectively paints a picture of a dark world, and you must be willing to live within the darkness of this world. With that being written, there is candles inside of this dark world.

A good book is going to grab you and make you want to find out what happens to the characters. Thus we must be engaged with a character quickly to hold our interest, and Collins does this.

The lead character Kattnis "Kat" Everdeen is a gripping character. Very early in the novel you find yourself both liking and responding to her. It is obvious, in the first few pages, that Collins's book is either going to make or break on your desire to find out what happens to Kat. You want her to have fear when things are scary. You want her to be clever when things need to be clever. But most of all, you want her to be brave when she needs to be brave. The character delivers all of this.

Because the book is so gripping and so compelling, I will simply not spoil it by describing what happens inside of the book. The book is a delicate sweet that will go down your literary gullet and disappear like the Christmas candy that is already gone in our house. You'll finish the book thinking "well that was just perfect."

After you have finished the first book, you will be compelled to find out more of the story. It is here that Collins follows up with two books: "Catching Fire" and "Mockingjay."

And it is here that the divergence between Rowling and Collins becomes obvious.

If the sum of both authors work was their first novel in the series, I am not sure that Collins would not be considered the stronger of the two writers. I think that she moves at a better clip. Her story has more punch, and her characters grab you more. I know that any Harry Potter fan might right protest my divination of the characters, but I would suggest that this is only because the Harry Potter fan would have read the entire series of books. The magic of JK style is that she knows how to grow and expand her characters and give them back-story and growth.

Collins, on the other hand, is weak on this front. As I wrote, you will read the first book and be pulled in by it. The book is so good that you will want to read it again. Collins basically gives you this chance by publishing "Catching Fire," the second in the series of this book. What will become obvious, after you are done, is the second novel is simply a retelling of the first novel. It is not an exact retelling, but it is a retelling none-the-less. Many popular artists in popular music will have multiple hits that sound very similar. Some clever internet youtube critics will paste videos for two popular hits side-by-side to show how the first hit and the second hit has the same basic chord structure, timing, and tempo shifts. The first hit was inspired. The second hit was copied from the first.

Catching Fire is an obvious copy from the first. Because the first book is so good, the second book, in similar fashion, will be hard to put down, but not quite as hard. All in all, the book does set up the final scene in the book which is a cliff-hanger into the final book of the three book series: "Mockingjay."

I personally don't have problems with the copy of the first book. Both are written well and grab your attention. However, Mockingjay is clearly called out to do two things: set the other stories in context of the bigger world that Kat lives in. Secondly, it must also cleanly show character development and wrap up the loose ends from the previous work.

The books are written in a straightforward fashion, and I would recommend reading all three, but with such an excellent start and clear compelling path, I am ultimately very disappointed in Collins last two books, which impacts the entire work. Not because she did a back job in rolling up the end end of story in Mockingjay, but because she blew the chance to establish a truly enduring trilogy.

You'll get a sense of things going awry by the fact that each book is roughly the same length. I am sure that when the teacher asked Collins for a 3 page report in grade school, her report was exactly 3 pages. She gives the sense that some editor worked with her to make sure that the book was just the right number of pages. By contrast, Rowling's novels only got longer as she went on. This is because Rowling was trying to give the reader more details and understanding of why characters in earlier novels had acted in certain ways. She was able to weave a fabric of interrelationships and back-stories that only pulled the reader into the story. She could not do this in fewer words, so she was forced to use more.

Collins, on the other hand, seems to know that she needs to give the reader a conclusion, and she seems content to simply place things in context and report the facts, but she clearly doesn't give us the evolution or expansion of characters that we desire. Even worse, some of her main characters don't so much evolve, but simply flip-flop in their actions. If you changed the names of these characters, there would be no common thread back to the original character.

It also become clear in the last book that she gets trapped in the fundamental choice that she made in the first book. She decides to continue to tell her story in the first person. This ultimately makes her conclusion to the series open and weak. There are reasons why your creative writing teacher should warn you of the traps of writing in the first person, and Colins falls hard into the trap.

As stated, the third book is design to be the instruments pulling up a level and understanding the entire framework of the world that she created. She is unable to do this in the context of her decision to start her books in the first person from the viewpoint of Kat.

This means that many issues, that beg to be explained or understood simply cannot happen. Therefore, deux ex machina type problems constantly pop out of the woodwork as the book moves to the close. There are many plot twists, but they are ultimately empty because Collins has never set them up.

If there is a lesson to be taken from this entertaining, but not quite great, work, it is the following: Those that user first person narratives should use it only sparingly and recognize that a shift in books and subject matter dictates that a change in viewpoint must happen.

Secondly, great film makers and great writers fundamentally understand that good writing is not about a plot twist, but about creating suspense. Alfred Hitchcock once explained that suspense comes from understanding that there is bomb underneath your characters table. You want the audience to see and understand that the bomb is there. The more they know that the character does not know, the better the story will be. Those that simply show a bomb blowing up to shock the watcher of the film may have a short impression, but leave no long term impact.

Collins never shows us in her final installment the setup, and therefore, while we are fed our literary meal, she never ultimately gives us much to think about.

Interestingly, I found myself touched by the end of the series. Not necessarily happy with the execution of the end, but I was touch by the story. All in all, it was worth my time.

And while this was a good series to read, they will only be read once.

"Body" -> Get In The Swing Of Things

2010-07-26T22:15:00.000-07:00

This is myself at Saddleback golf driving range. You can see that I have just finished my swing, having driven the golf ball off of the golf tee.

If you look closely at the picture, you will see something a bit strange about my golf driver. The fact that it is radically bent, should be giving you some pause. When you find out that the golf club is called the "Whippy," you might be able to figure what exactly is happening. My golf club is bending like crazy.

The reason of "why" I am swinging a golf club that for all intensive purposed has the consistency of a wet noodle is something that can only be understood if you are interested in golf.

Golf seems like an extremely simply game. You pick up a club. You have a ball on the ground. You hit the ball with the club that you have in your hand. You count up the number of strokes to put a ball in the hole. You do this 18 times, and you are done. Yet, to the outsider, there is a mythos to golf that they simply do not get. I know that I didn't get it when I was young.

"Golf," I would sneer. "That's a game for old men that are too fat to run."

Now that I am too fat (and too injured) to run, I find out that golf is something more than just an old man's sport.

In some sense, there are two tricks to golf. One of the tricks is deceiving, and the other is frustrating.

The first trick behind golf is the sheer misunderstanding of what is going on in the golf swing. Really, I have never seen more people more confused about something that is happening right in front of their eyes. If you have ever been with somebody that took you golfing, you will hear the following said with great assurity.

"You need to keep your head down," is something that is always said by one individual to another. The common reason that anybody has missed any golf shot is because they some how couldn't keep their head down during a golf shot.

Often you will here people offer "Awww, I missed that because I picked up my head."

I have video taped hundreds and thousands of golf shots. Mainly my own, but a fair amount of others. I have never seen anybody not keep their head down while observing the video in slow motion. Instead, everybody that I take a picture of has their head glued to the golf ball. So, while everybody thinks they need to keep their head down, this is never a concern. I have, however, had plenty of people tell me "oh, you picked up your head."

This bugs me so much that I simply tell them, "I've watched hundreds of my golf swings on slow-mo video, and I've never picked up my head. I doubt it is happening now." This normally makes them quiet, but I can tell that they don't quite believe me. After all, they convinced themselves that they saw my head pick up.

On the flip side of things, I have never had anybody point out what my real problems are: I don't open my hips. I over swing. I don't have a solid left wrist. I don't clear my hips. The list goes on and on. All of these faults are obvious in slow-mo on video.

Most of all, I don't have a lag.

The main problem with a golf swing is that it happen very, very fast. From the top of the golf swing to the bottom of the golf swing, there is one half of 1 second from the top of the golf swing to when somebody is hitting the ball. This is fast. Very fast. There is little time for people to actually understand what is going on in such a short period. There is a blur, and the swing is done.

What happens during that 1/2 of a second?

Forgetting for a moment that you need to aim the ball, most men just want to crush the ball. I often see men at the driving range putting their all into their swing. Letting out an enormous grunt, and while the ball does fly away, it doesn't go quite as far as what you think it should. Every once in a while, you'll have a little guy come up and smash a ball with what looks like a lot less effort, which just goes as far as the big grunts.

So how can big guys and little guys be hitting the ball the same distance? What is happening?

The secret for hitting a golf ball far is first timing and then quickness.

The secret of power is lagging the golf club. Above on the right, you can see one of the world's best ball strikers, Ben Hogan, in 1955 killing the ball. The color picture above is myself, in the process of not making a big hit.

Even though our arms are roughly in the same spot, you can see that Hogan has held his golf club at a big cock compared to myself. His golf club to arm angle is very small and in a "V" shape. In my golf swing, I my arm to golf club makes a square. While Hogan has kept his arm cocked into his swing, I have already release my cock and the club is already at 90 degrees.

This is the first secret of crushing the golf ball. Alastair Cochran and John Stobbs published the original, mechanical, scientific book on the golf swing in the mid-60s. It was called "The Search For The Perfect Swing," and it had some elementary models in it. It is still a good book that can be found at Amazon. If you look at the pictures above, you will see that when you swing the golf club, you will have two points of rotation. The inner point is the shoulder. The second point is the hand that holds the golf club.

Let's say that I am swinging my arm so that my hand is going 30 MPH. If I can also then swing my hand, so the club goes another 40 MPH, the end of the club will be going 70 MPH. This is called the flail effect of the golf swing. However, you'll notice that while the arm can swing about 360 degrees, the wrist can only 90 degrees. So, you need to save that 45 degrees of the swing to just before you hit the golf ball.

Hogan, in the picture above, is storing up the wrist action until he get later into his golf swing. I, on the other hand, have pretty much already uncocked my wrist. This means that I am just about ready to lose all the speed from uncocking my wrist, and the speed of my club is going to drop, in the example above, from 70 MPH down to just 30 MPH.

In golf, I am "casting." This simply means that because I am releasing the club lag, I am giving up speed when the club gets to the ball.

Now, I am not the only one to do this. Here is a picture of my friend "Mr Chung," who I played golf with last weekend. I want you to take a good look at his swing just before he is ready to hit the ball. Look carefully at his shaft on his club, which I have traced with my golf tracing tool. If you look, you will see that his club is bent in a reverse C position. What is going on? How did his club get like this? Did he bend it before hand.

The answer is no. If you understand my description above, you'll understand that he was trying to work the flail action, but he failed just like me. Somewhere, just before the picture was taken, he ran out of wrist uncocking. So, the head of the golf club, which was going maybe 120 MPH, suddenly is getting no more push from the wrist. However, since the club head was going at 120 MPH, it doesn't stop immediately. Instead, the club head is still going 120 MPH for a second, and it races ahead of the shaft and bends it in the wrong direction. In some sense, Mr Chung is lucky. He has losing his club speed way before he gets to the ball.

Let's say that you are getting closer to the Hogan swing above. You are actually in a worse position. Why? If your club is deforming right before hitting the ball, you actually will change the angle of the club face! This will then send the ball sky high, as you've taken a club with a little loft, and turned it into a club with a lot of loft.

Here is my friend Mr. B. He has the "oops, I'm getting closer, which means farther" in his golf swing. You can see the golf club has radically deformed. His club face is now pointing upward just as he hits the ball.

His shots, of course, were going sky high.

Now Mr. B is a very smart engineer. Do you think that he had any idea of what was happening? Do you think that he could see the radically deformation of his club? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Not until I showed him the video stills. And I could tell that he was amazed.

Which brings me back to the Whippy and my other device that I use. I've shown you all these picture that show what looks like very solid golf clubs bending like crazy. So what happens when you take a very flexible golf club and swing it?

It bends even more.

And this is the beauty of the Whippy club. It bends so much that you get zero distance if you are casting the club dramatically. The problem, as I alluded to before, is that in the golf swing you often can't even figure out what is going on when you swing the club. It just moves too fast. Since the club shaft is pretty stiff, you can still hit the ball. You may only go 150 yards instead of 250, but you hit the ball.

With the Whippy, you go zero yards. You can't hit anything. And somehow, it is this lack of results that forces you to find someway of swinging the club so that you get some distance. It is subconscious but it works. The Whippy forces you to do less errors. I still cast, but not as bad.

You can see this with an add of another device in my bag of tricks: The Swing Radar.

You can set this by your golf ball, and it'll measure your swing speed. In this picture you can see it is an impressive 89 MPH.

Now, I've done this a lot of times. I set up the swing radar. I get my fastest and longest club, the driver. I set up my fee solidly, and spread apart nicely. I tee up the golf ball. I rotate my body back as far and I can go, and I exploded into a swing just about as hard as I can and still keep control.

"85 MPH" the display flashes to me.

Considering the average tour player swings 115 MPH, I'm not all that good. However, many golfers don't swing quite even 85 MPH.

However, I can go to the golf course with my Whippy driver. I will stand with my feet together (so I get no benefit of the body turn), and I will swing my Whippy driver so that I know I can hit the golf ball.

"75 MPH" the display punches out.

In other words, even with the worst position in the world, a properly swung Whippy driver has 7/8th of the speed of my big "kill it" position. This is because the "kill it" position loses all the club head lag.

Now, you can tell that I understand all of the theory. I have all of the video. I know what to do.

Now remember I said that there were two tricks to golf? One was deceiving. The other is frustrating. The frustrating second trick to golf is no matter WHAT you mentally know, your body may not follow. What is interesting about golf, is no matter that I know what I should do, I just can seem to do it during that 1/2 second of the downswing.

Believe me. I've tried. I'll slow down my golf swing so I can mentally train myself to change my golf swing. I'll practice without a golf ball, and the video looks good. However, when I actually trying to hit a golf ball, all of my rehearsal goes out a window, and I have the same old faults. I could cry because of golf some days.

Oh well, back to the driving range with the Whippy. There is always tomorrow.

"Mind & Spirit" -> Is Harry The AntiChrist?

2010-05-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

My son and my daughter recently came to me to ask me about what I thought about the use of magic in fictional novels where there are Christians involved. They had been debating this for a number of days. After all, the Bible expressly forbids any dabbling in the dark arts.

Now the Bible is straightforward on this. Witness Exodus 22:18, and I'll include the following verse for context.

18 "Do not allow a sorceress to live.

19 "Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.

So, if you want to find the section on sorcery in the Bible, just go to the verse on bestiality, then back up one. Obviously, not a good neighborhood to be hanging out in. Some in Christian circles will draw a line that says Harry Potter does sorcery. Sorcery is of the devil. Harry Potter is of the Devil and the antiChrist.

Therefore, Christians should not read Harry Potter.

Wikipedia, which never ceases to amaze me with the breath of insight that it can provide, has a whole section on religion and Harry Potter. (Which can be seen here.)

As they point out in their article, some in Christian circles advocate book burnings. Jacqui Komschlies, in an opinion piece, wrote in Chrisitanity Today that Harry Potter in the house is essentially the same as having a drink for children that is a mixture of orange soda and rat poison. To her, the Harry Potter books look good on the outside, but once they are taken into our children, they corrupt them.

My daughter has been thinking about this in some great extent, and she is becoming more like here father every day. If you wish to see her thoughts, please visit her rather extraordinarily named blog. While I won't spoil her viewpoints in my own blog, I would like to think that her Dad has brought some sanity to her world.

The one thing that I have tried to write in my blog over and over again is that the Bible is designed to make you think. It is not designed to become a rule book.

To understand my viewpoint on Harry Potter, you need to read Mark 9:38-41

38 "Teacher," said John, "we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us."

39 "Do not stop him," Jesus said. "No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.

Now, think on this verse for a second. Do you see the principle at work here? Or do you think, "Now, what is the guy off about? What does this verse have to do with Harry Potter?"

There is a very simple principle at work in the Bible, which is "what is of God and what is not of God?" The disciples came to Jesus, and they thought they saw something that was out of the ordinary. Somebody wasn't "doing Jesus" correctly. To do the Jesus thing, they thought that you needed to follow Jesus in a particular way with a particular daily habit. Now, the disciples hung out with Jesus. They thought they always knew what Jesus would say. In this case, they were so sure that they did the right thing, they told the guy to stop, and then they went back to Jesus to brag about their good deeds. They were telling Jesus that they were keeping the faith pure.

In this context, Jesus told them that they needed to understand that the lines are not firm in the sand. At the end of the day, if somebody does anything good in Jesus's name, then they will not lose their reward. "Well, this is not as if JK Rowling says she is a Christian," you might think. "I know that JK did her novels to undercut the whole of Christianity and place seeds of destruction in our youth."

The shocking thing, JK Rowling said the following, when asked if she was a Christian by the Vancouver Sun newspaper.

"Yes, I am," she says. "Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books."

Now, some will simply say that this cannot be possible. After all, she has witchcraft in her books. She even said that one of the main characters was homosexual in a lecture. Some will simply state that she is taking on the mantle of Christianity, which she does not deserve.

Now, I love Chick publications. I don't mean that I love everything that he says, and unfortunately I do think that Jack Chick has done some extreme disservice to the church by coming up with angles on things that simply aren't true. I don't agree with everything that he says, but I truly believe that Jack Chick has saved many a lives. However, the wonderful thing about his publications is that it often nicely summarizes what fundamentalist Christians believe, and Chick is not shy about his view point on Harry Potter. The following is the classic scene from one of his tracts.

This tract summarizes perfectly the viewpoint of some in the Christian church. Unfortunately, it is very, very wrong.

I will be first to admit that JK has issues, and some day when we all stand before the throne, she may not make it to the other side. I would much prefer a woman that had all the flaws, but all of the strength of CS Lewis, who would argue for mainstream Christianity. JK is a bit too quiet for my tastes. However, I can also see the good in what she does. She argues for the downtrodden in her own life. She contributes to charities to feed the poor. She cares. Her desire to help her neighbor shows the gospel message. And those people that say her novels are corrupting are reacting and not thinking.

The fundamental missing link is understanding that the magic in Harry Potter is not sorcery as defined in the Bible. There is only one story in the Bible of sorcery. This is when Saul goes and finds a sorceress to pull up the departed spirit of Samuel. If you read the story, you will see the root sin of Samuel is going to a sorceress to get direction. The magic inside of Harry Potter does not have the kids sitting around trying to call up dead people to get guidance (although there are situations from people talk from beyond the grave). The magic of Harry Potter has to do with an alternative way of getting stuff done.

Stephen D. Greydanus, a Christian writer, calls out that he believes that there are two types of magic portrayed in literature:

Invocational Magic: Where you call to a higher power
Incantational Magic: Where you you simple know how to say some words to get a unique effect

I don't particularly like his definitions. However, I will credit him with the thought of a separation. I would rather like to say that Harry Potter novel portray Arthur C. Clarke's third law.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Let us do a gedanken experiment. JK Rowling decides one day that she really is promoting magic in her novels, and having a background in Christianity, she is struck by guilt. In her desire to solve the situation, she does a google and comes to my website. Impressed with my insight, she calls me up on the phone to ask my advice.

"Hello, is this Theologic?" she asks in a quavering voice.

"Yes, it is," I answer

"Well, I've already written you, and I feel that I'm in a big pickle. I've decide to spend my money recalling ever Harry Potter book and burning them, unless you find a solution to my glorification of witchcraft," she sobs on the phone.

"Don't worry," I answer. "We are going to use Arthur C Clark's third law.

We then sit down together, and we write the eighth novel in the series. In this novel, we describe an early race of Christian beings that have created a technology that looks like magic. This technology is later passed down to the people of the Harry Potter books. The magic in the books is not real magic. It is technology that looks like magic. When the children cast a spell, what they don't realize is that their wands all have incredibly advanced microcomputers with fusion reactors that produces effects that look like magic. The scene where they apparate (appear and disappear over great distances) is actually just a transporter like on Star Trek.

The animals and the dragons, as portrayed in the book, are real. However, they were made via genetic engineering. Things that are invisible were done by projection or space-time distortion.

If would be very possible to rewrite the whole book, and make all of the items science fiction elements, and not change a thing.

The reason that this works so well, is because JK Rowling has a very distinctly Christian worldview in her books. She never has the children praying to gods. She has no talk of "mother earth." She doesn't encourage anybody to worship false gods. To the opposite, she is remarkable clean of any religion. Only religious thing mentioned is Christmas, and this is mentioned to just talk about the gifts that are given. If you read the books, and if you substitute science devices for the spell devices, nothing in the story changes.

Now, JK does mention souls and the afterlife. If you read the books, I believe that you will find out that the little indication that she gives about these things are remarkable similar to what most evangelical Christians would claim about the soul. One of the central points of the story has to do with the anchoring of the soul to the body. I find nothing offensive about her literarly device.

"So, you are overlooking a few things, and maybe I can understand that. But why would you want to deal with her books at all?" you might asked.

This is where you must read the books to find out. However, I find an incredible resource in her writings. I have four children, and I want each one of them to read the stories. I would not call JK a great literary figure. She does not caste clever literary allusions to other pieces of literature. She is not a great writer. Her sentence structure has nothing of outstanding merit. She does not invent new devices and languages in her writing.

She is, however, a masterful story teller. She may be the giant of our decade. The new Charles Dicken for our age.

Now, I ask friends at work if they have read the Harry Potter books. They tell me "No, but I've seen the movies."

Let me tell you friend, the movie is the last thing that you want to see.

Read the books and have your children read the books. Then use this as another common basis to have discussion with your children. If you don't get hung up on the use of magic as a literary device, you will have a common framework to discuss life with your children. You can discuss heroes that do what is right. You can discuss children who study hard. You will be able to discuss a story where there is no premartial sex, and couples that mate for life. You will be able to distill thoughts of sacrifice.

And when you get to the last book, you will see why JK said "If you are a Christian, you are going to understand how the series ends."

There are so many things in the novels that flesh out what it is to be a Christian, I would be hard pressed to tell you them all of the things. I certainly don't want to spoil the books for you. So, I will simply offer you this, read the books. You will be built up and not torn down.

Harry Potter is not the antiChrist, but gift from God to allow us to reach out and use this story to save others.

As a Christian, I can say that JK Rowling is not against us. And if she is not against us, she is for us.

"Body and Spirit" -> The M Word And Sex In Marriage

2010-03-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

Warning: You may find this offensive, and you may disagree with me. However, I believe that the Christian church must take this on with the all the other issues that we face. However, I suggest that if you are not of age, or don't want to deal with one man's views on masturbation and sex in marriage, I suggest that you simply don't read the rest. You will be offended.

I recently sat in a conversation with some very nice, Christian women. They started to talk about another women. Now, this may be close to gossip, but it really wasn't. They were simply recounting this woman's life and some of the misery that she saw. Then suddenly one spoke out, "Well, her husband had a porn problem."

Pornography is wrong. As a Christian, we should not use it. However, these women were clueless. I really like both of these women, but I could tell that they were trapped in their bodies. They simply could not understand how men are wired. Pornography is not right, and as Christian, we need to fight against it. However, unless you understand the framework, you'll never figure out the root.

My children are of age where we need to talk about subjects of growing bodies. Probably the most under talked subject in Christianity is masturbation. For something that happens so often, you would think that the church would face it straight on. It doesn't. It puts the subject on the back burner, and it allows the holy hypocrites to dominate the conversation.

Thank goodness for James Dobson.

If you are not in the Church, you probably think that Dobson is the most repressive fundamentalist Christian that lives. He does not support homosexuality. He does not support sexual freedom. He is anti-abortion. However, he has some interesting words on masturbation:

"Between 95 and 98 percent of all boys engage in this practice — and the rest have been known to lie."-- "Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide"

I think Dobson has thought this out remarkably well, and he lists four areas of concern with masturbation.

1. Some people go crazy with guilt over this. I had a mother that was raised in such a fundamentalist church that they taught that reading any comic strip was sin. So, until she died, she wouldn't read the funny papers. This, to me is crazy, but it shows how a religion can make anything filled with guilt.

2. Over masturbation. I read a few secular websites where people throw stuff out. Every once in a while, a rabid atheist will ask "how do I stop masturbating so much? Its become an obsession." In these cases, most people answer him. You don't have to be a Christian to realize that you can masturbate too much.

3. Pornographic material. Without going into the details, there is no doubt that pornography does nobody any good, and hurts people. Again, any secular person will tell you that porn will stop your love making with your wife. We'll write more on this later in this post, but porn is the great bane of our time.

4. Masturbation in marriage is wrong, except in extreme cases. There, I've said it. I've found an area where we can support it being wrong. I wish that I could do a perfect exegesis to explain why this is true, but I can't. However, the evidence is so clearly common sense, I believe you will understand this later on.

To leave Dobson alone, let us talk a bit about masturbation and the scripture.

I've seen some horrible exegesis of scripture on this. A matter of fact, most exegesis of scripture and masturbation is so bad that those that talk against it may be condemned as Pharisees in Matthew 23:

"Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."

I am going to make the exegesis very simple. The Bible is a big book. It talks at length on every subject. You want to know about eating shellfish? It has a verse on this. You want to know about miscarriages from a woman being hit? There is a verse on this. Do you want to know about how to treat your neighbor? There is a verse on this. You want to know what happens if a person has sex outside of marriage? There are many verses on this. You even want to know what happens if somebody has a perverse act with an animal? There are verses on this.

The Bible never calls out that masturbation is wrong as a pleasurable action.

There is one brief story in the Old Testament about Onan that was told to take his dead brother wife and to give her children. He used withdrawl as a birth control so she wouldn't get pregnant (basically removing any ability for her to have children, and condemning her to an old age without support). Because Onan wouldn't give his dead brother wife a child, the Lord killed him. Now, the Bible doesn't say he masturbated, but some have twisted the scriptures and will say that he did. Regardless, this so clearly is not anything about masturbation that it is an open and shut case. The Bible says nothing about masturbation.

I've read some Christian forums where people tried an "apply" scripture to say "have no unclean thought" as a basis. However, this is just silly. It is beyond silly. They are off applying scripture when nothing is needed. Let me be clear. The Scriptures are very complete. You don't need to apply anything. It masturbation was wrong, the Bible would say so. In clear letters. In flashing letters. It does call out everything clearly, but this one activity.

Don't twist the scriptures.

As a married man of over 20 years, let me explain a couple of things. Sex is made for two purposes:

1. Procreation
2. Pleasure to bond

The first one is easy for the Christian to understand. The second is self evident once you get married. Generally, the role of male and female is very clear. Men have a strong sex drive. Woman don't have a strong sex drive. Now both male and female have distribution curves of desire, but evidence is overwhelming in both observation and studies. There is no doubt about it.

I personally believe that if man never fell in the Garden of Eden (commonly called the "Fall of Man"), there would have still been this separation in sexual desire. Some women recognize this, but remarkably a lot of women don't. Women can drive extremely strong behavior by virtue of this sexual offset.

The root of sexual desire seems to be testosterone. I read many reports that when women start injecting testosterone, their sexual desires start to echo those of males. In the same regard, when boys get to a certain age, the testosterone changes levels, and they start to notice girls and start to worry about sex. This is where it really gets tough for males. Once we get this hormone flowing, we have a really difficult time with our behavior. However, sex is a bit like an appetite. You may get sexually hungry, but it you act on it, the desire goes down for a while. Paul recognizes this as he writes in I Cor 7:

"But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control."

Once you are through the sexual act, the desire goes down. This is scriptural and clearly written by Paul.

This is one of those points that is so incredibly important that I am going to repeat it, "If you do not have sex, Satan will tempt you." The Word of God states that sex reduces temptation.

The Catholic Church, which states priest must be celibate, has a big problem. This is what happens when you don't read your Bible. I can understand a bit of their confusion, however.

The only challenge with Paul's writings is that Paul could be celibate. So, Paul threw out some comments about being celibate. Many people beyond the Catholic Church have said, "Hey let's be like Paul. Be celibate." Although the scripture says be "fruitful and multiply," we throw that section away.

However, being celibate is not the norm. Peter, one of the most influential apostles, had a wife that came with him on his travels. No doubt Peter had sex. I find it beyond belief that the Roman Catholic church says "our Popes come from Peter" and yet they do not follow Peter's example of marriage.

Once we get into a Christian marriage, things should change. If I could drive the best of all behaviors in married Christian couples, it would be the following:

1. Husbands, you can no longer masturbate yourself.
2. Wives, you need to address your husband's need every single day or whatever interval he needs it

The psychology is very clear, and is familiar as Pavlov's dogs. Human beings have broad associations. Let me give you a non-sexual example. It is well know that people are perceived much more positively over a meal that is very pleasurable. The reason why is that human beings cannot distinguish the pleasure from the meal versus the pleasure from the person. If you want to make friends with somebody, just feed them something that they like.

The goal of sex should be to have the husband only associate the pleasurable act of sex as being associated with his wife. Once you have kids and a busy job, you will not have time for passionate love making every night. Face it. To be happy, the wife will simply need to take care of her husband's need. Many nights this will be a sexual act to is fast and not wearing on the woman. Most couples will not want to have certain types of sex during certain parts of the month. However, I would always suggest that it is the wife that addresses her husband's needs.

So now we get toward the end of this post. Once a man is married, we start to forget what it was like to be young. I see some older married men or women saying masturbation is wrong for our children. If you are a woman, I will ask you not to butt in. Most of you have no idea of what a man's sexual appetite is like, and you can't judge here. If you are a man, just remember the days of your youth.

The worst thing that we do to our children is to force them to be sexually capable and yet have no outlet.
I am not some liberal-joe that says "teach your kids to have sex safely because they will have it anyway." I don't believe in teaching my children to put on condoms. I don't think they will have sex. I do believe that Paul had the right idea. If you have no outlet for sexual tension, you will have no self control. For girls, you may never need to teach them to masturbate. For our boys?

We need to understand how they work.

The only thing left that you will struggle with as a Christian with sexuality is the problem of unpure thoughts. Certainly in masturbation and even in marriage, it is easy to have wrong thoughts. And many will print "if you think about a woman wrong, then you are committing a sin." Since masturbation can lead to bad thoughts, we potentially set up ourselves for sexual temptation.

However, I believe that both the Bible, research and commonsense points out the danger of no outlet. It is necessary for us to provide an outlet for sexual drive. Although it has risks, masturbation is the only reasonable way for the non-married to have this necessary outlet.

"Body" -> What Do You Have Brewing?

2010-02-06T11:15:00.000-08:00

One of life's simple pleasures is tea. There I've wrote it, and I'll write it again: Tea.

Now, tea by itself might be an acquired tasted. You might say it has a bit of funny taste at first, but once your body starts to like just a little bit of caffeine, your body will start to look forward to tea every morning.

I think that one of the best things about tea is the wonderful look of the leaves when you compare it to coffee.

Here is a picture that I stole from another website showing a nice little pile of tea.

Doesn't think look appealing?

Coffee is burnt and black. Coffee is left over crust. Coffee is death.

Tea is green. Tea is wonderful. Tea is life.

Now, you might say to me, "What about black tea? Is this a little bit of death? Is it different?"

All tea come from the same plant: camellia sinensis. The key to the color is that tea is processed in many different ways. If you ferment the leaves, you get black tea. I would argue that black tea is misnamed as it is more of lovely tan color. If the leaves are steamed and dried, you get green tea. If you add some incredibly bad tasting bergamot to it, you get Earl Grey tea. (There has been an explosion of Earl Grey fanatics because Captain Picard on the new Star Trek always made this particular blend his order. I believe that this explains why Picard was bald, and could never get any women. Captian Kirk, I am convinced, was a green tea man, with a bit of coffee thrown in when he needed a manly jolt.)

In my life, I choose green, and I drink a lot of this stuff. Around 16-20 cups per day. While this may sound like a lot, in reality, there are a lot of people that will drink the same amount of liquid per day as soda. There is a bunch of research showing that tea is very good for you and lowers both body weight and reduces cancer. Just substitute tea for your soda.

However, if you think about it, at this level of tea, you cannot use tea bags. This would be 10-12 tea bags per day. Even buying the tea bags at bulk, you would be spending a lot on green tea. At $.50 per bag, we would be spending $6 per day. However, we have options. You can buy tea in bulk. If you have Ranch 99 market near you, your in luck. If not, get the phone book open and find a local Chinese, Japanese, or Indian food store. Generally, these places will have a green tea, and it you are drinking a lot, they will have some very serviceable teas for dirt cheap.

The one that is the leader of the value pack is "Hime Ban Cha." Bancha is the just the Japanese name for a common green tea. This brand is sold by Japan Food Company out of the Bay Area, and I've been drinking it for at least ten years. The thing about this tea is that it brews a decent cup of tea, and it is dirt cheap. Generally, you can buy this for around $4 for 227g (8 oz) at most local stores. If you can't find it locally, even Amazon has it.

While you can buy Hime Ban Cha at Amazon, if you take a stop on the internet tea tour, I would suggest an immediate look at the Upton Tea Shop. On the home page look for the sampler section. The teas are pricey, when compared to the $4 Hime special, but they have a lot of information about the various types of tea. Their quality is normally very, very good, and the samplers are always a good pick. They have been around forever.

While the Upton site cane give a lot of information, you might want to know that green teas are divide into several categories, and the two dominate descriptions that you will find in the USA will use either the Chinese names or the Japanese names. This post isn't about the teas per se, and I won't get into this much. However, generally for the Chinese teas, you'll want a "green" tea and not a Oolong or a Jasmine tea. Just look for "Chinese Green," but make sure that you don't accidentally get a Chinese Gunpowder tea, which is often labeled as Green Tea. Gunpowered tea is great once you get used to it, but it does taste like smoke, which turns some people off.

When you determine that you want to brew some tea, the first question is "how" and this has been an ongoing quest of mine. I started as most neophytes do by putting the bulk tea into one pot (in my case this is a glass coffee pot re-purposed for tea) and pour the tea into a cup or another pot through a strainer. If you do this, you'll probably start with a normal strainer, and then you might find another fine tea specific strainer. For many people this will be their preferred method for the rest of their life. Yet this has drawbacks, starting with the fact that these strainers never get clean On top of the cleaning problem, I find that I really like a very fine strain of the tea for the final product, and this is where I steal from the coffee world.

This is a picture of my default brewing set at home. It is nothing more than a box of coffee filters from Costco, which cost all of .005 a piece and a drip coffee cone. The key on this is to find the Melita #4 manual manual coffee cone. I've had mine for 10 years, and while the edges chip off, I've used them thousands of times. While they don't label them as Melita, you can find these red #4 here. Just search on "cone" and pick the #4 one. At $3-4, there is no better bargain.

Now, you'll need to remember that you are making tea and you are not making coffee. In coffee, you pour a ton of coffee into the cone and then you fill up the cone with hot water. You are not going to do that for the tea. All you want the filter for is to filter. So, you need to find a separate container for brewing the green tea in. A number of years ago, an American company called "Gemco" use to make a perfect pot for the brewing section. This was call "The Whistler" and the pot looked like the pot that you see for commercial coffee brewers, but without the plastic top that just look unclean. It had a handle attached by a stainless steel band. They stopped making these, but you can search on eBay and find them for $25-30, which is very expensive compared to the original selling price. If I remember right, they stop making them after a few of them broke, and they were getting sued. I've used mine for year, and while they break, they are no worse than a broken glass.

However, Medelco jumped into the business with Gemco out, and they produced a dead ringer for my old favorite. I found some at a local store for $8 a piece and I bought 8 of them. My wife, who generously ends up cleaning up the tea brewing after I am done, breaks one of these around once every 2-3 years. So, I am set for 25 or 30 years. These can be bought here online. The reason why I like this design goes just beyond the clear functionality of the pot, but also how you brew with the pot. Because the opening is small and the water pot is wide, you can quickly learn how to flick your wrist so that you get the water and tea leaves swirling in a great circle. This allow a lovely blend of the tea and water and shortens the brew time. So can see a close up picture of this pot at the end of this post.

Now, I have a pot of tea in the morning, but I also have one after lunch. I am often in a meeting, and I will bring my tea pot into the meeting and drink and converse. My workmates think that I'm odd, but many are intrigued at the same time. Yet, I do not the hands to bring in two tea pots and filters to make my tea. What I need to do was have an easier system. In this case, the "standard" Japanese solution came to bear.

If you go to your local market Japanese market, you will be able to find a bag of these. They can also be ordered online. Generally, they come in two sizes, and this is actually the smaller size. They run somewhere around $.03-.04 if you buy carefully online. They are less at the markets it you find a good size Japanese food store. This is nothing more than a thing polester bag that you can put your tea inside of. The bag is constructed so that it has a little top that you can flop over and seal the top of the bag.

The operation is pretty obvious, but to describe it: you take your bag of Bancha (as described above) and you put in a couple of heaping teaspoons of tea into the bag. You flip the top of the tea bag over, and you throw the bag into the pot. I started to drink green tea in earnest after spending a 4 week trip in Asia Pacific many years ago while I was working for IBM. This was before web browsers and the internet, if you can believe that. I remember seeing the Japanese throw these bags into their tea pots. (The world was a lot bigger back then, and things like anime came on video tape, and people simply did not have the same cultural cross over. This went both ways. I quickly learned, during this trip of the mid 1990s that you needed to learn to eat well with chopsticks because you would find places that simply did not have knives and forks. I got to be pretty good because I had no other choice. Expect for the Korean chopsticks, which are more like thin metal rods rather than chopsticks. But this is another story.)

Now the biggest problem with these tea bags is that the top that is designed to hold in the tea doesn't do a great job as the tea gets smaller and small. If you are using whole tea leaves, it would work well. However, to get the maximum out of the minimum amount of tea, you'll want to actually crush the tea leaves. So, you'll get leakage out of the tea bag and into your tea. Some people simply don't mind, but I like a little better filter. So, I ended up buying this little hand sewing machine from Dealextreme (see here).

It is almost comical in that this little hand held sewing machine would be absolutely useless for any real usage. The problem is that it does a simple slipknot type of sewing, since there is only one bobbin for the the little hand held machine. If you miss just one stitch in sewing, and if you don't sew to the end of the fabric, the whole stitch can pull apart with just a little tugging. So, it is useless for clothes.

However, for the tea bag is absolutely perfect. While it is fickle to learn how to use, once you understand how to work it, you run a line down the top of the tea bag and seal it. Once you have it sealed, you can throw the whole tea bag into the pot and just let it brew. Even if you miss a stitch with the little sewing machine, generally it will hold it well enough to hold in all the tea. It is like a tea bag on steroids. It is the perfect solution for work.

Now, final method for brewing is used in Germany all the time by commercial tea makers, but we don't see it in the states at all. However, the Germans are very concerned about health, and tea is widely available because of the health benefits. As you might expect, the Germans engineered a better solution. The reason why one would like a tea bag is that it is very clean and fast. You simply throw the bag in, and you have a string to pull it out. The clean up is very fast. The problem with the previous methods is they require multiple pots or sewing machines. You could use tea bags, but they are very expensive, and there are too many of them if you drink a big pot of tea. "Ach du lieber," the Germans cried. "Vee must fix this!"

This particular tea bag can be bought directly from Adagio (see here). They are made in Germany, as you might expect from my description, and if you buy directly from Adagio they are $.03 a piece. They are simplicity in itself. Want they do is create a very long tube with one end opened. The other end is closed and you can pour the tea into the bottom of the tube. You then throw the sealed end into your pot, and the other end you clip to the top of your pot. Now, the tea will wick itself up the bag, but I've never had drips out of it. In the picture above, you can see my glass brewing pot and the tea for my morning pot of tea. The white thing on the top of the tube is a "Chip Clip" that I picked up from Walmart. You could grab the top of the tube with a clothespin or any other clip. The tea hangs in the water, and the clean up is just a snap. These will spoil you quick. The only draw back is that they aren't available everywhere, and the brewing can take a little longer than the loose leaf method with two tea pots. However, leave it to the Germans to come up with the best method.

Regardless of the method of brewing, as started in the first part of this post, green tea looks to have a variety of good effects on your health. Most of the health studies in this area were started by the Japanese, and since green tea is the variety used in Japan, most of the medical studies are on the green variety.

However, the most interesting thing to me of late in green tea is the presence of Theanine (pronounced pretty much like "tea lin"), which is an amino acid found only in tea. It appears that this amino acid crosses the blook brain barrier and helps mood, mental cognition and could offer neurological protection to the brain. The stereotypical scene in Japanese and Chinese literature and cinema is the hero thinking about his actions over a cup of green tea. Maybe this is more than a stereotype. Maybe it is a chemical reaction.

Maybe there is truth in the image.

"Mind" -> Rubbing Out The Keyboard Mess

2010-02-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

What happens when you spill green tea laced with pomegranate juice into your laptop keyboard?

It will stick. And in this post, I'm going to describe how to get it unstuck.

I recently bought a CULV laptop, which stands for Consumer Ultra Low Voltage, laptop. In reality, I didn't buy one, I bought three: one for my sister, one for whomever is working for us (Hillary), and one for myself. If you aren't familiar with the CULV concept, it is a "thin and light" notebook much like a netbook, only on steroids. It is much faster than a netbook could be. However, it still features the lightweight of a netbook. For instance, the weight of the one that I bought, which were the Acer 1410 model--the hot one on the market, was a little over 3 pounds. Amazing how my industry continues to change.

The fact that I was able to buy these at around $390 per pop was all the more amazing.

Now there are some things that are given up for such a light weight at such a low cost. DVD onboard is one. So add to the $390 another $50 for an external DVD, but still a good deal. The other thing that you give up on these is a anything of a real keyboard. These things have a "chicklet" keyboard. Now if you look at the picture up above, you will see my hand. What you might not recognize from this angle is that that wafer thin line that I'm holding is actually the keyboard on its side. The keyboard is just a little thicker than 10 or 20 sheets of paper.

So, the other weekend, I decided that I was going to add a bluetooth module into the 1410. (Although it has a switch for bluetooth, the module is not populated.) So, after pulling the whole computer apart, and putting it back together again, which could be a post in itself, I sat at my desk happy that I was done. As I booted up the machine, I grabbed my big glass of juice and tea morning mixture, and I accidentally slopped a little bit into the keyboard. Now, I thought that I could take a paper towel and wick out most of it and I would be okay. What I didn't understand at the time is how the wafer thin keyboard would impact the issue. The gaps are so small in this keyboard that anything in it causes problems. As the keyboard dried out, I had a bunch of keys that stuck.

I ended up order another keyboard off of eBay just in case I destroyed the current keyboard, then after I received and installed the new keyboard, I went down and I bought a big bottle of rubbing alcohol to try and fix the issue. The issue is that you need something to dissolve the stuck stuff. You could use water, but the obvious problem is that water encourages oxidation, or rust. The other issue with water is that the vapor pressure is quite low. Once you get water into something, it takes a while to get out. As we all know, rubbing alcohol vapor pressure is higher, and it dissolves quickly. Now, most rubbing alcohol is a mixture of water and alcohol, so you you want to get a blend of 90% alcohol so the residue evaporates quickly.

Once you have your alcohol, you need to removed the keyboard from the computer. Can't help you for your laptop, but for mine the keyboard is only held in by a series of clips around the edges of the keyboard. Once you have the clips undone, I could slip the keyboard cable out of the connector and disconnect it. (I really like this design, as the guys at Quanta--the Acer ODM--are pretty clever.)

The next step is as simple as pouring. You open up the bottle and you start pouring it into the keyboard. Allow it to soak into the keys, then start to manipulate and press the keys. The key, no pun intended, is to make sure that you have dissolved all of the gunk inside of the keyboard. In my case, I need to dissolve the old tea and pomegranate juice that had caused the keys to start to stick. However, once you've pour in the rubbing alcohol, you need to remember that the old gunk that makes the stuff stick has only been moved from making your keys stick to now being suspended in the rubbing alcohol in the keyboard. So, you need to make sure to drain the rubbing alcohol out of the keyboard and down the sink. Now that you've rinsed your keyboard, you need to still allow it to dry out. If you had 100% alcohol, this would happen immediately, but you have a mixture of alcohol and water, so allow the keyboard to sit in a warm space. In my case, I had the laptop up and running with a different keyboard, so I let it sit for 3 days until the weekend.

So, the question you may have is "how did it work?" The good news is that I'm typing this post on the keyboard that you see in the post, the one that is running over with rubbing alcohol. I might feel just a tinge of stick in the keys, but it may also just be my imagination. However, the keys are much, much better than before, and so far everything seems to work well.

I now have two keyboards for my laptop. However, seeing how I have 3 laptops that I could use it on, I think I'll keep it.

"Mind" -> Hacking SPD On Memory

2010-01-31T16:00:00.000-08:00

This the laptop that I was wrestling with yesterday. It is an old NC4010 that I decided that I would buy refurb about 2 year ago, so that my wife could have her own PC to do email. The PC is very small, and while it sold for $2000 when new, it was selling for $200 as a refurb.

The PC never ran as fast as I thought that it should and the battery was not very good, but it was good enough for logging into Google mail for my wife. After using it a lot for the last two years, I bought a big 17" Acer Portable for her desk downstairs, which she uses all the time. The nice thing about her new portable is that from time to time, the kids use to watch videos on. The new portable is more like an entertainment system.

But there were a couple of nice things about the old portable. With a new battery, it should still get around 2.5 hours of battery life, which is a lot longer than the entertainment system. It also comes in at about 3.5lbs, which is a very light portable considering that the screen is very tall (albeit with a resolution of 1024 x 768), which is pretty much a winner.

I like that it also had a track stick and a speaker that could be cranked up quite high to listen to web casts.

If the portable was a bit more responsive, I would actually like to keep the thing around, as it had some unique features. No doubt, the original $2000 price tag allowed the designers to put in a few of the extras that I just described. So how to fix the performance?

I suspected that the real issue on the PC is that it had a fairly large, for the age, shared memory space with the video, and I needed a bit more RAM in the thing. I also needed a new battery, so I looked on ebay, and I found a Hong Kong seller of batteries that would replace the battery for less than $40. The battery cost wasn't bad. What about memory?

So, I looked up the memory on the HP site. It was166Mhz memory (also called PC2700), and the memory was DDR1 (or just DDR). So, I got online and found I could buy a gigabyte of RAM, doubling the RAM space, for around $40 dollars. My guess is that this would lower the hard drive swapping by a lot, thus speeding it up.

I had read on the HP forum that some had problems getting new memory to work, so I was very careful to order PC2700/166Mhz chips to make this work just fine.

Putting in memory is not that hard. The picture above shows this class of memory, and I'm holding the old memory chips that came out of the HP.

Laptop memory normally comes in 200 pin DIMMs, which is just another way of describing the packaging. The important thing to note is that there are 4 or more types of memory in use over the last 5-6 years. Each memory package look a little like each other, but the notches are set up so that you can't plug a DDR1 into a DDR2.

The other thing is that the older memory technologies, like SDRAM and DDR1 aren't made much any more if at all. If you are buying chips, it probably means that you might have a repackaged chip.

When I got the new chips, I plugged them into my HP, and the screen just went black. I went to the HP forums, and this is what happens when the memory is not being accepted. The people on the forum had no idea what was happening, and the were speculating all types of things. The good thing is that you don't have to speculate, because you can use tools.

Now you may be asking why I am posting this here, but the posts on the HP forum were a couple of years old. I had a suspicion about why the memory didn't work, and I had enough knowledge to figure out how to check on it. Unfortunately, the forum posts were for people that had given up a couple of years ago.

The key for me was having another older laptop in my house that I could use to see the chips. So while the new memory would not boot on the HP, it would boot on my old Dell laptop.

The first thing that you can use to see the memory is something call CPU-Z, which will tell you what is inside of your PC. Now, I didn't take snapshot at the time of my new memory, this is actually a picture from my Dell portable with its own memory, but you can see that CPU-Z will show you a bunch of stuff including the memory type that is in your machine. In this case, you can see that the utility is looking at slot #1, which is the onboard memory in my old Dell, and that the type of memory that I have is DDR in that slot is just DDR or DDR1.

Now what is PC2700? The memory manufacturers came up with an idea of labeling the memory in terms of bandwidth because this is what the hard drive guys do. However, it just confuses everyone as the key thing is matching the memory for Mhz not bandwidth. Regardless, the term PC2700 means that the data transfers at 2.7 Gigabytes of information per second.

Again, most people just want to know the megahertz (MHz). You can see that the MHz is both 133 and 166. This is interesting. Is it 133 or 166? The answer is "it is both," which we'll cover in just one second.

So, I put my new memory, which was labeled as 166Mhz into my Dell portable to double check the speed, and although it said "166Mhz," there was a third line with 200Mhz on it also! The memory maker that sent me the chips had repackaged some newer chips, and said that it would work with my older system.

In most cases it is true. Remember I said that the memory could operate at 166 or 133? If you have faster memory, it will often work with the older machines. This is why there are two memory speeds above. If the system cannot connect at the fast speed, it falls back to the slower speed. The problem is that my HP was choking and not trying to negotiate the speed. I did not want to go through the problems of doing an RMA, so I decided to program the chips. The mechanism for detecting speed is called "Speed presence detect" or SPD, and to program this SPD you need a PC with an open memory slot and a SPD programmer.

The best program is something called Thaiphoon burner. If you are only going to use the program once, it is $20, but they have a 15 day trial. So, you can use it for a single shot issue. There is also SPDtool, but it is harder to use. The screen shot above shows you a picture from my old Dell portable, looking at the memory that was is in the machine. What you need to do is "read SPD at 51" which reads the SPD timing of the memory in the second slot. Beware that you can read the wrong slot and write the wrong data. Luckily, if you really hose your memory, you can boot with certain pins covered with tape, and reprogram the memory, but it is a real pain. Better to be careful and not screw up.

If you go onto the memory page, you can pull up the timing memory table. I stuck the memory from the HP into my Dell to pull up the information, and I got the memory table above.

You can see that it has "table 0" and the other tables. Table #2 is grayed out, so it doesn't exist. This only has two memory settings: 166 MHz and 133 MHz. I also popped in the new memory and sure enough, it had 3 tables. The third table was at 200 Mhz, just like I saw in CPU-Z.

To get the timing speed, you adjust tRCD, tRP, tRAS, tRC, tRFC, and the tRRD. I won't go through what they mean because they are Wikipedia. However, I guessed that I needed to set all tables so that they would coincide with the memory that worked. What was interesting is that the 166Mhz timing was also different on my new memory. So, I adjusted my new memory table 0 to the above timings, and I adjust table 1 to the above timings. If I didn't wipe out the 200MHz setting, the memory would still try and negotiate to a higher speed, so I had to totally remove the 200MHz setting.

After resetting the SPD, I put in the memory chips in the old HP and I let out a whoop of delight as the PC purred to life without a problem. I also found a new driver for the old Ali Chipset, which was dog to begin with as the company went bankrupt. Luckily, a university type had spent a bunch of time research the Ali 7101 driver and had it posted on his University page. Thank goodness to academia.

My wife used the portable last night and remarked how much faster it was with new memory. I felt a little bit guilty for not fixing it earlier, but for $80, we were going to have a very servicable extra portable around the house.

"Mind & Spirit" -> Why The Little Guy Wins

2010-01-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

The most problematic issue that I've face at my work over the last 20 years of being in corporate America is the propensity for social loafing. Now social loafing is one of those things that simply don't need to be described once you figure out what it is saying.

If you want to get a good sense of the connection to Christianity, all that you need to look at is Paul's writings in 2 Thessalonians 3:

"In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone's food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat."

We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat."

Social loafing is simply the normal human reaction for people to back off working hard when they are part of a group. The person to first document this behavior was Maximilien Ringelmann in the early 20th century. To this day, some social loading is considered an important part of the Ringlemann effect.

To understand the entirety of the Ringlemann effect, we need to understand what Ringlemann did, and why it is so applicable to group dynamics. It explains why major corporations are not the preferred method of employment.

Very simply he ran and experiment where he had his subjects pull on a rope. He then measureed the pull of that individual. Once he was done with measuring the individuals, he would place all of the individuals into teams and have them pull on the rope.

Now the only numbers that Ringlemann test was 1, 2, 3, and 8, but I think the chart is probably pretty close. If we are in a group of 2 or 3 people, a lot of work is done. It is as soon as we get to more than 3 people, we see the group effort really start to fall off.

Ringlemann, himself, had some idea of what was happening, but he thought perhaps the groups were losing effort due to lack of coordination. As the researchers have done more and more work (Ingham, Levinger, Graves, & Peckham, 1974), they discover that in things like pulling rope, the biggest issue is that people simply stop working as hard because there are more people around to do the work.

Eric Weiser, at Curry College,did a nice chart that shows the individual drop in effort from several studies.

The problem with most of these types of studies is that they cannot perfectly predict what will happen in real life. However, good fundamental thought as gone into this. Now that you understand the idea of social loafing, we can look at the roles that the various people can play.

1a. The free rider: This is the person that decides to back off on the hard work. Fredrick Taylor, the father of scientific management, called this soldiering. Taylor, in his day, recognized and categorized many reasons for this behavior in the common work force.

1b. The infected free rider. Free riders are a habit, and not something that is done every once in a while. These are the individuals that may have run into individuals in the past that have pushed them to achieve, and this was a bad event for them. If this was a confrontation, the individual may turn into an infected free rider. This is an individual that is trying to get back at a corporation or a manager. I call them an infected free rider because they tend to spread their mindset throughout the group and get other people sick. If the free rider backs off a bit, the infect free rider can actually lower the output of a group by being in it and being counterproductive.

2. The sucker effect: These are the formally hard working people in the group that look at the free rider, and they say to themselves, "why am I working so hard? This guy isn't working, and he is getting paid the same as me. I'm a sucker, so I'll back off."

3. The starter and pusher. These are individuals who just are wired differently. Generally, they are highly motivated and want to achieve something, therefore, they are willing to engage in conflict to get something done. The point is that they are extremely rare, and can cause either great harm or good.

4. The credit taker. Often, inside of these groups, not only do people not do equal work, but they start to realize that the group as a whole may be judged. In this case, what starts to happen is that individuals will start to position themselves so that they can receive credit for whatever goodness does happen out of the group. The other people in the group, knowing that they will not receive the credit, then back out of providing their full effort.

The last role is especially important, the researchers say that there is one way to ensure that all members of the group work more toward the value of their individual contributions is to have each member recognized for the effort that they put in. As an example, the swimmer relay is often used to prove that groups can have as good if not better performance. It is not uncommon for individuals to perform their best effort while on a team. However, in this case, each member's input is carefully monitored, and know that their team mates are depending on them only increases their effort. The key is that although they are on a team, they are seen individually.

Ask we understand these groups, we start to understand why business can be so turbulent, and why groups can under perform so dramatically. If you get 8 people together, the output of the group is going to drop closer to the output of 6 individuals. Then you have some people that are going hard, and others that are showing a variability in their effort.

If you are unfortunate enough to have a starter and a pusher, the group will either turn into a high performance group, or it will self destruct. The problem is that starter/pushers push themselves, and if they are an extrovert, they will start to push other people. The starter/pusher present a unique issue for us. You would think that a starter/pusher would be considered as a positive. However, to understand why he can be self destructive is understand why people freeload.

The reason that people back off in effort is that it is uncomfortable to put out a lot of effort. So, to go back to the beginning of this post, the question should not be "why do people loaf in groups?" This should be very obvious. They loaf because this is the most comfortable thing for them to do.

The real question is "why do individuals excel when they are alone?"

The obvious answer is "because the effort that somebody puts out shows their self image." The person works hardest by themselves because they know that other people will judge them. This explains why effort falls off in groups. If the individual believes that they cannot be measured, then they have no motivation to do better.

This is why the credit taker is so discouraging to a group. Since they suck up the available credit, they will heavily demotivate the other individuals. So, to go back to the pusher, he can be perceived by the rest of the group as a credit taker. So, he will instantly get some push back that he/she is simply giving orders because they want to get credit for whatever the group does. The other instant thing that will happen is that the pusher is going to try to get the individual to perform in a zone that they do not want to perform. So, they are afraid that they are not going to get the credit, and they are working harder than they want.

This often sets up an extreme amount of conflict. The good news is that there will be change in performance in the group. The bad news is that a free rider, which was performing at 75% of their effort, may suddenly tank to 30% or 40% effort. In today's knowledge work, you cannot force somebody to work hard. You can hope to change their mind set, but if you fail, you run the risk of turning a free rider into an infected free rider.

So, here is my advice as we get to the end of my post. If you are a high performance individual, generally you are far better off working in organizations that are small. At the very least, you need to work for somebody who is a starter and a pusher. A couple of starter/pushers can be an awesome team inside of a company. Generally, because their are two of them, they can watch each others back.

If you are a free rider, I guess that you'll never have gotten to this part of my post, because you felt uncomfortable. In the last couple of years, I've spotted a couple of people that are clearly loafing. They are very nice individuals. However, this will upset me. I feel that I've been suckered by these individuals. In both of these cases, as I've had a heated discussion with them, I basically called them lazy.

Now this is something that I should not have done. And it certainly wasn't very Christian of me.

However, in both case the individuals went speechless and hung up on me. In both cases, it was extremely obvious, they knew that I hit it square on the head, and it hurt them.

But in both cases, they didn't face reality, and I don't think I bought myself anything.

"Mind" -> The Beauty Of The Courts

2009-12-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

One of the first things that come to mind when we think about the law, is the famous scene in Henry the VI by Shakespeare

DICK

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

CADE

Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

Now, many legal firms have tried to explain that these two guys were actually bad guys, and thus they wanted to kill the lawyers to allow lawlessness to reign. This is only an explanation that a lawyer could come up with. The context of the famous line is found in the follow on by Cade.

To understand Cade's follow-on, we need to understand the culture. Legal contracts were done on parchment or lamb's skin. And when the contract was done, it was sealed with bee's wax. Cade basically says, "Yes, we need to put these lawyer guys out of commission. After all, what do they do? They kill innocent sheep to take their skin for a contract to undo a man and they seal it with their wax. If you think that a bee does its damage with a bee sting, you are mistaken. The bee does its damage when it's wax is used to sign a contract."

Now, we might think that this is funny, in reality, the problem of the legal system is that we don't teach our children the law. We don't teach legal concepts, and therefore, the common thought is that all law is considered black magic and voodoo. However, the idea of hearing disputes by leaders has a long history in the Bible starting with Moses. Disputes and judgment is as old as the Bible.

Exodus 18

15 Moses answered him, "Because the people come to me to seek God's will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God's decrees and laws."

Moses' father-in-law replied, "What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people's representative before God and bring their disputes to him. Teach them the decrees and laws, and show them the way to live and the duties they are to perform. But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied."

The needs for courts and law go back to the earliest books in the Bible. As long as we are human beings, we are going to have disputes about what is fair.

It is unfortunate that we as Christians need to deal with the courts and legality. It is clear in the New Testament that Paul says that we should not be taking a Christian brother or sister to court. It becomes much questionable when you are dealing with non-Christians. Our family tradition has always believed that if you are in dispute with somebody, you have the right to defend yourself to the full extent of the law.

While I'm not a lawyer, and while I would hate to think that anything that I would say should or could be construed as legal advice, I have worked contracts and I have worked a lot of items with lawyers in the business that I have been in. In a recent dispute with a limousine company, I was amazed at the lack of understanding of common law principles that the owner of this small business was showing. He was making claims that simply would not or could not stand up in court, as I understand the law. In this light, I thought it would be help to understand the basics of contracts.

This blog post is meant to layout some of these issues. Every day you are entering into contracts through the items that you buy and what you say to people.

In this case, the law is actually beautiful. While there are incredibly bad laws on the books, there are many instances where the law is simply brilliant. Lack of understanding of this brilliance will lead to confusion. It will also allow you to be ripped off.

This first thing to understand is "what is a contract?"

A contract is any agreement by two people to a set of terms and conditions. Normally, but not always, these terms and conditions are an exchange of services or property for money. So, the question is "what constitutes a valid contract?"

Basically, it is any time that you have an agreement between two parties. This agreement can be for a second, a day, or an year. Once an agreement is reached, this is considered a contract.

"Well, I wasn't in my right mind," you may say.

This doesn't matter. Unless you can prove by the weight of evidence that there were clearly mitigating circumstances (ie, you were under the influence of drugs or duress), you created a contract. This is why you must be very, very careful when agreeing to anything, and why the current consumer movement is so misleading. When you buy a product from a company, you may think "Oh, I can always take this back." You may have been spoiled by Costcos or Nordstrom. However, these companies are doing something which is not required by law at all.

"Well, I didn't sign my name," you might say. Unfortunately, you do not need to sign your name. All you need to do is to agree. If you are moral, you will not lie, and if you are fighting with an individual that does lie, you may be in a very difficult situation.

The courts recognize that there are two types of contracts: Oral and Written. Oral contracts are very binding. You cannot get out of an oral contract simply because it wasn't written down. If it is written down, the courts immediately start to focus on "what do the words in the contract actually mean?" Thus if you get into a dispute on a written contract, this is where all the focus will go. What did the contract say. It is very, very important as the bulk of the conflict resolution will flow around the verbiage. Beware signing the fine print!

Oral contracts are a much more interesting thing. How do you enforce an oral contract.

Let create an example where you call up a limousine service, and you ask to be picked up at the airport and delivered. You have signed no contracts, and all you have done is said, "I want to get you to agree to pick me up, and you can charge my credit card."

The issue is based around if you have actually come to a resolution on the closure of the oral contract. Most people have heard that "we do business on a shake." This is basically recognizing that there is clearly always two parts to getting a contract done, even if it is oral.

1. Negotiate the terms
2. Agree that the negotiation is done

In the case of the limousine service above, even though you may have said "I want you to pick me up, and you can charge my credit card," you have not had agreement from the other side. It is only once the other side has formally agreed to this, then do we have a formal contract.

Let me give you an example:

Buyer: I will pay you $100 for that car

Seller: I will only take $105

Buyer: Okay, I don't want the car

Seller: Wait, I accept the $100 offer.

In the above case, there was no oral contract made. This is the number one thing that must be considered by the courts (or in small claims court). The only thing that they will ask is "was an oral contract ever in existence?"

I cannot over emphasize how important this is. If you think that you can go into court and say, "well the contract wasn't fair," you will not have a leg to stand on. However, if you go into court and say, "I had no oral contract, as we had never closed on the negotiations and agreed to the deal," as long as you can show that you never had a contract, you obviously cannot be held to this contract. Remember, you have no contract until both parties had reached a moment in time where they agreed.

In oral contracts, making sure that both parties have agreed is really hard. Courts base their laws generally on the body of court cases before the current cases. This idea is called "common law," or it is the idea that the courts judge the current case in light of other common cases of the past. To help prove if somebody really had an agreement, the idea of Estoppel is used.

The estoppel theory says that you can tell that a contract existed by virtual of how the parties acted. There may have been no witnesses to the contract, but if both parties were acting as if the negotiations had been finished, then the courts will assume that an oral contract was done.

For an example, let's say that my neighbor tells me to go to the store an buy a pool filter for his pool and he'll pay me $5 bucks for my effort and reimburse me for the filter. I spend $50 on a filter, and when I shows up at his house, he says, "Hey, man I just found out that I have 6 in a box that I forgot about. I don't need the filter at all."

"You owe me $55," I say.

"Sorry, dude," he says. "It's your word against mine."

So, you go down to the local court house and file a small claims case. When the day arrives, you claim that the neighbor owes you $55. The neighbor claims that he doesn't know what you are talking about.

"Judge dude," he says. "We had some type of a conversation, but I had no idea that he was going to act on this. We never had a formal contract. The contract never existed."

The judge now must decide if you have a claim or not. He asks you if you have any evidence.

"Yes, judge," I state. "Here is the receipts from the pool store showing that I purchased the filter. Here is a picture of his pool that shows that he uses this type of pool filter. Here is a picture of my backyard, showing that I don't have a pool, and I have no use for a pool filter."

Judge will look at this, and he'll say, "Well by estoppel, we are going to assume that a contract existed because the plaintiff acted as if there was a contract."

I remember when I was taking my first business law course many years ago. I remember how surprised I was at this idea. Basically, if one party starts acting as if the oral contract is valid, it makes the contract valid. Generally, this is not well understood by the average person. Acting on a contract makes it valid.

If you think that there is any question that the other party believes that a contract has happened, the first thing that you need to do is make sure that they understand that you believe that no contract has happened. You want to tell this so that they cannot act as if the contract did exist. Registered mail is best, but an email saying "I never agreed to this arrangement." Basically, this should show an attempt to stop the clock. Stopping the clock is incredibly important if an oral contract is determined to exist in the future because it will determine the damages that you owe. Again, this is so important, I will repeat it. You want to stop the clock to mitigate the damages that you may have to pay.

So, let's dig into this a bit deeper. So, in the limousine example above, let's say that you get pulled into small claims court. The problem with oral communications is that it is exceptionally non-clear. The judge has the extremely difficult task of figuring out if a contract existed or not. Before you panic, you need to realize that there are three separate phases of judgment.

1. Determining if there was a contract
2. Determining if the contract was breached
3. Determining the damages if the contract was breached

You may be surprised to find out that many judges will immediately allow to say that there is an oral contract without any good proof. They may use the doctrine of estoppel to grant a contract, and your heart might sink to think that they will immediately say that you breached the contract (or broke it). However, it you have a wise judge, he is going to immediately going to follow it up with the damages.

Let's look at both the limousine case and the pool filter case. In the pool filter case, the judge will turn to me.

"When your neighbor didn't take the pool filter, what did you do?" he asks.

"Well, I took the pool filter back to the store and I got a refund," I answer.

"Well, it looks like you are out of pocket no money for the pool filter, however, you never got your $5 profit, so I rule that the defendant should pay you the $5 that you were promised."

The beauty of a good judge is that he normally is just trying to make things right. He isn't trying to teach a lesson, or make somebody sorry. All he wants to do is put the playing field back into shape. Now, small claims court is a slightly different kettle of fish, and judgments out of small claims court generally don't allow you to claim "specific performance." Specific performance is when a court says "Okay, you must give Tom the shelf that you promised him." Generally, most small courts will only grant monetary damages.

Let's go back to the pool filter. Let's say I didn't take the pool filter back to the store.

"When your neighbor didn't take the pool filter, what did you do?" he asks.

"Well, I took the pool filter back to the store but since it was a unique part, they wouldn't take it back," I answer. In this case, the judge may or may not be able to cut a perfect judgment. Since he can only award monetary damages, he may need to award damages somewhere between $55 to $5. In reality, the judge may award $55 to me, but then tell me, "Now, you have been awarded the $55, but if you do not give the filter to your neighbor, he can come in a counter sue you for damages because you never fulfill the contract."

As another example, let's go back to the oral contract on the limousine. Let's say that that the limousine company says, "alright, my policy is that if somebody cancels their limousine, I get to keep all their money so he owes me $300."

"Wait a minute," says the judge. "Did the defendant agree to these damages?"

"Well, no, but I sent him an email after the fact saying that this was the fee," answers the company spokesperson.

"Well, unless both parties agree to damages in case of breach of contract, there is no preset determination of the damages," the judge will smile.

This is yet one more incredibly important point in oral contracts or in written contracts. If you do not have in the contract the specific remedies, then it is up to the court to decide what the damages will be. When ever I negotiate contracts with other companies, I always look to place in what the damages will be. With almost all of the legal staff that I have, they generally want to leave out the specific damages. Why do they do this? They do this because know that in most cases the judge will grant far less damages than what is the expectation by the company that we are negotiating with.

This is where the law is truly beautiful if applied by a just justice. After all, we will always win some and lose some. The question is what is the damage of losing. This is why earlier, I state that if you believe that the other person believes that there is a contract, you need to quickly tell them that there is no contract, and you plan to dispute the contract.

So, let's go back to the limousine service.

"In my mind," says the judge, "There was no specific damages identified. Tell me mister limousine representative, what is the average profit that you make from one of these calls?"

"I make $50 profit," the spokesperson says.

"Okay, then the amount that you are out of pocket if a contract existed is $50, therefore, the defendant owes you $50 to make you true," says the judge.

This is pretty much the worse case, as long as you are very honest in the court case and act in good faith. Generally, a judge is not looking to hurt anybody but simply make them whole. In the best of all cases, the most that a service provide can hope to recoup is what the profit would have been.

Another example, is if you neighbor decides to have a contractor build a shed on his property for $1000 verbally, and they do this in front of witnesses with a handshake, there is a contract. Before anything is done by the contractor, if the neighbor changes his mind, the contractor can take your neighbor to court. However, he will never be able to get the $1000. Since he has spent nothing, the most that he can hope to get is the profit that would have been generated by the building of the shed. If labor and materials would be $900, the most he could hope to get, without specific damages in the verbal contract, is $100.

Now, mind you. When they shook hands on the shed, if your neighbor stated "and by the way, I'm going to pay you $1000 if I cancel this tomorrow," he would have no recourse. He would have to pay the entire $1000. However, without specific damages, all the courts try to do it make the plaintiff whole.

In reality, when the contract is messy and unclear, the judge may well rule that a contract was breached, but the penalty for breaching the contract is one cent. This has happen many times.

In the case of the limousine, the judge may think to himself, "Well there is something fishy about this. This company claims an oral contract exists, but clearly they were out no money on the deal. The person had canceled clearly in advanced of the pick-up date, and there was no damage done to the limousine company. Therefore, I'm going to have damages of 1 penny."

What is a shame is that we don't teach our children the basics of law. I hope that I can make sure that this error does not happen with my own children.

"Spirit" -> Son Of The Devil

2009-11-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

"Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"

Ah, there is nothing like Matthew 23:33 in the original King James. If you are unfamiliar with the passage quoted above, the scriptures has a particular potency for those of the Christian Faith, because this extremely strongly worded phrase was said by our Lord Jesus Christ.

The classical Christian belief system portrays that Jesus Christ was none less than an incarnation of God in the flesh. Jesus is the perfect embodiment of what God is like. We often forget this in our modern culture that has never read the Bible, and doesn't have an understanding of the man.

The problem with our society is that they are often guided by mavens of textural criticism that believe they can see an evolution in God's character throughout the Bible. They sift through the text and try to call out that there are two different Gods in the Bible. As they go through the Bible, they will say that the writers of the Bible were inconstant in their views of God.

This is trite and self-serving hypothesis, and is not born out by the reading of the Scriptures. I have read through the Bible completely six to seven times, and I simply don't see this changing viewpoint of God. There is no evolution of God. There is only separate views of the same item (God) by different men. The Bible clearly has an expanding revelation of God, but it is much as counterpoint. A simple melody is introduced, and this melody goes on to build on the initial theme. So is the word of God.

So, in the entire canon of scripture, we see the melody of anger. God in the Old Testament got mad. God (as per Jesus Christ) got mad in the New Testament. They are the same God. Face it, if you are a Christian, you need to realize that God, in our common vernacular, "pops a cork." He gets fed up, and he lets people have it. However, we need to be clear about who he gets mad at.

In this quote that started this post, the God/Human was angry at those that teach or proclaim God's word in a manner unworthy of God. Idea that man can misrepresent God is something that is one of the key touch points in all of scripture.

"And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck," we are told in Mark 9:42.

You would think with such strong words, we would be hard pressed to find teachers of children willing to teach. To be a teacher and teach young people about the word of God has all the attraction of becoming a profession bomb defuser. The scripture tells us that the job of teaching can be harmful to you unless you are on your toes all the time. As a child that grew up in the Christian school system, I have found many teachers who taught despite the fear of the previous verse. They understood full well the risk of teaching, but felt called to be a teacher. To these teachers, I am indebted. And if the Krells, Joanie, Joel Ulrich, Fanny Gates, or a host of other teachers ever stumble across my blog, I can only hold out the deepest love and respect for what they did.

What amazes me is when the opposite happens, and the teachers that have read the warnings and disregard the consequences. I shudder to think what judgment day will look like for them.

An example of this was when I was in college for my first degree. I was at Seattle Pacific University, and many of the teachers were there out of a conviction to do what was right. Yet, I have never seen a more corrupt group of religion professors in my life. They were self satisfied in their intellectual hubris, and they ended up doing great amount of harm to the Christian body. Now Seattle Pacific University was built on the foundations of John Wesley and his philosophy. After reading the works of Wesley, and meeting these professors, I am convinced that if Wesley would have been alive, he would have camped outside of the offices of the religion department, and prayed until God rained fire and brimstone down on the building. If God did not answer his prayer, I'm sure he would have shaken the dust off his feet, and moved on.

One egregious professor, who later in life I simply called son-of-the-devil took great joy in breaking down the historic faith during his freshman introduction to the old testament course. At the end of the course, he would leave the students with nothing but questions. His main attack to undercut the faith was by canonical criticism. Rather than pointing out inconsistencies in the biblical text, he would attack the canon of scripture.

"The Catholics have their Bible, really, who is to say that we have the right canon," would be his stereotypical way of introducing his class. He also forbade tape recorders because evidently previous students had tried to capture his heresy on tape.

"Really, what is truth? Does the Bible need to be factually accurate to be true? Even in the myth of the Bible, Truth can exist," he would go on. He believed that the Bible was not truth, but it contained stories that pointed to truth. Since he studied Hebrew, he would remind us of that.

A rather brutal trick of his was his Hebrew authority. As I've state before, I believe the evidence is clear that the universe is very old. Without repeating my posts, the idea that the university is billions of years old is very obvious. As long as you can accept that the days talked about in Genesis aren't literal 24 hour days, science and the scriptures are easy to reconcile.

Son-of-the-devil would have none of this, and he emphatically informed every class that the Hebrew for "day" could only be translated as "24 hours." He knew that he was immediately creating an uncrossable divide between the scriptures and science when he said this. He enjoyed making everybody doubt their faith.

At the time, a lot of what he said got into my head. Even though my head was filled with some pretty good stuff.

In high school, I got the bug on apologetics. I had read Geisler, Sproul, and other fundamental scholars of conservative Christian thought. Unfortunately, since I assume that I was at a Christian University, and being young and inexperienced, I was not using the data that I had learned. However, one day spoke up I in class. It is etched indelibly in my memory.

"Well, the contemporary writers of the New Testament had no idea that they were writing scripture, they just were communicating," son-of-the-devil said.

I held up my hand, remembering a bit from an apologetics book that I had read. He nodded to me.

"What about when Peter called out in his books that Paul's writing was equivalent to the Old Testament Scriptures?" I asked.

Now, this was supposed to be a Biblical Scholar. This was supposed to be a man that knew what the Bible was about. Certainly, with all of this learnedness and knowledge, he would know the famous 2 Peter 3:16 Scripture, where Peter places the writings of Paul on the same level as the Old Testament. Looking straight at me, he had an air of confidence.

"I don't know about that," immediately dismissing me.

It was years later that I realized that the son-of-the-devil didn't read the New Testament. He was looking at the Old Testament as a piece of literature and not as the word of God.

Unfortunately, some of my nephews and nieces have gone to this university, and the power of tenure has kept the son-of-the-devil in business and dragging generation down. We've had some debate about whether or not the son-of-the-devil is really demonic or simply grossly misled.

I lean toward misled, but I am sure if CS Lewis was around, he would believe he was demonic, and he would insist that "the son of the devil" could be a dead ringer for an extra character out of "That Hideous Strength."

The point in this story, and why it is on my serious blog, is to discuss what to do when you are faced with somebody that claims to be a Christian and yet displays completely non-Christian behavior. I could have argued with this professor, but I didn't. His criticism of the Bible nearly led me to abandon my Christian Faith, and I can truly say that the journey back to a non-blind Faith has allowed me to become much stronger.

However, I would wish this "faith strengthening" road on no one, and if I am saved today it is because of the providence of God in directing my intellectual curiosity to some well placed books in Seattle book stores and libraries. However, have a snare inside of any Christian organization is a problem.

So now that you've heard my tale, what of the ramifications? The first is to make sure that you carefully consider any teaching job. To teach is to play with dynamite. If you are called, it will be the grace of God that saves you. Secondly, and similar to this, if we know somebody that is teaching scripture, we need to watch and make sure that they are saying the right things. The potential blessings are great. The potential downfalls are the same.

Lastly, we will all have our children fall into circumstances where they are being damaged. The Bible is clear on how the good is corrupted by the bad. If you end up in a circumstance where your child is being influenced negatively, sell the house, sell the car, and do whatever you need to do to pull your child out of that bad circumstance.

We would not allow our children to play with a brood of vipers. We cannot let them hang out with those that would take them down the wrong path.

"Body" -> More Yogurt

2009-10-07T15:22:00.001-07:00

Well I'l take back some of my comments in the following post. Through the miracle of the internet, and Google book search, I found some more information on why you heat milk before making yogurt.

The above table is from "Manufacturing Yogurt andFermented Milks" by Ramesh C. Chandan via Google book search. Chandan tells of the different manufacturing techniques for milk products. The reason for heating yogurt above killing the bad bacteria is the denaturization of the Whey Milk Proteins. You want to get around 85-90% denatured for the best holding of the water. You don't want to totally denature the protein, therefore, it is a bit tricky nature.

The table isn't perfect from my application since I heat up the milk in a double boiler, and the milk will be denatured as it raises through the various temp bands, but from what I can see, I should be allow the milk to sit around 15 minutes at 90C. I normally don't hold it at this temp that long (or at least I don't think I do, so I'll need to try and estimate next time I make yogurt).

You may want to try different hold times and see if you get better or worse yogurt.

Another interesting thing about the book is that the optimum range of temperature for growing the bacteria is 42-43 centigrade (109 degrees Fahrenheit) at 4-6 hours.

"Body" -> The Bacteria In You, Yogurt

2009-08-13T10:53:00.000-07:00

On most Sunday mornings, before we go to Church as a family, you will find me up in the morning eating my breakfast and, at the same time, making yogurt.

Normally, when I tell most people that I make my own yogurt, they look amazed. They think that making yogurt is exceptionally hard. However, yogurt has been made for almost 5000 years. So, if it was that hard to make, the heritage wouldn't be so old.

And making your own home made yogurt can be strangely addictive. This week I went up to visit my family and my Dad in Seattle, Washington. Every summer, I try to send the kids up to spend time at my Father's rather enormous spread outside of Seattle. While this is a great family experience that the kids will remember forever, it is rather lonely for my wife and myself, who are basically two peas in a pod, and we hate to be separated for this length of time.

This year, after my wife had been in Seattle for about week and half, I snuck out of
work, and came up to see them. There was a lot of hugs and smooches, we talked about about what the kids had been doing, and the how we missed each other.

After about 15 minutes, my wife looked deeply in my eyes, and she said, "And man, I really miss your yogurt."

Love finds it form in many ways, and evidently one of the way it finds my wife is in my bacteria growing art of yogurt making.

To make yogurt, you need the right tools.

With the right tools yogurt making is exceptionally fun and easy to do. You need to follow a simple set of steps. In this blog post we are going to look at making yogurt with me in my kitchen on Sunday morning.

Probably the most important thing to making your yogurt is simply having a good double boiler.

As a matter of fact, I have a variety of tools that I am going to show you. However, there are really only two critical tools: A thermometer and a double boiler.

So, what do you want in a double boiler? Well the question is how much yogurt are you going to eat in a week? If you are used to having a small little cup of yogurt every day, then you can get by with a small Faberware double boiler from Walmart.

"Well, I don't eat that much yogurt, so this sounds fine," you might say.

Before, you decide to replicate your yogurt habits, you need to ask yourself "why do I eat this much yogurt?" Chances are that the cost of the yogurt is pretty expensive. If you eat a lot of yogurt, the cost would simply be a lot of money. However, once you understand how to make yogurt, your cost is going to be just a little more than the raw cost of the milk.

For my wife and I, it might not be uncommon to fill up a 30 ounce glass with yogurt and eat it as a meal replacement. If you do this once per day, you need a much bigger batch of yogurt.

So, if you look at the picture up above, you will see how we make yogurt. It is one gallon of milk per week. So, in this case, you want a double boiler that can handle this amount of yogurt with some room to spare. For my weekly dose of 1 gallon of yogurt, I bought a 7 quarter double boiler. If you use my tools for making yogurt, having a bigger container is key.

If you decide to get a bigger double boiler, it is important to understand that double boilers basically coming in two flavors. The smaller double boiler is generally two sauce pans that nestle together. This is good for making things like melted chocolate and small doses of yogurt.

For the gallon size batches you need the big double boilers are made for soup stock. I recommend a nice stainless steel one, and you can buy them from either Overstock.com or Amazon.com. My seven quarter double boiler was bought from Overstock for $47. (My only complaint is that the bottom has a ridge, which makes it harder to clean. However, $47 is hard to beat.)

Now, we need to look at the other tools of the trade. The picture shows a nice hand held food processor. This is actually an unbelievable helpful tool. The important thing about this food processor is the attachment at the end of the mixer bar. You might be able to see that it is basically a Milkshake attachment. This attachment mixes yogurt brilliantly and quickly, and is a snap to clean up.

I wish I knew where to tell you to buy it. The maker of my mixer is Hamilton-Beach, and I bought it at Walmart. I was so impressed with it, that I was going to buy a backup and I went back to Walmart. Why they still have the same hand held food processor, they removed the milkshake mixer in the kit of accessories with the mixer. I was very disappointed.

However, you can just mix with normal mixer, or even a spoon (which I think is suboptimal, but will work in a pinch.)

The last thing to get to make sure that you can make yogurt is a thermometer. This is another place to be a bit picky. Now, if you are in a pinch, you can go to Walmart and get a candy thermometer for a little over a buck. However, it is all the nicer to get a yogurt specific thermometer.

While you can Google "Yogurt Thermometer," I use the Yogourmet version that has made it through hundreds of batches of yogurt. It is nice that the clip stands makes the dial stand out nicely on top of the double boiler. It also has key temperature markings on it. While it got a lower rating at Amazon, the people that complained where obviously misusing it (they put it into a high temp oven or dropped it).

Okay, so now you should have your milk, your double boiler, and your thermometer. What you do is fill the bottom of the double boiler with about an inch or two of water. If you never used a double boiler, the idea of a double boiler is ingenious. By having a lower container with water, the water will keep the temperature in the upper container to less than the boiling point. This is because the upper container is only heated by the steam of the the lower container, and the steam temperature is about 212 degrees.

By heating the milk in a double boiler, the temperature of the milk is raised to around 190-200 degrees and no higher. This is exactly what you want to do with the milk for you yogurt. You want to bring it to around 190-200 degrees.

(Post edit: See next entry in my blog. After 20 years of making yogurt, I got interested in the denature process. For a good rule of thumb, you want to bring the temperature up to 90C or roughly 195 degree Fahrenheit and let it sit at this high temperature for around 5 minutes to get the milk denatured. You'll need to experiment with this, since the milk sees some denaturization as you raise the temperature.)

So the process is simple enough. Put in water into the base of the double boiler, put on the second pan of the double boiler, then pour in your milk, and wait for the temperature to rise.

So, why are raising the temperature of the milk so high?

There are two reasons that are often mentioned, and only one that really makes sense to me. The first reason that does make sense to me is that you need to raise the temperature of the milk up to the place that the molecules relax, which will produce a better texture of milk. In my mind, this does make sense as most milk is already pasteurized, which should have caused the desired effect to happen (if this really does happen.)

(Again, after reading "Manufacturing Yogurt and Fermented Milks" by Ramesh C. Chandan, the research is clear that you need to leave the temperature up higher to denature the protein. Pasteurization only increases the milk temperature up to 161F for 15-20 seconds (Wikipedia), but this clearly doesn't cause the range of denaturization necessary to get good yogurt.)

The second reason makes a lot more sense: You raise the temperature up to really kill any bacteria in the milk. Why do we kill all the bacteria? So we can introduce new bacteria. Our bacteria that makes yogurt.

So back to our yogurt. We have taken out double boiler, our milk, and a stove and we are raising our temperature up to 190 degrees Fahrenheit. However, once the milk gets up to around 140 degrees, I suggest you add something special. That something special is non-fat dried milk.

In our family, we make the non-fat version of yogurt. When you buy store bought non-fat yogurt, it is very firm. The firmness of the yogurt is easy to get used to. However, the reason that the yogurt is so firm is because the manufacturer of the yogurt has added thickeners. Now, we could add thickeners, but we are going to use the non-fat milk to both thicken and increase the nutritional value of the yogurt we are making.

Now mind you, yogurt made without thickener is perfectly eatable. As a matter of fact, when I travel to Asia-Pacific for business, they normally put me up in pretty nice hotels. In these hotels, they almost always have yogurt in a great big bowl. And this yogurt is almost always more of a running type. A lot of people like this thinner yogurt, so this is maybe something that you'll want to try.

However, let us go back to putting in non-fat dried milk. As I said, you want to let the milk warm up just a bit so that the milk melts easier. I add roughly 25-28 ounces of non-fat instant dried milk to my one gallon of yogurt. This adds calcium, a bit of calories, and ups the protein. It also makes the yogurt much thicker, and more like US commercial yogurt.

Once you've added your non-fat dried milk, you can take your hand held food processor (or spoon) and mix it in until it is nice and smooth. Continue to watch the temperature of your milk, and once it hits 190-195 degrees, you can pull it off the stove. (Since I do this on a weekly basis, I have this timed just right. Once I start the double boiler and pour in the milk, I can put in the dried milk around 20 minutes into the heating cycle, and in 35 minutes the temperature is up to the point where I pull it off the stove.)

By the way, the secret of a double boiler is making sure that the bottom pan never runs out of water.

It might not be obvious, but when the milk is very cold, the steam actually rises, hits the bottom of the milk pan, and cools back into water and drops back into the bottom pan. This means that in the earlier stages of the heating, you lose very little water in the bottom pan. However, as the milk heats up, less and less steam goes back into water since the milk doesn't cool it much. You need to watch out for this, because you can actually boil all the bottom water away. Since you are looking at the milk, you might forget that without water, the bottom pan is going to get red hot. So, make sure you have enough water in the bottom pan and that it doesn't go dry.)

Now that the milk is up to 190-195 degrees, you simply pull the milk off of the burner. The goal now is to have the milk cooler to 115 degrees. When it hits 115 degrees, you simply take a store bought container of yogurt and mix it in with the milk. This is probably the trick to making yogurt. You need to make sure that the milk gets to the right temperature. You heated the milk to kill at the bacteria that might be in it. You need to get the milk to the point where it won't kill the yogurt bacteria.

If you wait for the milk to cool naturally, you will be waiting a very long time. It may take 1-1.5 hours for the milk to get to the right temperature. This is a very, very long time. If I waited for the milk to cool gradually, I would never make it to church.

Some people simply throw ice into the milk to cool it off, but this is going to make the yogurt much more thin and closer to water. If you've taken my advise, the double boiler is going to help you again.

The secret is to fill the bottom container for the double boiler with ice. I fill it almost 1/2 to 3/4 full. Once you have the ice in the bottom, you place the top contain onto the bottom. Since there is only a thin layer of metal between the ice and the milk, the milk will cool very quickly if you stir the milk at all. I will us the hand held mixer to stir the milk, and you will actually be able to see the temperature needle move. After 5-10 minutes, you will start to reach the right temperature.

At this point, you need a commercial container of yogurt as a starter. You can also buy packages of dry starter, but the store bought stuff works great. For the most part, almost any yogurt will work. I've used all types, since most yogurts claim they have live cultures (bacteria). As a matter of fact, if it doesn't work, it says that your store bought yogurt was somehow damaged. You might want to never buy the same brand of yogurt, or change stores. Yogurt without the live cultures isn't yogurt.

However, there is a down side to this. If the temperature gets too cold, the yogurt bacteria don't like replicating. So if the temperature gets under 100 degrees, you probably won't have very good yogurt. You need to grow the yogurt cultures in the perfect range of temperatures, which means that you need to have it around 105-115 degrees.

There are different ways of introducing the cultures. Some people like to take out a bit of milk and mix it with the culture. However, I just take 3-4 big dollups of yogurt (some times an entire small container of Yoplait) and just dump it into the yogurt. Again, if you dump in the yogurt when the milk is too hot, it will kill the bacteria. If, on the other hand, the milk is pretty cool, and you dump in a bunch of cold yogurt, you will lower the temperature too much.

For my gallon of milk, if I dump in a whole container, I know that the milk will lower from 115 degrees down to about 110. This is the perfect temperature for the yogurt bacteria to grow.

Once I've dumped in the yogurt, I take the mixer and give the whole milk container a good mix. You want to thoroughly mix the two together and get the bacteria spread into every part of the milk.

If you remember, you have been mixing the milk a lot. You mixed in the non-fat dried milk, you mixed the milk to cool it down in the double boiler, and you mixed the milk to get the yogurt culture spread. After all this mixing, you will normally find a very thick layer of bubbles on top of the yogurt. This layer of bubbles does not impact the yogurt at all from a creation standpoint. The bubble normally stay around during the next stage, and it makes the top of the yogurt look a little funny.

So, I normally get a very large strainer and skim off the worse of the offending bubbles. The bubbles get throw down the sink, and it does waste a little bit of milk. However, the top of the yogurt, when it is down, does look nicer. Just think of this routine as a bit of art work on your good.

After you are done with this, we need to now grow the yogurt. You can do this in the top of the double boiler, but this is not the best of all containers. I suggest that you find plastic containers or glass jars to transfer the yogurt into. Depending on the the method you will "culture" the yogurt (or allow the bacteria to grow), you want to make sure that the you don't get the yogurt and milk mixture to get too cold. So, generally your transfer your new mixture and quickly pick a method to culture the yogurt.

So now you have everything set up and ready to grow to make your yogurt. Here is where the next decision comes in. How should you keep the temperature at just the right level. There are several ways of doing this.

1. You can use the natural temperature of your just finished product to complete the process.

2. You can pop it into a warm environment

3. You can get a specialize yogurt warmer

If we look at the first of these three options, I have used yogurts own heat to be very successful in making yogurt. To do this correctly, you need to remember that we start to introduce the yogurt into the milk at 115 degrees. If you push that up just a bit (to maybe a 120) you won't kill the yogurt, and after you've introduce the yogurt into the milk, the temperature is still going to be 115 degrees. If you then wrap up the yogurt in a blanket and put it into an insulated container, the yogurt own internal heat will stay in the range of the temperature needed for the bacteria to grow for the next 3-4 hours, and the yogurt will come out just fine.

The rule of thumb when you use this method is that you want to make sure that the yogurt starts a little on the high side for temperature. If you introduce the yogurt into the milk at 100 degrees,it will cool to such and extent that the yogurt bacteria won't grow and make the yogurt that you want.

Another variate on this idea is to pour the new mixture into a wide mouth thermos and put the top on. Since the thermos holds the heat, the temperature will stay in the right range to make yogurt. When I was first making yogurt 25 years ago, I used this method with an old wide mouth container for my very first batch. I had read about yogurt making, and I'll never forget opening the container and being floored that the milk had turned from a liquid into a solid. It was amazing to me that first time.

The second way is very popular if you have the right type of oven. Some gas ovens have a pilot light running all the time. In this case, you can check what the temperature of your oven is. Chances are that the temperature of the oven is around 100-120 degrees, thus making this the perfect place to put your yogurt. Millions of batches of yogurt have been made this way.

Some people will take an insulated chest (like in method one) and then put the yogurt in the chest with a low wattage light bulb inside. The heat from the light bulb makes the chest the perfect temperature. Now, you need to be very careful to pick a low wattage bulb, but this method has been used a lot.

The last method is the one that is clearly the best to me. I show pictures of the specialized yogurt warmer. The one that I use is the Yogourmet Yogurt Maker, which is actually made in Canada. This is just a great piece of equipment, and nothing to go wrong on it. If you have followed the post this far, you know that the milk and yogurt mixture is in the top of your double boiler. If you think about it, you may not want to store your yogurt in this container. So, you have the option to transfer it out of the double boiler into a glass or plastic container for the growth phase as I mentioned before.

The Yogourmet maker is made of two pieces, a container that holds two quarts of your mix, and a bottom heating container. For my yogurt, I transfer the milk and yogurt mixture into the yogurt container. I then put a little warm water into the bottom heating element. This is also like another double boiler. The water in the bottom unit completely surrounds the yogurt container. Since I make a gallon of yogurt every week, I have two Yogourmet makers.

After putting in the mixture, I put the Yogourmet off to the side. When the yogurt is culturing, it does not like to be disturbed.

After 4 hours, I pop off the top. If you tilt the container side to side, you can see the miraculous event that just took place. The liquid milk has turned to nice solid, a little bit like jello.

Now don't panic if the yogurt looks a little runny, because it will firm up once you put it into the refrigerator and it cools down. If the mixture doesn't look solid at all, then something went wrong. Here are the normal culprits:

1. You put in the starter culture or yogurt when the milk was too hot. You killed the bacteria and they couldn't grow.

2. You never got the mixture warm enough. You allowed the mixture to cool so much that the bacteria could never grow.

3. You haven't waited long enough. Give it 2-3 more hours.

4. The original yogurt had dead cultures.

By the way, you can allow the yogurt to grow too long. The bacteria basically chew up the milk sugar, and create a structure that is solid. If you allow these bacteria to continue to grow, they will eat all of the milk sugar. You can normally tell that you left it in a bit too long because when you pop off the top, you will see a lot of yellow liquid on top. This liquid is simply whey protein, and is good for you. (Don't throw it away.) Over growing the bacteria doesn't hurt anything other than the yogurt being a bit more sour. Some people may even like this version. This is the fun of making your own yogurt.

Finally, I normally make a smoothy with my homemade yougurt. Normally a bunch of yogurt mixed up with a 20% of Pomegranate or Blueberry juice. You can put sugar in it, but I love it with just yogurt and juice. It has a bit of a twang and it is good stuff.

Yogurt has been around for thousands of years. There are thought to be numerous health benefits to yogurt, which are still a bit debated, but I'll list them here.

*Yogurt may help with weight loss.

*Yogurt may reduce the rate of infection with colds and bacteria.

*Yogurt may help women lower their rates of vaginal infections

Less debated is the fact that milk is a pretty cheap way of getting calcium and protein into your diet. So, yogurt has the benefits of being based on milk.

However, yogurt is definitely the preferred source of milk products for those that are partially lacking lactase in their system. Generally, if you are from European genetic stock, you can digest milk sugar or lactose because you have lactase in your system. However, many people from other parts of the world (southern Europe, African, and Asia) have a large portion of their population unable to digest this milk sugar.

"Mind" -> Hurt

2009-04-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

Hurt. Is it a post grunge band? Is it emo tending? Is it over the top? Is it alternative metal?

What ever it is, I like it.

When you do music every once in a while, you listen to a lot of stuff and you think to yourself, "Man, that is a highly overprocessed sound. I bet that I could do something like that with enough money and enough producers behind me." However, Hurt is slightly different. Now, it is highly produced. However, I like this. Face it, I think the idea that you go once into the studio and record a album is bunk. If you don't put work into it, why do it at all. Good music should be hard.

However, when you hear a album that is self written and at a constantly good level,
you think to yourself, "Well I guess that I'll never make that cut."

Hurt is a lot like that. Once you start listening, you see a very high level of craftsmanship placed into every song. Okay, they sound a little bit like an amped up Nickleback, but there is a lot worse things to be compared to.

Hurt has never cracked the Billboard top 100, but they've come very close. Their discography consists of three basic albums. Vol I and Vol II are clearly the best place to start. Both of these albums hang closely together, and they could have been released as a double set. The last album is done after a split with Capitol Records. "Goodbye to the Machine" is a good effort, but they are at the cusp of a transition. They can do the same material as the first two albums forever, and never grow, or they can branch out a bit. They try the later on Goodbye, and I'm not sure if I like it yet. A few more listens to see if they are on the road to a new sound, or if this is the swan song.

Regardless, it's a good band to explore.

"Mind & Spirit" -> Eureka 7

2009-04-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'll admit it. I fell for Eureka 7, and it has become my favorite anime. Now, it is ended for me, which makes it all the better.

To understand why I like Eureka 7, and the fact that it ended, is to understand why anime stands up so well as an artistic medium.

A good anime does something that no American television can do. It is designed to have a birth and a death. Consider American television. In American TV, We start a story, but we have no idea if the series will be a hit or not. Therefore, the series starts off tentatively, only hoping to get the right ratings so that it can continue. If a show looks to be solid, the show may develop multistory arcs. Maybe these arcs will have a couple of twists, but the real conflicts will never be resolved.

In American television, the major couple will never get together (because it breaks the tension), or the major issue will never be resolved (for example the characters on "Lost" are rescued), or the major mystery is never fully solve (where is Battlestar Galactica's place to settle). You might say, "Yes, they do get resolved, on the very last show."

And that is the point of American television. We only end something when there is no other option.

And what drives this last show? Slipping ratings. The term "jumpinq the shark" is well known, as it describes a series desire to regain slipping ratings. Although it is well known, I'll relate the etymology of the phrase. In September of 1977, the television show "Happy Days" was starting to see it's ratings slips. Therefore, to get better ratings, the show started to create more and more outrageous situations. The pinnacle of this work is when the ubercool character Fonze wore a leather jacket and swim trunks to waterski jump an open pen holding a man eating shark. The best thing about this was that it was a cliffhanger.

The show had deteriorated to a shadow of itself.

Not only is the lack of knowing where the end lies before beginning a problem but the very medium of real actors makes yet another challenge.

The second problem is the power of the actor to hold the show captive. I really liked the show CSI because of the main character Grisham played by William Peterson. However, Peterson felt stiffled in his roll. So exited the main character. CSI lost a major part of itself due to an actor's desire, and not the writer's intent.

But in anime, the writer runs supreme. The characters are nothing more than drawings. Drawings cannot quit. They cannot strike for higher wages. And the beauty of Japanese anime is in the drawings. As I've scattered a few through this post, you should be able to see the creative flowing lines of a good anime.

Anime, for the most part, never has to jump the shark. When a main character is dropped, it is because story development needs it, not because the actor wanted something different.

Anime tells a story with a beginning and and end.

Often movies can do this also. They look to be self contained. However, movies are 2-3 hours at most at average. Maybe, if they know a movie will be driving a sequel, they will extend this to 2 movies, or at most, 8 with the Harry Potter movies. But even with the Harry Potter movies, they are spaced so far apart that we grow old with the wait.

Contrast this with Eureka 7, which has 50 episodes that are roughly 22 minutes long. So we get 20 hours of story telling. Yet this length show only goes 1 year in production. Having 20 hours, knowing that you must end the anime in 20 hours, gives you enough time to do character development. In 20 hours, you can make a real emotional impact.

So, why do I like E7, as it is often called by it's fans?

Superficially, it is just a dumb giant robot story. A little bit like the movie Transformers, only in a cartoon fashion. But this is just skin deep version of what we have. Of course, it does have the future version of surfing called "reffing." Reffing is a lot like surfing, only you do it on light.

Eureka 7 has the themes that we love. A 14 year boy, Renton Thurston, who is just turning into a man. Anime often picks on the 14-16 year old. Why? Because this is the age of change and discovery. This is the time when you make the decisions that will impact the rest of your life.

Into this life, he has his heroes landing literary in his front yard one day. The adventures that come from here are wild and varying. Some of the adventures pan out, some don't. However, all build toward an eventual climax.

You will see Renton struggle with a group of people know as the Gekko State. He begins to unstand that it is unclear if they are his friends or simply a bad influence. You will see him on both sides of a battle. Unclear about who is the right people to side with. For those of us with a Christian faith, it beckons to choices that we make in our own life. "Choose this day who you will serve," is a famous phrase from the Bible.

Into this frame work, we also find our young man captivated with a young girl called Eureka. For me, on a personal level, this is a touching issue. In the anime, we believe that young Renton has never been kissed, and to see him struggle with an admiration of a young woman reminds me of my own relationship with my wife. Is Renton only have a young infatuation, or is there something more than can grow here?

For me, while I had a couple of girl friends before my wife, my wife had basically none. From my perspective, not having anybody else in your life before your mate brings a clarity and deepness to your relationship. For all practical purposes, I have only loved one woman in my life. My wife has clearly only loved one man. And I love her more today than when I first met her. The question for me, in the entire series, is if this young man and young woman would find each other.

But if the story merely stopped there it would be pleasant. However, the story goes well beyond that and talks about family, war, sacrifice, and the acceptance of others. It has the wild villains and the courageous heroes, that often have problems of their own. While the large messages are strongly there, it is often the littlest things that grab me. In the course of the story, the young girl is involved in something that gives her scars on her face. When it comes to later section of the story, she is offered a miraculous chance of having those scars removed. Without a hesitation, she smiles and declines. See the scars are there to remind her of what she went through. To others, they are a deformation of a beautiful face. To her, they are a diary of past events.

We find through this anime that family can be blood, and blood can be family. However, we also find out that family can be friends and it can be adoption. Just because you are an orphan, does not mean that there is no place for you.

One of the interesting twists in the story is uncovered very early in the series, when young Renton gets to see Eureka with her crew mates. It is a shock to him to see three very young children run up to meet Eureka, and they call her "Mother." It is told quickly in the series that these are not her real children. However, how she came to adopt them is a twist that you'll remember for your life time, and I won't spoil it here.

The artwork is wonderful, with a smooth flowing anime style that is such a strong mark of the Bones studio. The drawings seem both new and old at the same time. It carries much of the traditional anime drawing style but with a coloring that seem new.

Top this off with an absolutely superb OST (Original Sound Track) by Sato Naoki, along with a single from Supercar, you have a emotional impact that will live with your long after the anime is done. If you cannot be touched by "Sorrow" by Sato Naoki, you cannot be touched.

As I finished the series, I read other people's interpretation of the events. One common theme was "it over, and I'm bummed." People got so involved in the journey that they didn't want it to end. But that is the point. The reason that we look back on the anime so fondly is that it did end.

And the ending made the journey all the sweeter.

For those of us that understand that our journey will end in not the distant future, we also look fondly at this journey we are on. Our ending will make our journey all the sweeter, also.

"Spirit" -> The Analogous Road

2009-04-12T12:44:00.000-07:00

I had recently run into a spate of cartoons that mocked the belief in a personal God. Most of these cartoons mock the Christians strong attachment to the Bible. And, there is no doubt why doubters would go for the Bible angle.

The backbone of the classic Protestant Christian faith is one of Sola Scriptura. It is also here that most people that were "raised in a Christian home" falls away from their faith. They don't first stop believing in Jesus. They first stop believing in the Scriptures.

I have heard and read countless number of accounts that once a person reads the scriptures with an open mind, all the contradictions in the scripture come to a head, and it causes them to abandon their faith.

"After all, the Bible is the Word Of God, and if it is the Word of God, it has to be perfect. Yet the Bible is full of errors, therefore, the Christian faith cannot be right."

We Christian often pull this problem right onto ourselves. I have gone to many a sermon where the pastor holds up his Bible and says, "I am preaching the Word of God."

However, the Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible points to the word of God. The Bible is the scriptures. The Scriptures (or the Holy Writ) explains the nature of God and points us to God.

The Bible is a sign. The Bible is not a destination. I wish that we Christians would redouble our efforts to make sure that the two things are separated: The Word Of God and The Scriptures. The scriptures is what we classically call the Bible. The Scriptures tell us enough about the Word of God so that we can get to the Word of God. There is only one Word of God, the Logos, or better known to the English speaking tribe as Jesus.

We we are supposed to worship the Logos. Yet, we often worship the Bible, and woe to us for doing such an action. Now, when you are reading this, you probably think that I'm being a bit harsh. Am I just thinly dividing a thin line? How can we study the Scriptures and not know Jesus.

Let's see what the Lord says:

John 5:38-40 (New International Version)

38...nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39 You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Tough to make it any more clear. The only reason to study the scripture is to get a better feeling of what the Christ is like. Scripture does not save. It only points to salvation.

The scripture translated, copied and handed down through the ages does not glow. It will have questions about a sentence there and a count of people there. However, if you read the book and look for a high degree of integrity, you will find it. It is like no other book. It is more than sufficient to do what is supposed to do: Lead you to salvation.

The scriptures were laid down like a highway from long ago. If we were exploring together, and we found this highway that had been built and abandoned, but was in very good shape, we could quickly identify it as something that had been done by a grand engineer. As we might take our jeep on this highway, it would allow us to drive quickly efficiently to where we wanted to go. We would recognize that somebody, somewhere had spent many hours designing and constructing this road. By studying the road, we would get to know the designer. More than this, once we got onto the road, we would be able to go places quickly.

However, the non-Christian sees our highway that we use so often, and they call the designer into doubt. "Look at mile market 23," they will say. "At mile marker 23, it is missing bumper turtles. If this road was truly made by the grand engineer, then it wouldn't be missing any bumper turtles." They could spend all day showing you the little things that were wrong with the road. They could show you all the "conflicting errors" in the traffic flow.

Well who did make the highway (or Bible). They would explain to you that it popped out trails that were made by the local towns people. That these roads just sort of grew over time. For the Old Road, they would say that there were four main designers: JEPD. They look at the highway very carefully, and they believe that they can find different color stones in the concrete.

However, a view of comparative literature just makes this laughable. To make the Bible contradict science, the atheist has to strain at the smallest knit. Mind you, there are miracles, but miracles are not logical inconsistency or obvious errors.

"Well the Bible says the Earth was made in 7 days," they'll say.

No, this is clearly a reference to seven eras.

"Well the Bible talks about the four corners of the earth," they'll say.

No, this is clearly poetic license.

Other than the story of the world being flooded, which is highly problematic (and obviously sent to test our faith) the path to reconcile science and scriptures is trivial. If I ever leave the Christian faith, it'll be of the lack of evidence of a global flood. However, the rest of the scriptures are so friendly to science that I overlook one area to have access to the others.

I hope someday I am surprised with clear geographical evidence for the flood.

Yet, this is not where the non-believer attacks. Instead, they try and say that all of the scriptures have deep issues. A matter of fact, they might even say that they can see the individuals that fabricated the Bible. "Everywhere a stone changes colors, we believe that we have a new writer," they announce. There are four major types of stones, thus four major creators of the highway.

In this analogy, the Bible is like that Highway. Most of us never got to see the structure laid down. We are viewing the Bible or the highway after many years of use. Certain parts of the scriptural highway may have been patched by man. However, if you stand back and look at the Highway, there is no doubt that whole of the Bible hangs together. Sure, are there small gaps? Are there some difficult scriptures. Sure, but there is no doubt that those that use the Highway get directly to where they want to go.

The belief of inerrancy applies to this. To be an inerrantist, like myself, you believe that the highway was laided down by many different authors over many years. Each section of highway is complete in itself. Now, each section may be of its own flavor and texture, but each small section of road is laid end to end perfectly. Even though many people did different parts of the road, each of them laid down a perfect section.

Now, from the day that the road was constructed, perhaps a couple of flaws or inconsistancies have appeared. However, there is no doubt to what the road does or where it is going. The roads were perfect as laid down, and they vary little to none from the original.

"Mind" -> Visual Basic For Excel

2009-04-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

The age old fantasy for everybody is to have a personal butler to help oneself around the house.

In the very popular movie "Batman Begin," Alfred is the rock solid helper that assists the Batman in the times of greatness need. Not only that, but he is also taking care of the menial duties of the house so that Bruce Wayne can spend his time on better things, like saving the city from the clutches of the evil villains that beset it.

So, what does this have to do with Excel?

Chances are if you are in business and you do any work, you will be using Excel for something. It may be doing the very simple to the very complex, but you will be using it for something. Now, if you are using it on a regular basis, chance are that there is something that you do with it on either a weekly or a daily basis. Here is where the butler idea comes in. It is exceptionally easy to set up the ability for that spreadsheet to do your repetitious tasks automatically, like a personal butler for your spreadsheet.

However, you will need to use some called "Visual Basic For Applications" or VBA. I was reading an excellent blog by Jorge Camoes, who is a quant head at a company and spends a lot of time blogging on charts, and very much enjoyed his casual observation:

In an informal survey among friends and colleagues (all of them Excel users), I’ve discovered that 55% doesn’t know what VBA is, 40% knows but doesn’t want to use it, 4% uses recorded macros from time to time and 1% actually edits the recorded macros to add some sort of functionality (well, this happens to be me…).

"Oh, no," you might say. "This sounds complicated. You just told me that 40% of people don't even know what this thing is. Why should I be interested?"

Well, the first step is just you out of the class that has never heard of have heard of Visual Basic For Applications (VBA). VBA is the backend (or the device) that allows you to record macros in Excel. So, congratulations, you are now more informed than 55% of the population.

Let's talk a bit about macros. Macros used to be very, very difficult. Now, they are very, very easy.

Macros are the short way of saying macroinstruction. Since I'm an aging computer geek, I want to take you back to the early days of computing to the old "Terminate and Stay Resident" (or TSR) programs. Borland International stole this idea from a start-up and created "Superkey."

If you think about it, there were no mice on the early computers. (I know that this boggles the mind.) The way that you interacted with computer was the "Command Line Interface" or CLI. The amout of clicks that you can do from the keyboard if you are a very fast typist is 480 per minute. (think 80 words per minute at an average length of 5 letters per word and one space.) While this is extremely fast for a typist, this is very slow for a computer.

If you had a series of keystrokes that happened over and over again, you could simply capture them and replay them. The computer doesn't know if it is a human being or a program replaying the key.

The application providers realized that this really wasn't worth a stand alone program, and they started to integrate these key recorders into the applications that they made. This is when I was introduced to macros, through the DOS environment. However, the macro environment goes back earlier than this.

When I got my second degree is when I discovered Unix. Unix has two very popular editors vi and Emacs. What is an editor? Think of it as a limited word processor made specifically to write scripts or computer language type instructions. Of these two programs, Emacs is of special interest. First off, I prefered it to vi, but even more important for our story: it stands for Editing MACros. See the real computer geeks were on the Unix side, and they were working on things far before it ever came to the DOS (and later Windows) world.

I sold computer in the early days of the personal computer revolution, and when Lotus 1-2-3 2.0 came in, it had the ability to use macros. People went crazy building all types of unique additions to Lotus using the ability to replicate end user keystrokes.

The successor to the general purpose keyboard macros programs can still be found today. The most widely used free software is Autohotkey. The program is not what I call as directly friendly, as you need some ability to program. However, I recently decided that I needed to trim the first 30 seconds of of 100 podcasts. I had a program that would trim one, but it had no ability to do multiple files. So, I set up an autohotkey script to act as if it was me. It opens the files in my trimming program. It trims the file. I copies the file into a "done" folder, and then it opens the next file. You can watch it operated as it does things on my screen. It is almost spooky.

Back on subject, applications started the ability to bring in keystrokes into the programs. In a flash of brilliance (and it revolutionize the app industry) Microsoft determined that it could capture those keystrokes and convert them into a series of programming steps.

Let's use an example. Let's say that you want to save a spreadsheet. You know that the keyboard short cut is "Alt-S" and typing in "temp" and hitting enter.

The old keyboard macro would have captured:

1. Alt key down (Make code in keyboard talk)
2. s key down (Make)
3. Alt Up (Break code in keyboard talk)
4. s Up (Break)
5. t (Up and Down)
6. e (etc)
7. m
8. p
9. Enter

What Microsoft does is change this automatically to a programming language call Visual Basic. Once it records your keystrokes, it say that you did the following command:

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:="c:\temp.xls"

Now, programming is always a bit hard to learn, but if you can learn a few rules (about 30-40 hours worth of study), but once you learn the syntax, you can open up a window and say, "I want to take the data from sheet 5 in my spread sheet. Then I'll make a Pivot table out of it. Then I'll make a button to come up to the various parts that I want to see. Then I'll save the document."

The trick part of working with VBA the first time is understanding how to refer to things and all the command to do something. Like most modern programming languages, the language has a lot object orientation in it. This make is simple to program once you understand how it thinks.

We can understand some of this by simply looking at the line of code above. What did we want to do? We wanted to save a worksheet (file), which is obvious and object. In VBA, the currently opened spreadsheet is called ActiveWorkbook. This is always an object. This object can do various actions (think verbs). The object can open. The object can close. In our case, the object will "save as". These actions are called "methods" rather than actions. If you want a object to do a method, you list the object, then you tack on the method with a period. Thus this is why we have

Activeworkbook.SaveAs (or object.method)

We are obvious lacking a file name, and if you put in a space and a "filename:=", it knows to assign the file name whatever you put behind the := in the syntax.

The other tricky thing is that most objects have properties. For example, a Pivottable has pull down menus for setting data that you want to see. In this case, you need to tell the program to find the workbook, then find a particular sheet in the workbook, then find a particular pivottable, then find the attribute or property of one of the items on the pivottable. While this sound very complicated, you basically just type down what we said.

ActiveWorkbook for the workbook
Sheets("MainPage") for the sheets inside of the workbook, and you named the sheet
Pivottables("Pivottable1")
PivotFields("MyData")
PivotItem

This is listed out as

ActivewWorkbook.Sheets("MainPage").Pivottable("Pivottable1").PivotFields("MyData").PivottableItemm

In this case, this pull down menu (PivotItems) has several things like "Sales in Feb" and "Sales In March". You can then say "please set this item to always come up "Sales in March".

However, in most cases, you don't type this in. You record yourself doing the action in Excel, then after you are done recording, you look at the commands. Simply selecting the pull down menu with record a line like the above one. While a bit complicated at first, with some training you can quickly see what it is doing. Then you can make changes to the code to modify the actions.

I know that this has been a short glimpse into VBA, but I want to give you a bit of the history and what it is doing as an overview. As stated before, it'll take 30-40 hours to learn enough to start writing a bit of code to automatically do stuff, but once you have this tool, you'll be many more times productive.

"Mind" -> Pivot Charts

2009-03-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

Our guest for today is Hans Moravec. Now if you are familir with robots, you have probably heard of Moravec. We are not going to talk about robots, but we are going to use an idea of Moravec. We are going to use his paradox.

What is Moravec's paradox? The paradox, as Hans Moravec coined it, is the basic idea that conscious thought in doing things like playing checkers requires very little computing power.

Yet, what we consider as simple (walking for instance) has not been adequately followed by even the most sophisticated supercomputer.

Let's look at this a bit more. For instance, if you've ever played chess with a computer, you know exactly what I am talking about. Very early in computers, PCs were able to play a decent game of chess. Even my Palm Pilot, which is a very early PDA, plays chess pretty well. On the other hand, if you try and get a computer to drive a car, it is massive challenge that we have yet to master. We simply don't know how to get a computer to visually take in information and turn it into decision making. There is something in the human brain that is more powerful than any supercomputer, and allows us to deal with visual information and turn it into actionable items.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about pivot tables. Pivot tables as I've already talked about are truly magical instruments to help you analyze data. But as we've just talked about, but you can easy out do a super computer, and this is based around utilizing your visual center.

The truth is the vast majority of our brain is set up to be able to process and use of visual information. If you took all the data input that you can get through your skin, your hearing, your olfactory glands and every other part of your system, you would find out that the data flowing into your brain in any one instance is roughly somewhere between 500 Mb per second to 1 Gb.

Almost 50% of that input is based on visual input.

So let's talk about this just a bit more, if 50% of the input coming into your brain is visual information, that means that your brain needs to process visual information somewhere between 250 Mb per second to 500 Mb per sec. This is no menial task. If you want to catch a ball, you brain sees it, processes it, and then it can do things like fine motor skill so that you can catch the ball.

Processing data at this rate is really amazing. As a matter of fact, for many many years inside of the high tech industry we survive on 10 Mb ethernet or something 50 times slower than the visual bandwidth going into your brain. Even today, you may know that 100 Mb per second takes a relatively sophisticated router systems. It is only with the advent of GigE that we are starting to get data rates that allow us to stream internet information at the same rate that your great, great, great grandfather could process visual information about a farm animal.

So we want to use this supercomputer to solve problems, find anomalous data, or figure out overreaching trends. This is as easy as graphing out information. You may not be able to take the integral of a sloping line, but you can say "hey that curve looks wacky!"

The thing that you need to remember, a good chart will allow you to find something in 30 seconds that would take you an hour's worth of analyzing a number table. If you want to find something out, make sure to chart out.

This is the fastest easiest way of tapping into your hidden talent. You need to tap into your visual supercomputer.

The question then becomes is "Why don't we use more charts in our data analysis?"

The answer is because they are really hard to make. Even if you use a tool like a spreadsheet which is exceptionally useful in making charts easier to get to, it still takes a considerable amount of effort to quickly get out a series of charts using data.

Therefore we turn our attention to one of the most underutilized parts of spreadsheets today, this is called the pivot chart. A pivot chart allows to make different charts almost instantaneously once you have set it up correctly.

The big problem is the initial set up. Unfortunately, if you think that Pivot Tables are a bit hard "to get" then you will find out that Pivot Charts are even more hard "to get."

But when you get a hang of using them, they will literally become the best instrument at your disposal to be able to make convincing arguments and find trends. They will help you be successful. The good thing is that once you "get" a Pivot table or a Pivot chart, they will become second nature. Once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget. Once you get a pivot chart and table, it'll stay will you for life.

So let us go back to the post that we did on pivot tables. If you remember we were comparing three salespeople the way that they were selling hard disk drives over a series of months and a series of different hard disk drives. If somebody handed you this pivot table and you had spent a little time figuring out how to use a pivot table, it would become one of the most useful items in your arsenal. However now we are going to take the next step.

To create a pivot chart the first thing you need to have is a pivot table. I am going to be a little unfair because I have not told you yet how to create a pivot table. We'll get to that in a later post. What I want to show you now is the power of the pivot table.

So how do you create a pivot chart?

If you look at the second picture in this post above, you will see that I have placed my mouse cursor over the current pivot chart. You can then right click on the pivot chart, and an option to create a pivot chart will come up on the context menu. Alternatively, you can go to the Insert -> Chart menu. Excel knows that you can only create a pivot chart from a pivot table. Bingo. You have just created a Pivot chart.

(By the way, these charts were made with Excel 2003. Now, I have Excel 2007. Unfortunately, Excel 2007 is probably the worst upgrade made by man in the pivot table section. They took what was a beautiful analytical tool and removed a couple very important buttons off of the interface. If you are stuck with Excel 2007, don't worry you can still do everything they used to be able to do in the old version, it just does a little bit more complicated. However, it is things like this that makes me wonder how Microsoft stays in business.)

Now what do we get once we hit that magical pivot chart button? The answer? We initially get a chart that looks like an absolute mess. This is shown directly above.

This is where I noticed most people stop trying to work with a pivot chart.

See the funny thing is that hitting the button to make a pivot chart doesn't do the same things as when you make a normal chart. Most people have made a normal Excel chart. Every time that they've push the button to turn a table into a chart, Excel auto magically makes a very nice looking chart. However here for the first time, they hit the charts button and suddenly they simply get a mess.

I am now going to give you the secret of the pivot chart. By and large I've never seen this described very well, and yet it is incredibly simple. To turn this chart into something that makes sense, you simply drag what ever you are using for the x-axis down underneath the x-axis.

In our case we want to grab the little gray box that says months, and we want to drag this little gray box down to the bottom of the screen until a little blue box pops up which is the landing area for the months. We then want to take the other boxes on the chart and drag them up to the top of the chart and again that you will see a little blue box appears that will serve as the landing area for these gray boxes that you drank up to the top. In our case, we are going to drag the salesman box up to the top and we are going to drag the RPM box up to the top.

You now have a chart that looks like any normal bar chart that you could make from any normal source of information. However the secret is that you can instantaneously create new charts I simply using the pulldown menus.

Unfortunately I don't have enough time in the short blog post to take you through all of the different options. Ignoring that we don't have enough time, the good thing is now you have a chart that looks like a normal chart. The rest becomes very very simple. As I described if you want to see a chart of any individual salesperson, all you need to do is hit the little arrow on the pulldown. This will allow you to see an individual chart of any one of the three different salespeople. If you want to see a chart of the various RPM sales or you need to do is use the pull-down menu.

So suddenly you can start making all types of charts with one or two different mouse clicks. Once you start creating new charts, you will start to notice if data looks like bad data. You will also notice trends that would otherwise be unnoticeable.

We use our eyes to keep ourselves from walking into walls and hurting ourselves. A good pivot chart uses your eyes to keep you from making mistakes.

Use a chart to discover the truth.

And the best way to make a chart is through the pivot process.

Getting Things Done: The Filing Cabinets

2009-01-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

Amazingly enough, I have not done a post on David Allen's Getting Things Done. Why is this so amazing? Because I am a major fan of Getting Things Done.

What is "Getting Things Done?" Well first off let me call it by the normal short hand: GTD. The father of the GTD system is a person called David Allen. GTD is a system for productivity. But it is also a system of stress relief.

Now I'm sure everybody would like to be less stressful.

When we first take a look at stress, the sources of our stress are not all that obvious. The obvious stuff that makes a stressed is the fact that we have so much to do. There are bills to pay. There is work to be done. It seems like work just builds up to beyond our ability to address it.

So the simple answer to this, is to say "Well I need less things to do." Asking for less things to do, however, is simply not realistic. No matter who are you, in today's environment, you are going to have too much to do. So the real challenge is how do we react to all of stuff that we need to do. David suggests a series of ideas and thoughts and processes that allow us to deal better with all the stuff that we have in our in-basket of life.

In future posts I'll try to look more at the substance of the "Getting Things Done," but for right now I want to give a suggestion just about one thing: FILING YOUR STACKS.

How much time per year do you spend looking for stuff? In reality we are just swimming in stuff. We have so much stuff that we don't even know what to do with it. I have heard that the average worker spends 150 hours per year looking for stuff. This is four weeks of working. I believe that it is true. Losing stuff is super frustrating.

So if you're like me you really have two different things that you end up doing.

Number one: you can simply throw stuff away.

Number two: you can take all your stuff and stack it or throw it into a drawer.

Now what is the problem with either one of these things. If you are throwing stuff away it is wasteful. If you are like me and was raised in a household where both of my parents came through the Great Depression, you'd simply don't throw stuff away. You save stuff. Therefore you have stacks and stacks and stacks of stuff.

The problem with having this is you may have stuff inside of baskets, inside of drawers, inside of places that you don't have the foggiest idea where the actual thing that you are looking for is. So the day that you want to use a screw, or find that clamp, or install that software you bought six months ago, you can't figure out for the life of you, what you did with that thing.

We were recently discussing this at work. I asked one of the people who used to work for me, "Let's say that you buy a switch because you think that you're going to need it someday." I then asked him "where are you going to put that switch?" He answered me "I'd probably throw it in a drawer somewhere." I then asked him would you be able to find that switch when you need it?

"Not a chance," he answered. "I would probably go off to Home Depot and buy another one."

So the answer is the following: you by filing cabinets. Now you don't by filing cabinets to store paper. You buy filing cabinets to store your little items that would otherwise get lost. So let's go back to the switch that we were talking about.

In the David Allen scenario, you would take out a manila folder. You would label that manila folder. You would then take that manila folder and put it into your filing cabinet. You would label that manila folder as "switch," and you would file it.

Even small things should be filed. If you had one screw that you knew that you were going to need later, and it took up a very very small space, you would do the above. Now this may seem wasteful, but you need to think yourself how many times have I looked for something. In this scenario you are going to be able to find.

Now you may ask "how will I know where exactly the screw is in the filing cabinet?" The answer is pretty simple. You simply look into the three or four filing selections that you knew that you may put it under. Really there are only very few ways of filing something. Maybe the screw is under "screw." Maybe this screw is under "desktop." Maybe this screw is under "china hutch." The good thing about this is you only need to look three or four different places before you find it inside your filing system. It's not like you're trying to dig around a bunch of empty baskets or pins or drawers or plastic bags.

So does the system work? It works pretty well. The biggest issue that I have, is a lack of space. So over break I started to look at Craigslist. The best thing about Craigslist is if you look hard enough you should be able to find filing cabinets for somewhere between $25-$50. Three or four of these will go a long way toward eliminating all of the stuff which has invaded your life.

If you are like me, and if you have four kids and home schooling life, you're probably going to need a few more filing cabinets. In our household we have something like 16 of them. They are scattered around the house and in the garage. Is this too many, but in reality I probably could use about twice as many.

Even with the filing cabinets that we have, as can be seen here, there is still a lot of stuff that gets left out. However having something done rather than nothing done is a lot better than having nothing to. While we may not have everything in its perfect place, it is the mental relief to have a lot of stuff in its place. The investment is well worth it.

So here, for your viewing pleasure, is our little homeschooling schoolroom. as you can see in this photograph, we have quite a few filing cabinets where we can put stuff. On top of the filing cabinets we have steel shelves that allows us to put even more stuff on top of them. This is high density storage. It allows us to store an awful lot of stuff in a very very small space.

While our filing system is not perfect, it is a whole better, then stacking stuff on top of each other into boxes and into corners.

If this thought has been interesting at all, you are now enjoying the idea of life hacking. What is "life hacking?" you may ask. Life hacking is the idea that there are lots of little tricks that will allow you to organize your life better, allow you to get more stuff done, and have less stress.

A great place to start is to go to www.lifehacker.com which is one of the more popular websites that discusses "Getting Things Done" type of systems.

Welcome to the New World.

"Mind" -> Who Killed Amanda Palmer

2008-12-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

Amanda Palmer has a little bit of a stomach, and when her record company recently suggested that her video needed to be retouched to present a more attractive body, she told them to go away (in very colorful terms). She said her record company doesn't understand her listeners. This must be true, as her legions of fans have been taking pictures of their bellies and putting them on the internet in protest of her record company.

Her image, and her music, and her fans are not about being perfect.

Every once in a while I do an album review on this site. They are far and few in between because music is covered so much in the press today. What am I going to say that somebody else isn't saying better?

However, "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" is so compelling, I'll throw another log onto the fire. With a title that is a parody of the question asked in the seminal TV show "Twin Peaks," she has create a musically uplifting but lyrically disturbing album.

The few friends and family that read this blog realize that I am a strong Christian, but I believe that all "good" art is common grace. Common grace is that goodness that God gives to the just and the unjust. And Amanda, even with all of her clearly non-Christian stands, is blessed with a lot of common grace.

The music on "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" has just a hint of Ben Folds. This is no doubt tied to the fact that Ben Folds both produced and plays on the album. It was recorded at his studios in Nashville. Ben had called the Dresden Dolls two years ago and asked them to open for him. If you listen very long, you will hear that most of the album is heavily underpinned by piano. Amanda is a piano player, and her songs come out of this instrument. While she may struggle a bit on the vocals, and her piano playing is nothing to write home about, the overall album does have excellent production values.

She first gained prominence with the musical dual "The Dresden Dolls," which was born out of the Boston art scene. If you see interviews with Amanda, you will see that she is an artist first then she is a musician second. For those that think this is backward, let's remember that one of the most constructive and impactful bands of the 80's was the Talking Heads. The heads, lead by David Byrne, was nothing more that art students. Unfortunately, in this fractured culture today, we have little hope that Amanda can drive the same impact as The Talking Heads, which headed a rebellion against the 80's glitz. However, this is not to say that she is not able to impact your perceptions in a similar fashion if you find her on your playlist.

The other half of the Dresden Dolls, Brian Viglione, has decided not to do this album with Amanda, or perhaps Amanda just wanted to be by herself. Regardless, while they did some of the songs together before the album, the album is all Amanda. The roots of the music are clearly in the same vein as the original group, which is no surprise since Amanda was the main song writer.

So, what is the music? The Desden Dolls describe their music as Brechtian punk cabaret. This is a self title in an attempt to be labeled as anything but Goth. However, the music really does have a strong flavor of cabaret type music with a few ballads thrown in. Extremely strong melodic hooks with very strong lyrics that generally have about as much story line as an Coldplay (ie no story), but instead of Coldplay's lack of real poetry, Amanda strikes you straight to the core. Much as in Bruce Cockburn, she can go completely overboard. However, in the midst of her struggles, her lyrics can strike intrinsically gripping thoughts.

If you want to start on Amanda, I suggest Leeds United. This features the original video where Amanda's stomach became the subject of the stomach debate.

Her voice is horse. She struggles a bit with intonation. However, she is brilliant. Listen to the refrain:

but who needs love when there’s law & order
and who needs love when there’s southern comfort
and who needs love
when the sandwiches are wicked and they know you at the mac store

Now the interesting thing about these 12 or so tracks on the album is that many of them have a video made for them. The highest production values is the video above "Leeds United," but if you go to Youtube, you will see that she made video for many of them, and while they are not slick or expensive, each one caries a gripping image to drive them.

The first track on the album is show cased in a simple video for the song called Astronaut (A Short History Of Nearly Nothing).

Somewhat inspired by the Columbia disaster, how can we not hate and love these lyrics.

YES you are, my love, the astronaut
Crashing in the name of science
Just my luck they sent your upper half
It's a very nice reminder
It's a very nice reminder

In this short post, I hope I've gotten you hooked just a bit on Amanda. One of the better people to explore as you do your musical wanderings.

All in all. A very good album.

4 out of 5 stars.

"Mind" -> Pivot The Data

2008-11-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

My son is thinking about becoming an engineer when he grows up. At a home school assembly, he is supposed to answer some questions about his career choice. My wife and he thought I would be a good resource for information, and they were asking me what does an engineer do. Although I am in marketing today, I started off as an engineer.

One of the things that I told my son is that the hallmark of an engineer is "somebody that wants to solve problems." I find this engineering desire used in my marketing job every day, and because of this desire, I am a better marketeer.

So, if you want to find a solution to a problem, first you need to understand what is the root of the problem, and as a firm believer in "The Fifth Discipline," I know that getting to the root of the problem is not simple. There is only one way to get root cause: look at the data.

Now this sounds so very, very obvious, but I find on a consistent basis that most people don't analyze the data that they get. As a matter of fact, they often don't even use the tools that are at their disposal. So, I am immediately going to tell you that you have one fantastic tool in solving problems if you do anything with spreadsheets.

A Pivot Table.

If you don't use pivot tables, you may have your bachelor degree in solving problems, but you need to have a Master's degree or a Ph.D. in solving problems to be really successful. As a matter of fact, I work with finance people and marketing people all day, and it constantly surprises me how most people may have some familiarity with a spreadsheet, but have little to no background with Pivot Tables. The analogy is using a spreadsheet without a pivot table to analyze data is a bit like only driving your car in first gear. Your car has five gears for a reason. To have a vehicle that goes fast, you need to use all of them.

I think the biggest problem with pivot tables is that until you see them in action with somebody for a while, they aren't really clear what they are. For example, look at the description of a pivot table at Wikipedia: "A pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets...."

Wow, that's helpful...NOT!

The best way of thinking about a Pivot table is that it is a spreadsheet that has many different spreadsheets "hidden" inside, and you can almost instantly pull them out. There are two things you need to know about pivot tables:

1. How to use them
2. How to make them

On this first post, we are going to start off on "how to use them." We'll save the creation for later.

Therefore, I am going to assume that for this first step you are just going to want to become the user of a pivot table that I made for you. Since I work in the hard drive industry, I am going to give you an example from my industry, although the data is all made up.

If you are selling hard drives, you will probably track several things:

a. What is the size of the hard drive that you are selling
b. What is the RPM of the hard drive that you are selling
c. Who sold the hard drive?
d. How many sales of the hard drives have been happening every month.

Now, let's say your hard drive boss comes to you, and he says, "Hey, how have the sales of the 5400 RPM drives doing versus the 7200 RPM drives? You look in your email and you see that I have sent you a pivot table in a spreadsheet.In this case the answer is very simple. Because when you opened up the spread sheet you have the answer right before your eyes.

You say to your supervisor, "Well I have the data right here. In January and February, the 5400 RPM models sold more than the 5400 RPM models. However, in March the 7200 sold better than 5400 RPM models."

Your boss thinks for a second, and he says "well, that is interesting, but I'm curious, how are the sales team doing sell hard drives?"

Now, normally if you wanted this answer you would have to go back to another spreadsheet and pick up all the names of the sales people and see how they have been selling. However, you have a pivot table. This is where the secret sauce comes in.

Before, we get to the next step, we need to ask ourselves, "just what exactly is a spreadsheet?" The answer maybe is not exactly as simple as you might think when I tell you that you can't describe a spreadsheet as a spreadsheet.

In reality, a spreadsheet is simply a list of something. In our case, the question are being asked about the number of hard drives sold. This is the most important point because this defines the characteristic of the pivot table. Either explicitly or intuitively, you need to understand that they only reason that your boss is talking to you is about the number of hard drives sold. In the future, he may not be interested in the number of hard drives. He might be interested in the selling price of each hard driver. He may be interested in the profit of each hard drive. However, in this case, he is interested in the volume of sales for each hard drive.

This is very important because I only gave you a pivot on the quantity sold. Therefore, you know that every cell that is between the "month's column" and the "RPM row" is going to be a quantity of HDD sold. You'll need to remember this, because we always need to be able to leave the data in the pivot. (If this is confusing, just wait a minute and keep reading.)

Now, if you can get the next part of the demonstration, you are about 90% over the most difficult part of understanding what a pivot table is. In the illustration to the left, I have identified three areas of the pivot table.

The area in the upper left hand corner is the "holding pen" for the rows in the data. I have identified this with a red line. If you want to put certain types "classifications of the data" out of the current grid, or put "classifications of the data" into the current grid, you drag the classifications in and out of the holding pen.

The pink line is the "active data classification rows" that is currently being used. In the current case, it is very simple. The spreadsheet is set up to show the sales of hard drives per month, and the row shows the data classified into two different rows: 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM.

Finally, the green area is the labels for the data area.

Notice, the first column has all the "data classifications" listed: in our example, we have the ability to classify the data by Capacity, Salesman, or RPM. These are the only three things in the first column that have the special gray box.

Now, there is another gray box, but it is in the second column. It says "data," which is important. No matter how I construct the pivot table, the second column is always going to be some type of generic "data" type label. (Over simplified, but a good way of thinking about it right now.)

Now, lets go back to the second question of your supervisor. He wanted to know sales by salesman. Very simply, drag the RPM out of the row area and into the holding pen, and this action takes out the RPM classification. Then, you drag the salesman from the holding pen to the row area, and this puts the new classification in.

If you are successful, then you will have the spreadsheet off to the side. Now, the first time that you drag a row label out of the first column, it may be a little confusing. They way that you do it is to put your cursor on the grey box RPM, then click and drag the grey RPM into the holding pen.

Then click and drag the gray Salesman box onto the row area. As a hint, make sure to drag the grey box onto the row area. Remember that since the row area and the column area intersect at the top left hand corner of the spreadsheet, if you drop the label onto this box, the pivot table will try and put the salesman onto the column area and not the row area! In this case, you would have to pull the label until it was on top of the "Total" box. However, if you do this, you'll have the table with the data quickly called out. You have the answer for your supervisor with one drag of the mouse.

The final trick on a pivot table for today is the "nesting of rows."

After your box asks you this, he says, "Well that is interesting, I wish I could see the breakout of the sales of 5400 and 7200 RPM drives by sales person."

One of the magic items in pivot tables is that you can build up the row area. In this case, all we need to do is pull down the RPM into the column area without pulling out the salesman item. If you put it in the left side of the row area, the RPM will show up first. If you drag it to the right side, the salesman will show up first. If you want to switch the order on the rows, just simply drag the gray boxes either right or left.

In this case, we get this table. The answer only takes one click and drag.

Your supervisor says, "Well Sally isn't selling any 5400 RPM drives. She just got into sales, and it looks like she doesn't know how to sell them. I'll go and make sure that she gets training on how to sell these drives."

This is the magic of pivot tables. Once you have the table, you can find answers hiding in the data in seconds rather than hours. This type of work allows you to get to the bottom of questions extremely quickly.

Today, we used a very simply example. This is very good to start on. However, once you get down how a pivot table works, you will find that they can be use in much more flexible ways.

They truly are a revolutionary tool.

Learn 'em.

"Mind & Spirit" -> Exposed: Christianity as an Evolutionary Advantage

2008-10-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

Well Ben Stein is right.

I have to admit it, I was prepared not to like the Ben Stein film "Expelled." After all, I am an evolutionist. I have grave issues on intelligent design ("ID"), and if ID is a conjecture or a science. I was ready to see a vitriolic and mindless anti-evolution diatribe. Even before seeing the film, I had read anti-Expelled web sites that talked about how Ben Stein had twisted the truth. I was ready to see through this because I had been prepared.

I was surprised.

Now mind you, Ben Stein does over represent that there are scientists on both sides of the issue. To be in the ID camp, you will probably be in the 1% of those with Ph.D.s. In reality, because saying that you'd like to study ID is a bit like saying that you're into picking your own nose and saving the results, even those that might consider ID in the academic environment would never admit to it.

However, there are just enough academics that hold to ID that it allows it to be discussed. Into this fray, Ben Stein inserts himself.

Stein's thesis is very simple:

1. To say that you base your belief system on a creator is political suicide in academic environments.

2. However, in almost all other areas of life we have the right to at least debate the issues.

3. The ID proponents are not babbling idiots.

4. Therefore, there is something amiss in the system. We should be able to question the prevailing system no matter what is the question.

Now, if Stein had stopped here, he would have only created a minor uproar, but what pushed his message into the red zone is his contention that Darwinism can lead to the idea of Social Darwinism, which helps to directly foster events like the Holocaust.

It is this last point that I agree with the most, and the point that is the most highly disagreeable to those in the academic environment. I have written some of this before, but allow me to again summarize the reasons that there is religion in the world. The following statements are mostly exclusive in their ability to reflect truth.

Hypothesis 1: Religion is around because there are gods or God that created the world. These deities that may ask us to somehow follow them. We have religions because an external force caused us to have religion.

Hypothesis 2: Religion is a construct that was created by natural forces.

Anyone that does not believe in a religion as an external force must believe hypothesis 2. However, the formation of religion or evolution of religion becomes problematic. Why was it created if it was not created by an external force?

The common sense answer to the average Joe is that "when early man didn't understand something, he would be comforted by the idea that there were gods or God behind everything." If this is true, that having religion makes one feel better, then religion is a necessary advantage to those that have it. Getting rid of religion is counter productive because it removes something that gave an evolutionary advantage over those that did not have religion. The common trait of religion is what gives a people group strength.

(This point is not mine, but I steal it here. The above thought is so obvious that many atheists spend hours trying to explain away the helpful nature of religion by saying that religion must be a spandrel or a meta-meme, both of which weak hypothesis when compared to the idea that religion results in an evolutionary advantage for those that hold onto it.)

You have two sets of conflicting hypothesis:

1. This world was made by a personal creator

2. This world was made by a fortuitous series of events.

If this world was made by a series of fortuitous events, there is no reason to help others out other than yourself. In reality, in a system that is based on evolution, you simply cannot explain how you can have free will. After all, you are a constructed being that is programmed with a certain programming. Perhaps, there was some core of chance in the way that your DNA sequences were fulfilled, but at the end of the day "it'll be all about the genes."

Evolution leads to the strong devouring the weak. It leads to fatalism. It leads to lack of control. The best of the atheist's philosophers, Dan Dennet in Freedom Evolves (and yes, I have yet to read the book, but I have read summaries) tries to argue that while man is predetermined, our ability to make informed choices--even though we are wired to make those choices--means that we have free will. Classically this is call Compatibilism. This mean that human beings may be predetermined to make a choice, but the fact that the person make the choices himself means that predetermination and free will are compatible.

To step one more time into this hole: You may determine that you don't like the weight that you are at. In fact, over 90% of people that go on a diet immediately gain back the pounds in two years. This would indicate that your programming of weight over rides your will. However, even in this case, you could pay somebody to starve you until you hit the proper weight. This is freedom. You can make a choice regardless of how you are wired.

So, by jumping through a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics, we get to an illusion or a type of free will. However, from a practical standpoint, the total population will never hear this message.

For the average Joe, all they will hear is that "we evolved to this state." There is no free will. Our wiring determines how we will react. Now, wrap this back into the idea of how we treat others. I have many discussion with atheists where they say that they are more moral than all the Christians they know. I may even agree with them, but my point is that their morality is driven by a desires to show that they are good. In more of the cases where I have asked an atheist why they are good, they have no answer.

The reason should be obvious to anybody that understand their own human nature: there is no reason that you should do good. Why help the weak and deprived if it won't help you. As a matter of fact, those that can't pull their own weight should be discarded. If you remember my last post, which can be found here, I pointed out somebody that I knew that was talking about "upgrading the team." The idea is that you should be going through the team and throwing away some individual and upgrading the rest. This is a bit of the survival of the fittest right in the work environment. I clearly see this thought process of the work upgrade as coming directly from the influence of evolution. The strong will survive.

Now if we don't like this mess of a philosophy, we can construct a very simple counter set of hypothesis to the evolutionary one. These are the other set that we started this section with:

a. There is a God.
b. He made you in his image, therefore you have free will
c. It is your choice to do the right thing

If you are a good Christian supervisor, you understand the following:

*The Lord is your master
*The Lord gave you responsibility for those under your care
*You are to be a good supervisor, and plan for the success of your people

This does not mean that we pay everybody the same. This doesn't mean that if a layoff comes that you fire people at random. It doesn't mean that somebody with a bad attitude should not be fired. What is does mean is that you are responsible for your people, and there are expectations that are given by the Lord for you to be fair and right. I would argue that in my experience that those that build this type of an organization are the ones that go to the top. A well led group of B-String players will outperform a warring class of A-String players every time.

Now. let us look at beyond the work place.

In reality, the advent of Christianity has done more than anything to make our nation powerful and great. Unfortunately, the world tries and says that this nation was not founded on Christian principles. This is a ludicrous statement. I was reminded of this by a High School friend that sent me a video that can be seen here. In a very short course in this link, David Barton gives a quick lecture on the culture of America. There is a straight line from how we were founded to the worldview of the Christian.

Over the last 50 years, the United States has been trying to dissolve this bond. Only the future will tell us how much it will hurt.

"Mind & Spirit" -> More Views On Anime And The Weakest Link

2008-10-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

Dattebayo!

This is the phrase that is constantly added onto the end of sentences by our fictional guest today, Naruto Uzumaki. What does Datebayo mean? You might suspect that it is simply a translation of some Japanese phrase, because you know that almost all anime comes from Japan. However, it means nothing other than a key phrase that the lead character from the anime Naruto puts onto the end of his sentences. For our American audience, you might remember that the character played by Billy Bob Thornton switchblade in the movie "Switchblade" always would say "Uh, huh" after his sentences. Dattebayo is a bit like this, and it make Naruto one of the most interesting and unique characters in anime.

The twists in anime are so interesting and the span of the story arcs are so large that I do not want to spoil the anime for you. However, Naruto has a well deserved fan base because of the story. In many ways, the morals that the story tells cut right to the heart of Japanese culture, and they are the morals that make the Japenese culture so engaging.

As I have posted before, there are things that will make this anime unsuitable for smaller kids. There are multiple instances of old men that are Peeping Toms that sneak up on younger woman so they can watch them bath. The interesting thing about Japanese culture in this aspect is that they don't condone the behavior. Normally, this is considered perverted behavior and the characters will call it out as such. Also, there is alcohol that flows. In terms of actual sex, there is none. In terms of violence, there is a lot. And while not all of it is graphically shown, it can be very, very shocking. Clearly people die in this anime. If not simple death is disturbing enough, we have sororicide (killing one's sister), infanticide (the killing of a child), filicide (killing of one's child), patricide (the killing of one's father), matricide (the killing of one's mother), mariticide (the killing of one's husband) and uxoricide (the killing of one's wife) as Wikipedia would put it. If there is a "...cide" it will be found in Naruto.

However, I am not here to burry Naruto. I am here to praise it.

Why? Because all of Naruto has core values that cause the anime to be strongly redeemed.Those that are in Christ are going to recognize many of the core values of the anime are ones that we can embrace and pull close to our hearts. These themes are ones that flow from the gospel.

These themes are as follows:

1. You only have one calling in life. To take care of those that call you family or friends. If you live your life for others, then you will find a well spring of strength inside of you.

2. Those that are cursed are not to be despised. If you hate those that are cursed, a curse will come back on you. Those that are cursed will cause your destruction. But more than this, there are many who are cursed by things that go beyond their control, and while these people do horrible things, they are not beyond the grasp of those that can see beyond their pain. The best thing a man can do is make their enemy a brother.

3. Life is centered around the team and the village. You should give your life for the village and the team.

This last value is one that I never see much in the USA and an attribute that I will devote the last half of this post to.

In the anime, the story revolves around the warrior culture. Each of these characters are trained to be killers from a young age. If you have any talent, you are expected to be a soldier by the time you are 12-13. The truly exception killers are those that can lead at 10 years or younger.

However, these teams are given over to groups of three. This is the core of the warrior culture in the anime. One of my favorite bits of animation in this series is the opening of episode #28 and following. As the series has gone from year to year, they come up with new openings. This particular year features a song from Asian Kung-Fu Generation, which is called Haruka Kanata. While the song is a great song, the animation is what perfectly captures the aspect of the team. Most of it is centered around images of the core three member team.

This group of three is normally lead by a leader or Sensei. The power in the culture is to have the three to operate as one. Often in this team, you will have the following:

1. The superstar
2. The leader
3. The brain
4. The strategist
5. The power

Now, depending on the group, these roles may be scattered around. In some, the superstar/leader/power may all be in one person. However, in most groups each member may take on some part of these roles. Therefore, it is only in the competion of the team does the real power happen.

While the weakest member of the team may call out that they are insecure because they know that they are the weakest, I almost never see the stronger members of the team say "hey that person is weak, let's get an upgrade to that person." Instead, the philosophy is "because I am strong, I will protect the weak."

Now, mind you, just because the weak person is weak, this does not mean that they can slack off. They must work hard. They must help the group any way that they can. They must be faithful. However, they do not have to worry that the other team members are going to leave them behind. As long as even the weakest team member is faithful, there will be a spot on the team.

Contrast the difference between this Japanese anime and the the American culture.

In the USA game show "Survivor," the constant struggle is to find the "weakest link" in the the tribe and vote them off the island. There is a constant battle of alliances an temporary agreements for people to know that they will continue to survive. However, at the end of the day, there will only be one left. It is about watching out for oneself.

Recently, I had a conversation with somebody on how they shape their team. They were saying that they were always "looking for an upgrade." In other words, they thought that the team was pulled together for them. In essence, they had control over the team, and you should be swapping out part of the team like you would be swapping out pieces of a car. If you found a better muffle on eBay, you should order the new muffler and throw out the old.

I philosophically disagree with this. The teams that we are given are not about "what can they do for us" but "how do we work together for the common good." Mind you, I believe in those that do more work should be paid more. You need to reward the superstars on your team. Those that do less should not get the same compensation as those that do more. However, people are not mufflers. Each person has something to add to the overall team. If you find that you are paying a person too much money, then you should downgrade their salary. If you find that one person is doing 150% of the work of another person, you should upgrade their salary to compensate.

Those with a bad attitude? Shoot those people on site. They pollute the entire work force, and diminish good beyond expections.

But at the end of the day, it is about the team. And team don't give up on each other.

As a parting shot, here is the opening video and lyrics. Now, I'm never sure quite how long a video will be posted to Google video, the post does not depending on this video being around for a long time. But if it is here, please click on it and watch it.

What you will see is a variety of images, but notice how often a series of three pops into the frame. In almost all instances, these are the teams of three that compete for each other.

Maybe Americans can learn a bit from the Japanese.

Haruka Kanata (Far Off Distance)

Hit the gas! There's no need to finagle, oh yeah!
We'll go all through the night.
I'll complain at the end, the balance is zero, oh yeah!
We'll whittle the days away...

When you open your heart a little, and pull someone close to you,
Your feelings will surely reach them deeper, yeah...

Hurry it up! Wring it out!
Though my legs are all tangled, they will surely take me far...
Even if I steal it and manage to grasp it,
If it isn't you, then what's the point?

So I'll go further and further away!

Hit the gas! There's no need to finagle, oh yeah!
We'll go all through the night.
I'll complain at the end, the balance is zero, oh yeah!
We'll whittle the days away...

When you open your heart a little, and pull someone close to you,
Your feelings will surely reach them deeper, yeah...

Hurry it up! Wring it out!
Though my legs are all tangled, they will surely take me far...
Even if I steal it and manage to grasp it,
If it isn't you, then what's the point?

So I'll go far into the distance...

Your world will become a thing of deceit
painted all in white...

"Mind" -> Account For Yearly Gains On Etrade

2008-10-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

I have written before how I believe that having both stocks and working covered calls can work to your advantage. However, once you get into using these tools for making money, you might not realize two very important things:

1. It becomes a little more difficult to keep track of how much money you've made or lost.

2. You absolutely need to clean up your account at the end of the year, or you'll be paying a lot more cash than you want to to the government.

Let's talk about both of these issues.

This is because the numbers that Etrade show are based on what you paid for stock, and they are not based on how much your cash position has changed over the year.

Let's say I walked into the tax year with $10,000 that I had in my pocket. On January 2, I put this money into etrade and bought myself $10,000 worth of stock by buying 100 shares of $100 stock at XYZ corporation. Once I had the 100 shares of stock, I then turned around and sold the cover calls on the stock for an additional $1000. Since I now had $1000 in my pocket, I decided to buy ten more shares of stock of XYZ. So, I have $11,000 worth of stock.

Etrade shows a running total of what you made and what you haven't made in the market. So, after the covered calls have expired, it will show you that you have $1,000 worth of gains because I sold the covered calls. In this case, let's say that it is short term because covered calls are always this. So, Etrade would show that I made $1000 short term gain.

However, let's us say that my stock, which was worth $11,000 at $100 per share, fell to $90 per share. So, I would have $9900 worth of stock. Since I bought it for $11,000, I have lost $1100. My portfolio is down 10%! What a horrible year. I lost a bunch of money.

Or have I?

If you remember, I walked into the year with $10000. If I sold all of my stock, I would get $9900. In fact, since I buy dividend stock, I also got a dividend on all of the stock. This gave me another $300 for the year (after tax). This means that I entered the year with $10000, and I exited the year with $10200. I didn't lose $1100. I made $200.

So, you need to look at all of the data to truly understand what is happening.

The challenge with Etrade is that it doesn't say that "hey you had $10000 at the beginning of the year." Instead, it will simply give you three sections that you need to check:

1. The amount that is in your banking account (Seen on the home Account Tab)
2. The amount that is in your stock account and current position (Security Tab)
3. A running total of short/long gains in your Security tab under the sub-tab.

So, even if you didn't write down how much money you had at the beginning of the year, the overall answer is pretty easy. Here are the steps:

1. Figure out how much you are worth if you liquidated everything today. In the case above, if I liquidated everything today, I would have $9900 worth of stock.

2. Now you need to figure out how much you had at the beginning of the year. This is simply taking your liquidated value ($9900) adding the losses of $1100 because the stock went down and then subtracting the short term gains from selling your covered calls.

$9900 + $1100 - $1000 = $10000 your starting cash

Now, to get your performance during the year it is simply (ending cash)/(starting cash) = 1% loss on your portfolio before we got our money from our dividends.

So, life isn't all that bad unless you forget that Uncle Sam is coming after those short term gains. This is a major issue, and one you must not get surprised on. One part of the tax code that really boths me is the fact that Uncle Sam makes it so he can get the maximum amount of tax.

Let's say that you have a job where you are making $100,000 per year. Uncle Sam and Uncle California says that you need to pay them 35% of this money to them. So, you have take-home pay of $65,000. However, they see that you had all this money from selling covered calls in the market. According to them, you made an additional $1000 in the stock market. This is income, therefore they are going to come after it. However, this is a special type of income. It was considered "easy money" and you make a big salary of $100,000. Since this was easy money and you are making a good job, they will take roughly 40% of your $1000!

Now, lets go back to our example:

You started with $10000. If you sold the stock at the next year for $90 per share, you would get $9900. So you lost $100. This isn't all that bad, until you find out on your TurboTax that the government wants another $400! This is because they say that "you made $1000 by selling the covered calls last year." So by the time that you pay your money to the government, you find out that your 1% (or $100) loss has gone to a 5% (or $500) loss. $100 because you sold the stock and the other $400 because of the government.

However, you can try and miss most of this burden.

At the end of the tax year, let's say that you knew that the stock was down and that the government was going to tax you on all your short term gains. In this case, you have a $1000 gain coming, and on December 30th you see that the stock is at $90 and you know that the stock is going to be flat for a while.

At this point, you need to sell part of your stock to register that you have a loss. Let me explain it this way. The goverment will allow you to "offset" the gain from options if you have a loss. So, all you need to do is say "well, I need to show the government that I had a loss." You do this by selling your stock that is under water to the extent that it balances out the gain.

In our case, if the stock is $90 on December 30th, we are losing $10 per share for every stock that we sell. Therefore, if we have $1000 of gain that we want to cover, we need to sell 100 shares. The $1000 in money we made in the cover calls is offset or covered by the $1000 we lost by selling the shares.

So you walk out of the year with:

$9000 from the stock that we just sold
100 shares worth $90 per share

Total = $9900

Now, since we have neither gains or losses on this, Uncle Sam charges us absolutely nothing. So by doing this one simple act, you have saved yourself $400 or 4% of your money. This is a massive difference.

Now, this is where the tax code starts to have a massive dorking effect on the economy. This is going to be a bit complicated, but stay with me. In the above example, I was assuming that the stock price was going to be $90 exiting the year and $90 during the start of the new year. However, lets say that I had a perfect time machine. I knew that the stock price was going to be $90 on Dec 30th, but $92 on January 3rd. So, if you waited just 5 days, you could sell he stock for $2 more. Would you wait?

Well we just did the first case. In this case, we would have $9900 in money left over. But what about the case where we waited?

In this case, lets say that we held our stock until January 3rd and sold. So you would have

110 shares * $92 = $10120 worth of money. However, the government still thinks that you made $1000 last year on the options, therefore, they still are going to charge you another $400 for the money you made last year, regardless if just 3 days into the new year you sold the stock for a loss. So, your net gain?

$10,120 - $400 = $9720 or $180 worse than if you had sold for $2 less just 5 days ago!

This fact is not miss on anybody that is handling money a lot.

Always clean out your accounts at the end of the year

"Mind" -> Soul Eater

2008-09-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'll admit it.

Soul Eater has to be my favorite anime right now.

Now perhaps you know about anime, and in this case, this post will absolutely no interest to you. After all, you know the beat and what is going on. If you are not familiar with anime, let me introduce you to my subworld.

Anime is nothing more and nothing less than a Japanese cartoon. Anime = animation. Anime has played a pivotal role in Japanese entertainment. While it traces it roots back to USA animation, really the core of anime took off in the 70's and from Manga. Manga is basically a comic book. Similar to the USA cartoon characters--Superman, Spiderman, Batman--what appeared in comic books (Manga) eventually got animated or turned inot anime. What we have today is a very robust manga industry that eventually take popular manga (cheap to produce) and turn it into popular anime (more expensive to produce).

Anime landed many years ago in the USA, for example "Speed Racer" started as part of the first way of anime in the 70's anime explosion. However, taking the chance that a Japanese cartoon could be shown in the USA after being dubbed and distributed was a fairly risky deal. So, for the most part, anime was a very small niche, and then mainly applied to cartoons for children. However, in Japan the entertainment form continued to grow and press the boundaries of what was kid entertainment and what was suitable for people 16 and older.

If the USA distributors were scared to bring over children entertainment, they did think at all about bringing over the more sophisticated entertainment. Afterall, this was too risky.

As you might expect, the internet changed everything. Anime is here in force in the USA, only anime is watched almost exclusively on the internet in the USA.

I am sure that sooner or later, this is going to be shut down for copyright infringement, but until it is, the art of Japan is seeing its way across America. The train is as follows:

1. On Wednesday, Soul Eater is shown on Japanese Television
2. Somebody in Japan records it off the air.
3. They then place this onto BitTorrent
4. The US/Japanese speakers grab the Torrent
5. They put subtitles on the file
6. The file is sent forward in a variety of different formats
7. The movement grows

These subtitling of the anime from Japan TV is called "fansubs" and they can generally be found many, many places on the internet. You can view thousands of hours of "fansubs" of Bleach, Naruto, and others. Some of these are so big that eventually they are bought and dubbed. The Cartoon Network with their "Adult Swim" time slots has caused a much wider acceptance of this entertainment.

Now, there is some very sophisticated anime. As an example of this, "Ghosts in the Shell" and "Death Note" have an unbelieable amount of weirdness and eruditeness about them. Some, such as Blood+ have some very disturbing elements involving things such as rape.

Generally, however, many of the anime show the following:

1. A boy or a girl coming of age. Call it from 13 up to 18

2. Many times there will be a lot of sexual overtones, although not a lot of graph nudity

3. Some bad words, and maybe some inappropriate touching (which always results in the man being slapped silly by the touched woman, which always meant to be humorous. Clearly nothing that would fly in American culture.)

4. And if you think #3 is bad, some Japanese show racial stereotypes that would cause a race riot in America.

But, even with all these problem, the stories or "Arcs" in the various series are amazing in their span and their attention to detail. Each episode will build on each other with stories that are carefully weaved together over dozens of hours of animation.

If it stop there it would be highly interesting.

Now, I have always been a fan of movie soundtracks. The ability of a great composer to help drive a mood is very important to the entertainment value of film.

And what is done on a successful anime holds up against anything that is done for the US cinemas. One of the best composers today for this music is Taku Iwasaki, who is pictured here and is the genius behind the music of Soul Eater.

I was already a fan of his from his music for the anime "Read or Die," and he has really outdone himself for this series. Just brilliant, brilliant stuff. As a composer (read mediocre to bad) myself, I can appreciate his ability to go anywhere he wants: New age. Moodscape. Hard Rock. Rap.

It is all in there. Each track builds brilliantly. These songs are woven into the story. For instance, the current series is up to 26 episodes (there will be 50 in all). If you watch the anime weekly, you will get a point where you notice how well the songs are crafted into the story. Without even knowing what is happening, the songs will carry you along.

Unfortunately, his music is lacking in the US. Luckily, you can go to Last.fm, which is a Brit internet radio station, and you can listen to this type of music. Not perfect, since there is no Taku Iwasaki radio station, but at least you can get some sense.

In addition, the animation art is just wonderful stuff. It is warped and strange, and yet familiar. Really, the art is simply images that can burn into your brain. At first I wasn't sure if I liked something so stylized and strange. Now, I can't get enough. You will be a very short time into the first episode when you'll meet the hero of the anime.

However, one of the non-convential things with the Soul Eater anime is that the hero is actually a heroine. Maka. You can see a picture of her to the left.

She is the central character of the anime, and captivating in her style.

Thing that you love about her is the fact that she is 100% a young woman that has a wonderful blend of personality traits: She is 100% aggressive in her stance as a "Meister" of justice. She is more than willing to give her life in the fight against evil. Yet, she is incredibly insightful into human nature. Although it takes over 20 episodes to get to one of the cruxes of the story, I was very moved when she has brilliant insight into how to reach a person that was hurting. It grabbed me on a very deep emotional level. She is the heroine of the show and while she is very smart, she is not the strongest. This makes her all the more appealing.

Now, the characters go beyond Maka. You have probably heard that the Japanese are all about team work. Many times in USA based dramas we will show a "team" or "essemble" cast. However, regardless off all the characters, we know that CSI is really about Gil Grissom. You know that 24 is about Jack Bauer. Mind you there are some essemble casts, but often one person will rise about the rest.

In anime, it is the cast that pulls it all together most of the time. Each member will often reflect a key emotion. An you need to see all the emotions...because anime is all about emotions.

The Japanese have a very reserved culture, and anime is the way that they express emotions that they other wise can't. In the story you have the young braggart that does nothing but say how great he is. You have the Father that bursts into tears because he believes that he'll never be a good Father.

Personally, for an anime to really strike home, you need to have a character that you really resonant with.

For me, this is Franken Stein. Yes, the name is a clear tribute to the horror novel, and this them is used over and over in the novel. I will not ruin the anime by describe how he is used in the plot, but I can see a lot of myself in him. I can see that if I was not who I am today, and placed in a similar circumstance stance (no matter how unbelievable since it is fantasy), I would be this character.

I will not destroy the anime by describing the character completely, but he is a bit unhinged, extremely scientific, and explodes when pushed too far. A man after my own heart.

Now, I have thought that I would like to show this stuff to my own kids. There are some very valuable lessons in these stories. However, you'll find several issues:

1. There are bad words that the characters say. Sigh, I wish I could find a version that had #$(@*)% as the swear words. Strike one.

2. Somehow, there always seem to be some type of mild perversion in Japan anime. Many times this has to do with inappropriate relationships between older men, fathers or brothers with younger girls. Maddening. Why do the Japanese seem to think so much about incest? Mind you, it is never, never said. It is kidded about. Inappropriate? Sure.

3. Finally, there is almost always some fixation on breast. Why? I guess it is the Japanese way.

So, I won't be showing this to my kids.

In summary, you have all the emotion that you'd never see in real life. Is it over the top?? You bet. And I love it.

"Mind" -> Allais Paradox And My Investment Strategy

2008-09-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

As we often do on this blog, we have a special guest for today.

I am happy to say that we are going to be spending a little time talking about the psychology of risk with Maurice Allais. Unfortunately, this Nobel Prize winner is dead, but we can honor him by kicking around one of the more famous of his concepts, then we'll use this idea to examine the stock market today.

The Allais Paradox is a hallmark of the way that we are wired, and the best way to look at this is by having you immediately take a quiz. To be effective on this, you are going to have to actually take the quiz, and not just read ahead. Okay? Here we go.

I am a very generous blog writer, and I find a comment that you have posted on my website. I like your comment so very, very much that I write you an email, with the following being written:

"Dear XXXX,

You insight and comments on my blog posting are so very, very good, that I want to reward you somehow. However, I have been taking a look at risk lately, so I am going to reward you with a decision. I am going to give you 2 choices:

Choice A: I will give you a 100% chance of giving you 1 million dollars.

OR

Choice B: I will give you a 25% chance of winning 5 million dollars.

Thanks Again For Your Comments,
Theo"

Now what choice would you take? Come on. Be honest.

Why or why not? Just stop and think about this for a while. You may even want to write down your answer. You'll see later what most people pick. (Because this is "illogical," this is referred to as the Allais paradox, after our good friend Maurice. You have just participated in the Allais Paradox.)

Let's do another quiz. This is a follow-on to the Maurice Paradox.

Let's say that you are pulled up in front of a judge. He is very mad at you for speeding. So, he says the following:

"Hey look, I have a 6 sided dice," he says. "I'll roll the dice. If it comes up as a 1, you'll pay us zero. If it comes up any thing else, you'll owe $6000. However, to make it interesting, I'll give you another choice. No dice roll, but you'll pay me $5000 right now. So what will it be?"

So, would you take the 1/6 chance of paying no fine, or would you simply pay the $5000. What would your answer be? Again, why don't you write down the reason for your second choice. Also, note if you changed your mind after thinking about it for a while.

The first example involves upside. This was the original Allais Paradox. The second example involves downside. This was a variation on the Allais Paradox. This was done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.

Here is a picture of Kahneman. Unfortunately, Amos Tversky died of skin cancer. However, Kahneman went on to win a Nobel prize for the work he did with his long time collaborator. Too bad Tversky was not there to see it.

What is the answer to above questions?

Well on the letter from me, most people would pick the "sure fire" $1M dollars over the 25% chance of winning $5M dollars. As for the speeding ticket? Most people would pick the "roll of the dice" over handing over $5000.

If we only played the odds, we would have always picked the $5M upside opportunity. After all, getting a 25% chance at $5M dollars is $1.25M on average. As for the roll of the dice, there should have been no preference. Both come out to be $10.

However, people are not wired that way. On "upsides" most people want to lock in the "sure fire" thing. On downsides, they believe "well, it won't happen to me. I won't be picked."

What is interesting is that researchers have looked at this trend in all types of cultures and all types of languages. You would think that the response to this issue would be driven a lot by culture, however, whatever culture you are in, the reaction is basically the same.

Once you start testing this on large groups of people, you can start to plot out the "value vs the risk" on a scale. Kahneman and Tversky did just this. The eventual curve that they built is now known as the "Prospective Curve."

The "Prospect Curve," which I've stolen from Wikipedia, is shown to the side of this text.

If you examine this curve, you will see that it has two axis. The curve plots out the value of gains and losses.

You can see, that minor gains are appreciated, but quickly they level off. So, in this case, you may feel good if I gave you a million dollars. However, you won't feel "five times as good" if I give you five million dollars. This is why most people chose the "sure thing" over the $5M dollar gamble. You have almost four times the risk on $5M, but you won't get twice the pleasure.

On the other side, you can see that losing $1M is more painful than gaining $1M dollars! The curve goes down further for losses than it goes up for gains. Once you have something, it is hard to give it up.

On the down side, if if the odds look "about even," and the pain is pretty painful, most people will pick the result where maybe they'll get lucky and pay nothing. This is section of the down curve where it is less than a 45 degree angle.

"Well, once I lose $5,000, it is only a little more painful to lose $6,000," you might say. "Besides, maybe I can lose nothing and really feel good."

One of my co-workers says, "I'm numb" once he gets beyond a certain point in a quarter. I believe him. However, he is willing to take a little bit of a gamble, and get all the way back up the curve.

This is exactly what happens on the stock market, and this is why I am adjusting my portfolio.

The market is down 15% for the year. The financial sector has many skeletons in their closet. The government is taking over all the major financial institutions. And what is the hope of most of the people on Wall Street? They are rolling the dice, hoping to get lucky and cause their portfolio to regain the loses that they have had for the year.

However, I think that all the cards are pointing to a difficult 18-24 months. I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm in the part of the curve where I haven't lost much, and I want to preserve what I have.

Let me take you though some high level trends.

What I am showing on the chart to the side is the S&P 500 index. This is the "average" value of the stock market over the last 10 years.

Why am I showing you the S&P 500?

You are probably familiar with some type of mutual fund because you have a 401K plan. What you are doing is handing money to "professional money managers" that are supposed to give you good returns.

However, the real secret is that 80-90% of "professional managers" don't beat the S&P500! The other 10% are simply lucky.

The only guy that seems to have a 30 year track record of beating the street is Warren Buffet. He has been preaching for years that having a professional manage your money means that you will suffer. Finally, somebody showed up from New York, and challenged Buffet on this. Very simply, they wagered $1M on the following:

“Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S&P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”

Buffet will pay $1M to a charity if he loses. However, he won't lose. The bet can be found here.

So, now we are looking at a graph of what a "good" return should be. If you look at the S&P 500 index, you will see that it had a tremendous run-up going into calendar year 2000. If you remember back in time, the run up was due to the "tech bubble." At that time, the best way for Investment Banks to make money was to get any tech company that looked even half making a lot of money was to found a company and take it public.

Once you did your IPO (Initial Public Offering) everybody in the market would jump in and make money. Tremendous money was flowing into the technology sector, and stock price was going absolutely crazy. The real winners were the investment banks that made a ton off of every public offering.

However, technology wasn't backed by anything that could give returns. When it was found out that many of these companies couldn't make a buck, the tech market collapsed. Unfortunately, many investors lost a ton of money.

I think that I am "unique" in recognizing that our problems today go back to the problems in the technology sector. There was a massive machine all tuned up and ready to make money. This was the investment banks. Now, I hate and love these guys. They are greed personified. They do all types of stupid stuff to make money. However, they serve a very good purpose. This is how people get their companies started. Without them we'd be in trouble also.

With a lot of people losing a lot of money, Alan Greenspan, who may go down as a worse Fed Reserve chairman than George Bush was a president, lowered the Federal Reserve rate down to 1%. Now, considering that Greespan had given extremely cheap money to anybody that wanted it, all that the banks needed to do was find somebody to borrow it.

The idea that you could borrow money cheap, then lend it out to house owners was beyond anything that Wall Street could turn down.

So when there wasn't a technology industry to make money, the commercial and investment banks started doing stupid loans off of the "new bubble." The new bubble was this real estate.

Now, this is bad enough. However, to make this plausible, they need some type of insurance in case things went bad. However, insurance needs a reserve "just in case" somebody needs to actually use the insurance. However, there wasn't enough money to actually insure all the lending that was going on.

Therefore, Phil Gramm (former McCann man that was helping him with how to handle the economy in his election campaign for the presidency, pictured here with McCann) sponsored credit default swaps in our senate, with a little help from Phil Lugar.

As a matter of fact, this former McCann staffer may be the single reason for the melt down in the market today. Again, credit default swaps is just another name for "insurance." Only, Gramm was able to drive a bill that made it illegal for credit default swaps to be called insurance. Unlike insurance, which is tightly regulated, these vehicles require NO BACKING IN CASE OF DEFAULT.

In other words, the insurer is not required to be able to deliver the insurnace.

When Buffet heard about this, he said that credit default swaps were "time bombs." How right he was. The bombs are starting to go off. Interesting, Buffet is voting for Obama. While Buffet has talked about tax rates, I think one of the main issue is that McCann seemed to embrace Gramm (until Gramm put his foot in his mouth once too many times by saying that the economy was just doing fine, and anybody that said different was a whiner).

Buffet has picked the lessor of two evils by picking Obama in his mind.

However, things run in cycles. We are not in the great depression, no matter what some headlines are saying. We don't have a run on the bank. We have crippled outselves with large debt loads as a nation, but the core of the USA is fine. It is just an extended house remodeling that we need to do.

The interesting thing about the "general problems" with the last bubble in the economy was that it took two years to hit bottom. In our new situation, I think that we will also take about two years to hit bottom. Clearly, we have launched into an unknown space. The government has made the most massive investment (or bail out) in our history. The impacts of this will not wind its way through our economy for 2-3 years from now.

So, what is my suggestion?

Well, if you like risk, you can start to short the market. This is what I've been doing all this year through a moderate "covered calls" strategy. Because of my strategy, my portfolio is down 5% for the year instead of the 15% for the S&P 500. I was actually up 5% just a couple of months ago, but made some slip ups in my investment strategy, which was completely foreseeable. (Basically, you can't run a personal portfolio AND do a stressful job. You will slip up on something.) However, I'm pretty proud of outperforming the market.

However, this last week gave me quite a scare. There was a point where the market was down over 20% year to date. If not for a phenomenal intervention by the government, and a crazy rally on Friday, I would have been down 15% for the year.

When the market popped back on Friday morning, I immediately liquidated part of my assets. I now have 20% of my liquid net worth in cash. In 27 days, once the next option expiry date, I will convert another 20% of my portfolio into cash. So exiting October, I will have at least 40% of my money in hard cold cash. By December, exiting the year, I will have 80-85% of my portfolio in cash.

So, once you have all your assets in cash, what do you do?

1. Put them in a safe place.
2. Wait for the market to turn around

Where is a safe place? Well the BEST place is T-Bills or government back bonds. However, they both have a problem in that they are are not liquid. The best thing about have cash is if the market does take a massive nose dive, you may want to actually buy something along the way. A house. A car. Even an investment. If you are a Wall Street firm, this is no problem. If you are an individual, there is nothing like a savings or checking account.

Now, lets say that you've been saving for a number of years, and you have at least $150K saved up. My suggestion is to have your money in at least four FDIC banks, spread evenly with no more than $100K at each bank (or $200K if you have a joint account with your spouse). The key is a minimum of four banks, regardless if you have a $800K or $80K. FDIC banks will cover any bankruptcy up to $100K for single people, and $200K for married couples.

If you are just starting out with $1K for savings, my advice is getting saving more. Cash is king in an uncertain time. However, you can probably get away with just one bank.

The reason for multiple banks is to be able to get you your cash at anytime regardless of bankruptcy. A local bank IndyMac, went bankrupt because of the market. While the invest is secured, it takes an extended time to get your money out of the bank. Spread risk by having your bank accounts spread out.

Some of my ideas for banks?

Ing Direct (if you ask me for a referral, they'll pay me $10!) They pay around 3% on savings accounts.

E*Trade Bank. While there are cheaper stock trades, E*Trade blends them all together seamlessly. They also pay around 3% on savings.

HSBC Direct. Another online bank with a 3% interest.

Finally, I have an account at Bank of America. They pay lousy, lousy. But their cash machines are all over the place.

Just hang onto cash for the next 18-24 months.

"Mind" -> The Lack Of Science In Global Warming

2008-09-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

The topic for today is how the scientific community tries and comes to agreement about what and is not true.

Science can be more than a bit of religion. Mind you, I am not talking mathematics. Math is often pure and perfect. Science is dirty.

There is a story by Richard Dawkins, the high priest of science, where he describes a classroom setting and a professor and a student that are having a debate over the proof of a concept. When the student showed that his idea was true, the professor graciously said, "Good job, I'm glad to see science happening." Then the classroom breaks into applause at how the scientific method happened.

This nice little anecdotal story belongs in the fiction section of the bookstore. In reality, I see most of science of having as much bias (ignoring math) as any other field or endeavor. The issue is the the "problem of the mind and biases."

The problem with the mind is that it is so powerful in its ability to define reality that most people cannot escape this. It is the same for both Christians and non-Christians. We see what we think that we should see. I am not blaming the scientist, but I am saying that the scientists are no more and no less susceptible than anybody else. Once we expect to see something, we do see it.

So, with that lengthy preamble, let us dive into Global Warming.

Take the advent of global warming as driven by our carbon dioxide footprint. If you listen to public radio, the impacts of global warming is said so often that it must be one of the most often theme that is said.

Drought in Australia? Human carbon dioxide emissions.
Hurricane Ike? Carbon dioxide from humans.
The Netherlands? Soon to be impacted from carbon dioxide when the sea rises.

With the massive impact of the global warming, you would think that the information on this would be widespread and greatly debated. Yet, I have had many conversations about this with people. On both sides of the debate is an amazing lack of knowledge at the lay level.

Even worse, I often find the liberals that believe in global warming, and want the US bought into the Kyoto accord, but have yet little idea of a fundamental tenet:

a. What will this cost?
b. What will be the benefit?
c. What is the payoff?

Instead, there is banal whining about "well our children will have to pay for it." My question is, "What will they have to pay?"

There are the conservatives that don't believe the idea of global warming, but my conservative friends haven't even the most passing knowledge of the data behind those facts. They just say "well I don't feel hotter." They really have abdicated their responsibility to understand the facts.

So, let's talk about global warming at a high level. Conservative or liberal, we should have some idea of the concepts of global warming, and what that means for us.

There are three main ideas, and each much be looked at separately.

Climate change
Global warming
Carbon dioxide (or CO2 in chemistry terms) as the source of global warming

So here is the logic. Man has been introducing industry. This industry releases Carbon Dioxide or CO2. This CO2 increases something called greenhouse gases. These greenhouse gas will trap more heat in the earth's atmosphere. The earth will heat up. However, the heating up just doesn't mean that the earth gets a little hotter. Instead, this increase in heat unleashes cooler weather and hotter weather. It unleashes hurricanes and tornadoes. The impact of the warming is much higher than the movement in temperature.

The first rule of science is to try to watch out for correlation vs causation.

I often am very, very happy that I only have one wife and an exceptionally strong marriage. However, I look at myself and many, many times I think to myself "anybody could live with my wife. She is cheery, full of laughter, and very helpful. What person would ever get divorce living with her?" In other words, I can't take credit for a good marriage. Just because I'm in a good marriage, doesn't mean that I am the reason that the marriage is good.

Climate warming is a bit like this. It is very true that C02 is coming up in concentrations. However, most people don't understand that we measure C02 in parts per MILLION. In other words, CO2 is almost non-existent. If you read any reports on climate change that blames CO2, you will see scary graphs. Almost all of these are shown in highly deceptive fashions designed to create an emotive result.

Let's talk a bit about CO2. Perhaps you have fallen asleep or heard that people will fall asleep in high concentrations of CO2. This is at the 1% level. If the CO2 levels get to 7-10%, then most people will get dizzy. Let's look at a chart that shows the concentration of CO2 at Mauna, HI since 1959. The bottom of the chart is 0% CO2, and the top of the chart is 1%, where we would start to feel drowsy, but nowhere near toxic levels that would immediately kill you.

CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas. For all practical purposes, it very inert. You should be very familiar with it. Every time that you buy a soda pop, the bubbles in the water is carbon dioxide. If CO2 was a highly toxic substance, you certainly would not be drinking it!

Now, let's go back to the chart above.

As can see from the chart, the levels of carbon dioxide have increased and incredible 7 one thousandths of 1% over forty years. In other words, the increases in the percentage of carbon dioxide is unmeasurable with all but the most sophisticated equipment.

Now, mind you, you should not wallow in CO2 as it can create carbonic acid inside of your body. According to Wikipedia, any above one half of one percentage (which is equivalent to half way up the graph) is going to have bad health effects. However, as you can see, the amount of CO2 in the air is basically flat. Now, in recent years, I have read some papers that say "well humans may not do well in environments higher than 400 ppm. However, as far as I'm concerned, the concern that 400 ppm would hurt in anyway is simply laughable.

The best data we have is from people that have extensive times on nuclear submarines. A number of years ago, our sailors were exposed commonly to concentrations of CO2 of 3000-4000 (on averge) ppm without any clear deleterious effects according to research published by the US Navy.

Considering our long term use of CO2 and the lack of any good data showing that it harmful, we should not be worrying about slightly higher levels in our atmosphere.

If you believe in an old earth, as I do, then you can start looking at this question along even longer timelines. Having slightly higher levels of CO2 is a minor nit if you consider that higher levels of CO2 have been the norm over the span of the earth's time line.

Once you start to examine the earth's atmosphere in terms of many millions of years, the story even becomes a lot more clear. This site has some nice graphics of the overall temperature of the earth.

If you look to the right, there is a chart that shows both the CO2 levels and the temperature of the earth. (This chart comes up a bit small, but you can click on it to see a bigger picture. However, let me also describe this to you.)

The chart shows the average temperature of the earth over the last 600 million years. The Co2 levels are in black. The temperature is in blue. Now take a look at 450M years ago. The CO2 levels are very, very high. Yet the temperature plunges down to 12C. This caused what is known as the Ordovician–Silurian Extinction. So now we have an extremely cold earth. So cold that it caused massive change. Yet, the CO2 levels were much, much higher than today's environment. It should strike you as strange. There have been clear times where CO2 has been much, much higher than today, yet the temperature was much, much colder.

Some say that there was a massive bit of gamma radiation coming from a star 6,000 light years away that impacted our earth and this created a special condition that dropped the temperature. They think that it may have stripped away all the ozone, and this somehow triggered a massive ice age. Regardless if this is true or not, the issue is clear. The earth has seen much greater swings in temperature, and some how it has been able to survive them.

In reality, the earth is about as cold as it has ever been. Now, we may not be at the absolute bottom, but we are very, very close to the absolute bottom. The earth is running a little over 12C as an average temperature. This is vastly different that the majority of the past, where the earth have been running at 22C as an average.

We can get a bit more of a picture around this if we look at a much smaller time period. One of the neatest things that we been able to use to determine "short term" time periods are the polar ice caps. Humans had gone to the poles, and we drill down into the ice. The ice is like layers of a cake, with the lower levels being deposited many thousands of years ago. Just like looking at tree rings, we can determine the amount of snow fall, and even the atmosphere conditions that were present. This data can be use to figure out the amount of amount of ice that was deposited. If you look at the chart above, you can see a clear cycle in the ice that is deposited.

There are very clear cycles in how much ice accumulates over the last half of million years. What we are seeing now looks just like the same pattern as we have always seen.

We are actually living in an ice age. This is called Quaternary glaciation in most people's book. The earth simply has been abnormally cold for many millions of years. The problem with ice ages is that we really don't understand what creates them or gets rid of them. There is evidence that we've had ice ages when CO2 has been high, and ice ages when it has been very low.

Inside of these rather large cycles, we have a smaller "ice age" cycle. For example, just 11,000 years ago, we had our ice cycle. We can take core samples from the ice caps to discover the rate of ice accumulation. The chart above is a chart from Wikipedia. You can see that roughly every 100,000 to 150,000 years, ice either builds up or doesn't build up. The movement from build to non-build is very quickly.

With or without a massive influx from humans, it is clearer that we have seen a massive change in how much ice has been building up over the last 11,000 years.

Really, if the earth is warming because of a greenhouse effect, it is not carbon dioxide driving this. There is really one greenhouse gas that we need to worry about.

That is water vapor.

Here is a nice little chart from this web site.

One of the best things about the industry that I am in is the tools that we use to find "root cause." Let's us say that you have a customer that wants a hard drive that fails less. So, you have customers start to ship you the hard drives back and asks you why they failed.

What you will find out that hard drives fail for a variety of things. So, we graph out all the ways a hard drive fails, and we have found that we always need to start to focus on fixing the issues that are the "top hitters."

We need to do the same with the greenhouse gases that we have. We need to figure out what is the contribution to the "problem" of greenhouse gases.

So, what is the #1 greenhouse gas? The answer is water vapor. As a major of fact, water vapor so dominates the results, everything else is inconsequential to the equation.

Right around 3.5% of the green house gas is from carbon dioxide. 95% of the effect of the green house gas is caused by good old water vapor. The problem become even more clear when we start to talk about man's contribution to CO2. This is estimated as anywhere from man is creating 30% of the problem for the increases in the amount of CO2 that is in the air down to around 3-4% of the CO2 that is in the air is due to man. There has always been CO2 in the atmosphere, and what is exceptionally clear is that we are at a very, very low level of CO2 in the air in this time.

As you might expect, one of the major issue that we have is no clear cause and effect of man's output of carbon dioxide and the concentration of the carbon dioxide that is in the air. The chart from the side is from this site.You can see that there are two lines. One of the lines show the concentration of CO2 in the air. The other line shows the impact of man's introduction of CO2 into the air after the industrial revolution.

This is one of the ironic charts that people hope to show the "horrible impact of man," and if you can just read the chart, you can see how it directly does not support the ideas.

The first curve is the impact of concentration of CO2 in the air. If you compare this chart to my earlier chart, you will see that they nicely line up with each other, with one exception. This chart cut the Y-Axis so that it starts at 280 ppm before the industrial age. This means that our atmosphere was approximately .03% (3 one hundredths of one percent) CO2. Now, after hundreds of years of carbon emission, the level has gone up to .04% (4 one hundredths of one percent).

By the way, you should be able to clearly see that before the industrial revolution, the CO2 in the air was going up. Why? What was causing it to go up, even though we had no massive influx of human activity to drive it.

Now, lets take a couple of key data points off of the chart, and you will have to work with me. Often when we see a chart like this, we simply don't understand that it drives an emotive reaction. We see two lines going up, and we say "oh, they must be related." A way of getting around this is to look at case examples of the data off the graph.

In 1950:

*The CO2 concentration was 300 ppm
*The man made Metric Tons was 1 million

In 2000:

*The CO2 concentration was 370 ppm
*The man made M Metric Tons was 6.5 million

The contribution from made went up 650%. The free CO2 went up 23%. Anybody can see that if the two numbers are correlated the leverage between them is tiny. In other words, man had to ramp his production like mad, and even then the impact on the CO2 levels look to be tiny.

What you will often here is "well CO2 is up 23%! But remember that it is water vapor that is driving force in the greenhouse effect. This means that CO2 may have gone from 4% of the green house gases to 5% of the green house gas in the atmosphere. Big deal. This is not the primary problem that we have.

We can go back to before the industrial revolution, and if man is 100% responsible for all of the increases in the CO2 levels increasing (but since the levels were rising before our industries arrived, this is highly doubtful), we would be able to "lower" the green house gas by 1%.

No matter how you cut the data, man can not simply impact our global enough to seriously impact global climate conditions to the extent of the concerns that are being voiced.

Now, let us add an even more jade eye to the subject. Let's say that we give in, and agree with all the dire projections that are being given out. Wikipedia has a nice chart of all the models that are out and the total increase in temperature that could happen. Here is the chart.

100 years from now, the earth is going to be somewhere between 2 to 4.5" degrees hotter than it is today. Shocking. How will we ever survive such a massive swing in our temperature.

I'm obviously being sarcastic. When compared with the span of the earth, an increase in temperature of this swing is no where outside the norms of what we might expect. Will it cause us to re-examine where we live? The answer is yes. Is it a global catastrophe? The answer is no. Even under these highly pessimistic models. The earth has been colder. The earth has been hotter. We were able to survive all of this.

Now, you might look at me and say, "well that guy does not believe in all this stuff. I bet he is driving a big SUV."

The answer is no. As far as I know, I am probably the most "green" person that I know. Only, I don't do it because I believe in global warming. I do it because of two things:

1. Pollution
2. Peak Oil

Even if Global Warming and CO2 impacts are not meaningful, the same behavior that solves for the perceived problems of Green house gases, also solves truly difficult problems.

We are doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

As a final shot, here is a short video by Bob Carter. Well worth your time.

"Mind" -> The Disturbing Surfwise

2008-09-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

Doc Paskowitz and his family is the subject of a fascinating documentary called Surfwise. This documentary is available on Netflix direct streaming, and if you don't want to deal with spoilers, I suggest that you see the film then read the rest of the post. For those that don't mind a bit of revelation, you can read the following:

Doc, as everybody seems to call him, was a medical doctor that got his degree from Stanford. He was pursuing a very successful career, when he started to experience panic attacks. Because of this, he flipped out. He basically walked away from it all, and decided to start surfing. Through a series of adventures, he eventually meets his third wife. One of the main points of this relationship was a very robust sex life. From here, he plotted a life that is far different than any that I have heard before.

His wife and he started to have a family. A big family. 9 children with 8 boys and 1 daughter. Rather than living a normal life, he placed all nine children into a very small trailer, then started to drive all of North America and some of of South America. He would go every where with his family and they would surf. With hardly a penny to their name, he considered it a great adventure for the family.

The father was a dictator. He insisted that all of the children surfed. However, all of the children learned to love the sport. However, he also decided that sugar was absolutely horrible. Their main staple in the morning consisted of some type of feed that Doc would buy for them. It was unclear exactly where this feed came from. One of the brother on NPR stated that the children thought that it might have been horse feed or bird feed. For dinner, they would have some type of soup or beans.

One doesn't have 9 children without having sex. And in the movie all the children seemed to hate the fact that their parents would have loud sex all of the time. After all, there was 11 of them in and extremely small trailer, and everyone could see what was happening every night.

Doc declared that there was knowledge and there was wisdom. Sending children to school only gave knowledge and no wisdom. Therefore, none of the children went to school. There is a particularly heart melting scene when one of the children describes the fact that his desire to go into medicine was crush when he found out that he was so far behind that he could never get a regular college degree. He would never be a doctor.

This is not to say that the children were dumb. They read a lot, even if they didn't do much math. Opera was played all of the time, and several of the children went into music later in life.

When the children was in the family with the iron dictator running the trailer, everything was happy. The main issue is that having an iron hand from somebody else on your life only creates children that had no ability to govern themselves. Eventually, the children decided that they had enough, and one by one they all left the circle that they stood in. As they left the family, they really left the family. While some of them were a little closer than others, the film basically shows that the family had been in each other's way for so many years that they could no longer stand to be intimate any more.

I think we have all been tempted to leave our current life behind us. We desire to leave the pressure of our lives behind, and take off in a trailer to live our own life. This film is highly instrumental in showing the pleasure and the price for living this type of life. Children leave the family social structure never to return, and at best they can be called quirky. At worse, they can be called highly disfuntional.

What is my take away from the film is that living the free life messes you up. Responsibility is not something to flee from, but something to be embraced. Keeping your children separated from the world is not to say that they will be safe from the world.

Hebrew's 12 tells us

"No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

Your children deserve to be treated with love and respect. Sometimes this means that you need to get them to do their school work, and clean their rooms. But this film shows that their is a limit to how hard to push. You cannot make your children into your own image. You cannot ask them to turn their back on the world. What we must do is teach our children how to stand in the world.

Moderation is a virtue. We should all experience more of it.

Quantum Mechanics

2008-08-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome our guest today: Hugh Everett III.

He has come up with the idea that some call the most important idea since the theory of relativity. Too bad after his Ph.D, he gave up on academia because nobody would touch his radical ideas. Some simply considered him a raving lunatic. Because he was a rabid atheist, who insisted that his ashes should be thrown out in the trash after he died, he would not like that I am going to use his ideas to justify a view of God.

Over time his ideas have gotten a strong following, and he is no longer rejected as he was when he first proposed his ideas. I am going to take his ideas today, and apply as he would never accept them. To talk about the very nature of God and how we will be judged.

I had a close friend in high school who was Dutch. The interesting thing is that he was raised in Holland and came over at a young age. His parents spoke with a heavy accent, and whenever the kids were at home they did not speak English. They spoke Dutch.

I remembering asking the kids in the family how it was to switch from one language to the next. They told me that sometimes it didn't even register. They weren't conscious of moving from English to Dutch. I asked if this every turned into an issue in real life.

"Oh yes," said the mother. "I remember that one time I was talking on the telephone to a friend. As close as I came remember it, I started the conversation in English, but somehow I switch over to Dutch. I had been talking for quite a while, and the friend was saying nothing. Finally, I realized what I had done, and because my friend did not speak Dutch, they simply did not know what was going on."

I recently had a conversation with my nieces husband where I started to explain quantum mechanics. When I got to the part where I was trying to explain how quantum mechanics formed my views on freewill, I could see that I had so totally lost him that I might as well had been talking in Dutch.

Hopefully, you can stick with me a bit longer today. You need to try and grasp the Dutch.

We have know about Quantum Mechanics for many years, and yet the common person has no idea what Quantum Mechanics actually are. I was in San Jose with some people from my work, and I was describing some interesting Quantum Mechanics. These are all intelligent people, yet they didn't know what I was talking about. As a matter of fact, if not for Quantum tunneling, we couldn't even have hard drives, which is the product that I deal in.

The problem of Quantum physics is that particles simply do not exist unless you observe them. I could spend a lot of time describing this, but the thoughts are so intuitively stupid and unbelievable that it is almost not worth it. You need to take it on faith, when you get to very small particles, they don't exist.

Now, this doesn't seem to be very satisfying. Small stuff doesn't exist? Crazy. Yet, we look at big stuff all around us, and that exists. It the big stuff made out of the small stuff?

The answer is yes, and the difference between the big stuff and the small stuff is that the big stuff is observed and the small stuff may not be. As soon as we observe something, it turns into "real stuff."

Thus the age old question, "If I tree falls in the forest, and if there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?" is simply reframed. In our new world, the question is if a neutron is split into two particles and nobody sees it, does either particle have a definite state. The answer to the second question is "no."

Now, you may ask "how do you expect me to believe this? I would have to see it with my own eyes." I will answer this is actually not that big of a deal. The scientific community have many experiments that will show that particles are not particles until you observe them, and you can run an experiment yourself to see it. The problem is "why" particles are not particles until you see them.

This is the rub. We can come up with math that describes these particles very nicely. This math is based around carryng around vectors that have probability embedded in then. Once you observe a particle, it goes from a chance of a particle to a real particle, and once it is a real particle it instantaneously communicate to any other particle it is related to and causes those particles to also snap into reality. This is called collapsing the wave function.

Without getting into quarks (which make up atoms), lets say we split a sub-atomic particle into two pieces. Whenever we split this particle, we can tell that one particle has an "up" value. The other particle has a "down" value. So, we find out that the particle that we broke apart only has quarks with 1 "up" value, and 1 "down" value. So, if we see that one particle is "up," then we know that the other particle is "down."

However, if you remember from the previous discussion, particles aren't really present until you observe them. So, lets say that the two particle you observe are flying in different directions. One is flying to the north universe 7.5 billion light years away, and the other particle is flying to the south galaxy 7.5 billion light years away. Now, in 7.5B light years, the two particles are 15B light years apart from where you started them. However, as we discussed, they aren't particles until you observe them. If you then view just one particle, you know that the other particle must have the opposite value. So, you observe one particle, and you see that it is an "up" particle. The math tells us that the opposite particle 15 billion light years away instantaneous turns into a "down" particle. This means that somehow information is passed faster than the speed of light. Even though the particles are 15B light years apart, they instantaneously communicate to each other.

However, the idea of particles not being real is pretty highly disturbing. The idea that one observation can impact another particle 15B light years away is highly disturbing. I have noticed that most scientist simply do not like to think a lot about this. In many ways, the idea of Quantum physics can led directly into religion. Observation leads to reality. I agree with the physicist that think this way. Just because some is bizarre on a microlevel, it does not give rise to the idea that somehow this impacts the world for larger objects. We may not understand the microworld at all. However, this does not mean that we don't understand the macro or Newtonian world.

One of the interesting things about this, however, is that we still must try and deal with the idea that particles are not particles until they are observed. In a famous thought experiment, Schrödinger suggest that if a cat was set up to be killed by a Quantum event, then the cat would neither be dead or alive until somebody observed the event!

To get pass this, Hugh Everett in 1957 came up with the idea that any time we have an event triggered by a Quantum event, two separate universes spun off or there are separate quantum worlds. Although Everett did not call it "Many-worlds interpretation," this is name that has stuck. The idea is that there are many overlapping quantum worlds that take on any possible outcome. In essence, our universe is one of an infinite series of universes. They all overlap in some sense, but they are all separate. Every event in an universe creates at least two new universes. For all practical purposes, there is a mass of infinite universes that had common histories and then split. In other words, even if an event didn't happen in our universe, then it happened somewhere else.

You may has seen episodes like this on Star Trek. There is an alternative universe where there is an evil Kirk. Or where the Enterprise and Jean Picard is destroyed in a black hole. However, there is another universe of "good Kirk" and where the enterprise is not destroyed.

So if we review the current state of quantum physics, we basically have two ideas:

1. Sub-atomic particles don't exist until we see them and if they don't exist, perhaps events that rely on the particle's state doesn't exist.

2. If an event is triggered by the state of a subatomic particle, then multiple time lines are spun off. Each one is a new new world that is decoherent (which means they cannot interact) with each other.

Now, are you grabbing your head? I know it makes my head spin. Now the idea of many worlds probably is seen as a weird idea that isn't generally accepted, but if you dig into the literature, you will find out that many worlds very nicely deal with a bunch of sticky philosophical problems. So much so, that is one of the mainstream models that many physicists accept.

Hawking has used the idea of many worlds to get around the idea that information is destroyed in Black Holes, which is a highly problematic issue in physics. While Susskind and other have come up with other ideas on how to preserve information, my point is that some good minds have accepted the many worlds hypothesis.

Now, why is this important?

While we have bounced around a lot of subjects, the whole of the post so far boils down to the idea that there may be multiple overlapping universes where many different versions of YOU exist. This is a bit odd, but fits inside of one of the models of how to interpret physics.

To some people, they would think that I'm crazy to go down this path. As I started this post, my niece's husband just thought this was crazy.

"I can believe that God would create many versions of us," he stated.

I want to turn this thought on its head. It is not about what is intuitive to us. Quantum mechanics is completely unintuitive. It screams "it makes no sense." Particles are not particles.

Roman 1:20 tells us "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made...."

Really, if the above is true and scripture is the word of God, we need to embrace that the study of the building blocks of nature will give us clarity about his attributes.

So, let us just imagine for a moment that the many worlds interpretation is true. What would this say about our lives?

This would mean that we are living an almost infinite series of lives. We are living lives where circumstances cause us to be the best Christian in the world. We are living lives where circumstances have us do horrible things. There are lives where we are lost at birth. There are lives that we are rich.

This might horrify you. "You mean that there may be worlds that I am not a Christian?" The answer is yes. This would mean that there are worlds where evil men are pious and devoted family men.

The many world interpretation is not scary to me because it means that God would see me and others in all circumstances. He would see how I would have reacted. I believe that over the sum of all these different lives, people's nature will be clearly defined. Are they evil? Then this becomes clear as they are put into all possible circumstances. Are they good? Then the overall series of lives will show them as moving toward God.

The biggest problem with this interpretation is from a scriptural viewpoint. We know that hoses that call on the Lord will be saved. If there are lives where we live that we are not saved and lives where we are saved, then which set of lives determine how we will be saved. If we have an almost infinite set of selves, does this mean that eventually we will have one life where all are merged together? Or do we have multiple sets of heaven?

The problems for this viewpoint are strong and many.

However, I can also see places where this viewpoint could solve a lot of issues. In this viewpoint, all of these lives are somehow tied back together again at the judgement. In this viewpoint, we are completely without excuse. God can objectively point to all of our lives and say "it is clear that given an infinite numbers of circumstances, you consistently chose those paths that were evil." In this viewpoint, God does not "force" any of us down a path. Instead, all paths are explored. In this viewpoint, we have complete freewill.

I've taken you through a lot of thoughts, and if you have never studied the idea of Quantum Physics, I might as well be speaking Dutch. However, before I conclude this post, I want to wrap this back into another aspect of science and the way that we should think about this possibility of the multiple world hypothesis.

Mathematics allow us to explore virtually all of the known universe. I am hoping that you took enough high school math to come across a very simple idea. This is the idea of the formula as written as y =f(x). What does this mean?

It means that given a certain input of x, we can run it through a formula or function f( ), which will transform x into y. There are only two things that matter as inputs and outputs. The input is x. The output is y.

Every formula can be broken down into this idea. For a given input x, we get out another output called y. The interesting thing about this idea is not x and y. This is so common that we always refer to these ideas simply as x and y.

The interesting thing is the f(x) or the function of x. The formula can be as simple as

a. y = x + 1

or a quadratic equation

b. y = x*x + 2x + 1

or to much more difficult equations.

Now, let us stop thinking about this as a simple equation. Let us say we are the equation. I'm saying that our life is the equation.

The output or y is the things that we do: we feed the poor, we accept Christ, we are bad, or we are good. The x is the things that are feed into our life: are we raised as Christians, were we well treated, or did we get killed at a young age.

In many mathematical formulas of similar class, you can get any y out of the formula by changing the x. And this is what we argue with God about.

"Well, God, you can't judge me because I wasn't told about Christ," we might say.

"God, I had a mental problem that kept me from being righteous," is another excuse.

What we are saying is that our function (or us) is lacking because we didn't get the right circumstance in our life. And this is a problem in elementary mathematics because if we just looked at one x and one y, we have no idea of what the equation is. All we have is a single input and a single output.

So, what we learn to do in mathematics is graph out the function. In other words, we put many, many different x's into the equations to get out many, many y's. Once we have done this many, many times, we can step back from the equation to see the shape of the equation. We can see where the equation dips. We can see where it soars. We can get a good idea of the nature of the equation.

It is well understood that graphing out an equation is a prerequisite of understand mathematical formulas. Everybody does this.

If the multiple world hypothesis is correct, then what is happening is nothing other than many different inputs are put into our nature to determine what we are actually made of. In the same sense that man can only see the math formula by graphing out the formula, maybe the only way for us to understand our true nature at judgment is to have all of our lives shown in many different circumstances.

A strange thought? Absolutely. Logical? Disturbingly so.

We'll see at judgement.