Archive for August 2005
August 29, 2005
Death to Polo Shirts
4:08 pm | Politics | Style | Comments: 55
As I write from Grand Valley State University’s Pew campus in glorious downtown Grand Rapids, I am seeing dude after dude after dude walk around with baggy shorts and a polo shirt. Let it be law: all baggy-shorted, polo-shirted dudes are to be stood up against the wall and shot for criminal conformity.
On a less extreme though equally political note, I would recommend reading Victor Davis Hanson’s article The Paranoid Style. I was introduced to Mr. Hanson today, and after reading some of his stuff it would appear that he and I share a brain. At any rate, the article in question does a great job, if nothing else, of pointing out some of the ridiculous opinions there are out there on various subjects including 9/11, the U.S. involvement in Iraq, and even the Wishing-Dubya-was-Jeff-Davis types (you know who you are). Look forward to more commentary on Hanson in the future.
August 28, 2005
Katrina Approaches
9:56 pm | Nature | Pictures | Comments: 12
The GOES Weather Satellite and NEXRAD indicate a tough time ahead for New Orleans and much of the gulf coast as Hurricane Katrina approaches the mainland, expected to make landfall late morning or early afternoon on the 29th. Katrina is being described as “possibly catastrophic” by the National Weather Service. Here in Michigan it’s easy to be interested in this kind of monstrous and terrifying weather system, but imagine watching this thing approach your house. Remember the people in Katrina’s path in prayer tonight.
More Google Goodness
12:39 am | Pictures | Sci/Tech | Comments: 6
For those of you who haven’t tried Google Earth, I would recommend you go to earth.google.com and get it. You can literally see anything in the world, and there’s presets for famous places around the globe. As an example, here’s a picture of the T.V. Tower in Berlin, Germany:
I’ve added screenshots of many famous Berlin buildings in the Berlin 2004 section. Google Earth is cool. That is all.
August 24, 2005
Fun with the Camera Phone
7:06 pm | My Life | Pictures | Sci/Tech | Comments: 11
Nothing but good news all around today as I finally managed to get my computer fixed, and got my Motorola Data Cable in the mail! This means I can get all the stuff off the phone and put cool stuff on it like my Life in the Fast Lane ringtone! As for the computer, it’s going to be a long time before I get any of my old data back. But that’s life. At any rate, here’s a few wicked-awesome pictures.
John and his Voodoo Firetorch of Uncertainty
The MelissaBurger™ - Yes, that’s really a hamburger.
Spent a night on the beach a few nights back; here’s my attempt at a fire, moments after touching a match to it.
What would a night at the beach be without a sunset?
Experts anticipate much more camera phone goodness to come in the future. In other random technology news, there’s a new kid on the block that might interest all the IMing nuts out there: Google Talk. The base client is super smooth, and is yet another good reason to get Gmail. Trillian has already integrated it with their premium client (we free-client yayhoos will have to suffer for now).
August 23, 2005
Time Warp
8:06 pm | Religion | Sci/Tech | Comments: 6
Starlight. Starlight steals the show from the Moon nearly every evening, if you ask me. Starlight has always made me wonder about the universe, and here’s why. First, let’s begin with a few presuppositions:
1. Creation (the Universe) is young (6,000 years, give or take).
1. The speed of light, as we know it, is constant (299,792,458 meters per second in a vaccum).
2. Objects in the universe visible to us are really at the distances Astronomers say they are.
The nearest star to us (discounting Sol) is Proxima Centauri, at a meager 4.2 light-years away. The brightest star in the sky, Sirius (known as the Dog Star because it’s contained by the constellation Canis Major), is so bright because it’s huge and also very close - 8.6 light-years. Neither of these pose any huge questions. Here’s the real kicker. The farthest object visible to the naked eye is the monstrous Andromeda Galaxy (400 billion stars). Andromeda is 2.2 million light-years from earth, which is the problem: that’s way, way, way more time than the Universe has even been in existence, and yet somehow that light has managed to reach our planet and our eyeballs.
How can you explain our ability to see this galaxy if it supposedly takes 2.2 million years for the light to get from there to here? When we look at Andromeda, are we really looking at 2.2 million year-old light? That would be impossible considering the Biblical account of creation. What really throws things into confusion are interstellar events such as supernovas. The latest, Supernova 1987A, still occurred an estimated 160,000 light-years from Earth. If we can see it in 1987, doesn’t that mean that it had to have actually happened 160,000 years ago and the light finally reached us in 1987? Here are some possible explanations that I’ve come up with over the years by myself and by discussing it with friends:
1. The Universe, in addition to being created by God in six days, is many millions of years old. In this case, when we see the faintest starlight we’re looking millions of years into the past.
2. The Speed of Light is not constant and travels much faster at certain times than anybody has discovered yet. In this case, when we see starlight we’re possibly seeing what’s going on in real-time: as it’s happening.
3. God created light in transit. In this case, not only did God make the stars and the Earth, but he also filled even the vacuum of space with travelling light. I like this one because it adds a new element of complexity and awesomeness to the Universe. If this is true, when we look at starlight we’re seeing light that came directly from the mouth of God, not from secondary causes like stars - light made directly by God. That’s a pretty special thought to me.
Naturally, the third explanation has a tough time with the interstellar events. That supernova in 1987, did it really happen, or was that simply light in transit created by God to show off His power and greatness? I certainly don’t have the answer to any of this, and to be honest I’ve been entertained for years just by thinking about it.
August 18, 2005
The Wisdom of the Sphinx
10:51 pm | Random | Wisdom | Comments: 14
“To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.”
“You must lash out with every limb, like the octopus who plays the drums.”
“He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.”
Mr. Furious - Why am I doing this?
The Sphinx - If you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.
Mr. Furious - And why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?
The Sphinx - I don’t remember telling you to do that.
“You must be like wolf pack, not six-pack.”
“When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you. ”
Mr. Furious - Okay, am I the only one who finds these sayings just a little bit formulaic? “If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right.” It’s…
The Sphinx - Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage…
Mr. Furious - …your rage will become your master? That’s what you were going to say. Right? Right?
The Sphinx - Not necessarily.
“We are number one. All others are number two, or lower.”
Entering the Voicemail Matrix
10:37 pm | Sci/Tech | Comments: 6
Day 2 of me having a cellular telephone and I have an observation. I think literally everyone of the two dozen or so calls I’ve made thus far has consisted of me dealing with a voicemail machine. Voicemail appears to be taking over the world. I don’t mind leaving messages. In fact, I like to have fun with it. However, since the advent of interactive message systems where you can review your own message and start over if you wish, leaving voicemails for me is somewhat painstaking: trying to get the perfect message with no ahs, ums, or just plain blank spots where the gears in your head nearly grind to a halt as you try to remember what you were just about to say. I think wistfully of the days when you knew you only had one shot at a quality message so you had to really step up and deliver or just sound like a goofball with a telephone in your hand.
The upshot of all this is that I generally end up recording 3-10 practice messages before I really hit one that I like. My only hope is for somebody to actually answer their phone, although so far it seems like such an idea is nothing but pie in the sky by and by, as it were.
August 14, 2005
More Fun with Relativism
9:57 pm | Religion | Thoughts | Wisdom | Comments: 10
Many of us are familiar with the nearly immortal words of Cornelius Van Til: “There is no neutrality.” What exactly was Van Til getting at? Once again, we take out the baseball bat of logic and use it to beat some sense into Relativism and at the same time take a few shots at the biggest slackers of the philosophical world, the Agnostics.
If there is no absolute truth, whatever you happen to believe is true. There’s so many problems with this world view that to believe it you have to remove the part of your brain that deals with logical thinking and use it for a doorstop. Yet another weak link in the already-dubious chain of Relativism deals with the changing nature of man’s beliefs. Get a Relativist to admit that it’s possible for him or her to change his beliefs on something - this shouldn’t be hard considering it’s ludicrous to claim that people never change their mind on things. Therein lies the problem.
Let us assume that I am in a house and there is a car parked outside of it. If I believe that there is no car outside my house, then afterwards decide that there very likey is a car outside after all, have I not in effect just created a car outside my house? If it were really true that there was no car outside when I believed there was not, then me changing my mind would have in fact created that car outside my house assuming that my second belief was also true. The real truth is that there was always a car there, no matter what I happened to believe; the car existed universally outside of my own beliefs. If you take this further you realize that there were only two options available: a car being outside, or no car being outside. Thusly, there is universal truth relating to the position of that car outside my house. Given this revelation, once a Relativist has admitted that it’s possible for him to change his mind, he’s already - once again - disproven his own world view. Fun, isn’t it?
The same thing goes for Agnostics: the people who say there isn’t enough evidence out there for the existence of God for them to believe in God. They’re not prepared to claim that there is no God, they’re undecided. They’re moderate. They’re centrists. They’re all a bunch of slackers. From the previous example, it is logically obvious that there must either A) be a God, or B) not be a God; there is no situation where you might have half of a God. Regardless of what you believe, one of those is true. There is either A or B, there is no neutral position. Van Til had all this and much, much more in mind when he said, “There is no neutrality.”
August 12, 2005
Gorillas in the Mist
4:16 pm | Thoughts | Wisdom | Comments: 37
Here’s an issue which most people probably don’t talk about, a fact which has nothing to do with the other fact that it’s an important issue that needs to be dealt with. A precedent having been set with a previous discussion on the random nature of male nipple hair, we now look into the subject of male armpit hair. The great question: grow it, or shave it?
It goes without saying that women should shave their armpits. If you are a woman and you do not shave your armpits, feel free to begin doing so at your earliest possible convenience. Men, however, seem to have the idea that great bushy mounds of armpit hair are manly. I disagree with this entirely. Facial hair is certainly very masculine. Armpit hair, however, is an entirely different story. There is never - ever - anything aesthetically pleasing about armpit hair. It looks nasty. Just talking about it makes most people cringe. I submit that part of the male grooming routine should include shaving or at least substantially trimming armpit hair. It’s something that just really needs to be managed for the sake of hygene.
There are other reasons for doing this beyond the fact that armpit hair is disgusting. Many of us use some sort of deoderant or antiperspirant on our armpits so that we don’t smell like either camels on a garlic diet or just really old people. Many guys, however, do not realize that when you have vast amounts of armpit hair, the vast majority of the chemical compound isn’t even making contact with the skin pores - which is where it needs to be. You aren’t getting the benefit of the deoderant, and you’re wasting the stuff at the same time. If you just simply keep your armpits clean and clear from hairage action, you’ll save money and smell good too. Aside from all this, it’s simply the right thing to do.
August 11, 2005
Life Calls
5:40 pm | My Life | Religion | Comments: 1
These are the best of times. Life in the service of the Lord of Glory never was better. Every minute is a minute to glorify and enjoy God as well as one more drop in that great bucket of eternity carrying me closer to life without sin. There’s good food and drink to be eaten, good Psalms to sing, and good times to be had. True Life is calling; I’m determined to answer. I am determined to draw nigh unto God.
