Unscripted Remarks

Cygwin terminal problem fixed

2006-11-08T18:11:00.000-06:00

I have Cygwin ("a Linux-like environment for Windows") on two computers which both run Windows XP. If you want to use some Unix-based utilities with real shell scripts, but your employer won't let you install Linux on your computer, Cygwin is the way to go. Anyway, I have been annoyed for a couple of months with one of these installations.

On Cygwin on my laptop, I always got an error message, "WARNING: terminal is not fully functional" whenever I tried running the man command. On my other installation, I got nicely formatted and colored documentation, which paged nicely. I tried lots and lots of tweaks to get the Cygwin installation on my laptop to work properly, including reinstalling Cygwin, the groff program, and messing with .bashrc and everything else, but nothing fixed the problem.

Today I set both systems side-by-side and set out to conquer this gremlin. I ran "cygcheck -c -s -v" on each system, output the results to a disk file, and ran a diff on them. Many differences turned up, but nothing special jumped out at me. The cygcheck comparison, helpful as it was, did not give the solution.

Somehow I noticed that the home directory of my desktop computer (the one which worked) did not have a ".termcap" file, at all. The home directory on my laptop computer (the one that always gave that error message) did have a ".termcap" file.

"Hmmm . . .," I thought. "I wonder if that could be the problem." I renamed the ".termcap" file in my home directory to something else, restarted Cygwin, and instantly the problem disappeared. Now less and man work exactly the way they should. Problem solved!

I'm sure most people have no interest in this, but for me, it was a small victory worth saving to the web. Hope it helps somebody else who uses Cygwin.

Soft tissue found in T-Rex bones

2006-10-03T14:16:00.000-05:00

According to a recent article on Slashdot, a newly-broken thigh bone from a Tyrannosaurus Rex was found to contain stretchy, soft tissue inside. The bone marrow was not fossilized, as one might expect.

Last year, paleontologists excavating a T-Rex fossil skeleton in Montana successfully extracted the femur (thigh bone) of a T-Rex from the earth. Unfortunately, the only transport from the site was via helecopter, and the helecopter was too small the carry the whole femur. So the femur was deliberately broken so it would fit on the helecopter. When this was done, soft, stretchy tissue was found in the center of the bone, possibly even containing blood cells.

The California Academy of Sciences web site contains this photo of the reddish, meaty tissue which (according to archaeological dating) has persisted unfossilized after 70 million years.

As the Slashdot readers pointed out, the implications for this find are enormous. Either the standard methods of dating dinosaur bones are wrong (which is what the creationists are saying), or else fossilization doesn't work the way people have traditionally thought.

And since that tissue contains DNA, is it possible that a Jurassic Park scenario of cloning a Tyrannosaurus Rex might be closer than we imagine?

Jesus Music Oldies

2006-07-13T19:43:00.000-05:00

For the past week, I've been grooving on Jesus Music Oldies, an Internet radio collection of some of the greatest music of the "Golden Age" of Jesus Music. Some of the best musicians and early songs that fed my soul: Phil Keaggy and Glass Harp, Children of the Day, Love Song, Keith Green, Don Francisco, Daniel Amos (remember Shotgun Angel?), early Second Chapter of Acts, Matthew Ward, Andre Crouch and the Disciples, James Vincent ("Waiting for the Rain"), Larry Norman, Randy Stonehill ("Lung Cancer"), DeGarmo and Key, Janny Grein, Honeytree, and more and more and more.

This is a great find. I could listen to this stuff all day long. If you got saved in the seventies and listened to Christian music, you'll wonder how you ever forgot some of these tasty tunes. The station is produced by Rob Whitehurst, and he has a kickin' collection.

There's a related website at www.JesusMusicOldies.com, but it's not very easy to navigate. Rob has a more up-to-date web page on My Space, and I found some great weblinks to the classic bands. (I had no idea that All Saved Freak Band had its own web site. And if you haven't heard My Poor Generation, you've missed some of the best vintage Jesus rock there was.)

To listen, you do have to sign up on Live365 with a username and password, and also tolerate the advertising. It's no more worse than regular radio, and if it annoys you, you can pay a fee of about $50 a year to get the ads removed. I'm taking the free ride right now, and believe me, it's a nice listen.

Randall Terry converts to Catholicism

2006-06-09T16:25:00.000-05:00

The online edition of World magazine reports for the "June 17" edition (even though today is actually June 9) that Randall Terry, founder of the well-known Operation Rescue has "left his evangelical moorings and quietly joined the Roman Catholic Church."

The news article (scroll halfway down the page) reminds us that that Terry, now 46, started Operation Rescue in 1987, nearly 20 years ago, was arrested over 40 times, and driven into bankruptcy in 1998 following multiple lawsuits filed by the abortion industry.

He divorced his wife in 2000, joined the Charismatic Episcopal Church, remarried, and now has 9 children (3 by wife #1, 3 by wife #2, 2 by adoption, and a foster child). The article says "He is seeking an annulment of his first marriage in order to receive Catholic communion."

A lengthy article in the June 9 issue of the National Catholic Register gives far more information about Terry's history, struggles, and personal life. Terry "entered the Catholic Church on Holy Thursday" (April 13) and spoke with NCR interviewer Tim Drake from Terry's new home in St. Augustine, Florida. Drake describes Terry's legal battles and the "string of 27 lawsuits by organizations such as the National Organization for Women, the ACLS and Planned Parenthood" which caused Terry to lose his home in 1998.

Terry reflected, "If I had to do it all over again, I would. The lives of these children were worth the loss. It's the cost of war." Terry's home was obtained through the fundraising efforts of Alan Keyes, who asked donors to "restore what the enemy took" by contributing towards a new home for the Terry family.

The article is worth reading for anyone shaped by Operation Rescue, as is this separate interview, where we see a different look at Randall's somewhat meandering and stumbling trek that led him into Catholicism.

Baby Got Book

2006-02-27T23:49:00.000-06:00

I just discovered this rap video. It's a parody of a more well-known rap song, and I found it both clever and cool. Worth looking at!

They call it "Baby Got Book." You can get the lyrics, too.

Firefox Web Developer extension

2006-02-26T15:42:00.000-06:00

I'm a web developer by day, and the most important new thing I've seen in several months is the Firefox extenstion written by Chris Pederick, named "Web Developer." It's a revolutionary piece of software, capable of greatly enhancing the process of creating (and deconstructing) web pages.

Right now, it only works with Gecko-based browsers: Firefox and Mozilla, and two up-and-coming browsers derived from them, Flock and Seamonkey. It doesn't work in IE (Microsoft Internet Explorer) -- nor in Netscape, so far as I know. But for web designers who use Firefox, it's the cat's meow.

The only thing that compares with it (which I have happily used for years) is the Proxomitron.

Download the new Firefox extension for free from http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/.

Open doors, pay bills with embedded chips

2006-02-14T13:20:00.000-06:00

I am not a kook on Bible prophecy, nor do I cater to conspiracy theories. However, my eyes are raised twice when the Bible's warnings about receiving the mark of the Beast finds preliminary steps to fulfullment within our tech industry.

According to this article from the Chicago Tribune for Feb. 14, 2006, the CEO of a security firm in Ohio has embedded a chip in his arm, as have two of his employees. The chips, about a half-inch long, grant him and his employees access to restricted areas. The reporter announces that "about 70 others in the U.S. have the devices implanted in their bodies, mostly for medical reasons--or because they work for VeriChip Corp., the Delray Beach, Fla., firm that makes the chip ..."

The privacy-loving Americans apparently lag far behind "about 2,000 patrons of nightclubs in Barcelona, Spain, and Rotterdam, Netherlands. The chips allow them to avoid long waits in lines and to run tabs at the clubs, which are owned by the same firm. Waiters scan the chips and a computer automatically draws the amount due from their checking accounts." Buying and selling food using embedded chips. Hmmm ... does this sound vaguely familiar?

The article reports that in October 2004, the Food and Drug Administration allowed VeriChip to sell and market these embedded chips, which use radio frequency identification to locate, identify, and record data about the chip's owner or user. There are also a variety of medical applications which can be exploited, according to the Tribune article.

Further corroboration occurs in this Associated Press news story which announces, "Two Workers Have Chips Embedded Into Them." Here you can see a photo of the chip at work. The article says "the chips are the size of a grain of rice and a doctor embedded them in the forearm just under the surface of the skin."

A small amount of research reveals a spate of articles on this:

The Hurricane Katrina tragedy is used an incentive for worried Americans to accept the chip. That way, they suggest, the bodies of our missing loved ones or fallen heroes can always be identified should a similar disaster occur in the future.

The security expert says "it took about 5 seconds to install it" into his right arm. His version does not emit a signal, and therefore cannot be used to track people's movements, but other companies are looking into precisely this application---say, to track executives who might be kidnapped when visiting foreign countries. Can we not discern the "signs of the times" in these events?

It is not the critic who counts ...

2006-02-05T01:59:00.000-06:00

While surfing today, I came across this quotation from a former U.S. president I believe is worth preserving and repeating:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Pennsylvania man recognized as God

2006-02-02T18:02:00.000-06:00

Paul S. Sewell, a 40-year-old citizen of Reading, Pennsylvania, has legally managed to get his name changed to God. Yes, really.

His driver's license (issued by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Transportation), his credit card, and now his voters' registration card (issued by Berks County Board of Elections) all recognize him by the name, "God." That's how he signs his name when he votes. Guess what? "God" is a Republican. (I've always heard the Republicans hit with that accusation, and now we have empirical proof.)

A news item published by the Associated Press says, "[Berks] County Solicitor Alan S. Miller said Sewell claims his 'God' signature is merely a legal mark like the 'X' used by people who are illiterate." Okay. I believe that Sewell probably did say something like that. But what possible reason is there for the County authorities to accept Sewell's pompous claim? This is self-aggrandizing to the hilt, pure and undiluted. What prevented them from having the common sense to reject this nonsense, especially since "In God We Trust" is our national motto, present on all U.S. currency?

I suspect that for his part, Sewell must like to hear people praying to him---"Oh God, please help me," "God, what's wrong," that sort of thing. I don't doubt but that this country is filled with megalomanics galore ... but why must our legal and political institutions cave in to their pretentiousness? *sigh*

If you find someone who has legally changed their name to Satan, and gotten a credit card, drivers license, and all the rest, send me the link.

Countercult Apologetics Journal

2006-02-02T17:52:00.000-06:00

Volume 1, Number 1 of the Countercult Apologetics Journal makes its debut at the Resource Center for Theological Research. Right now, articles are in HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word format but hopefully they will be normalized to HTML by the next issue.

The sheer volume of tasty theological essays, interviews, video footage, and audio archives this guy manages to find is amazing. Definitely worth a look-see if you're a Christian student or researcher.

90 percent of U.S. businesses in litigation

2006-01-31T08:23:00.000-06:00

From an article by the Associated Press on the new business of data-mining for litigation purposes:

90 percent of U.S. corporations are engaged in some type of litigation, according to research by the law firm Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. The average company bigger than $1 billion is wrestling with 147 lawsuits.

The companies that search corporate email, messages, and records are growing "at about 35 percent a year." The article also (shockingly) says,

This surge has led Kroll Ontrack to quadruple the size of its data-crunching center in less than 18 months, from a half-petabyte of storage to two petabytes. That's 2 million gigabytes. Consider that the Internet Archive, which aims to store almost every public Web page ever to appear, currently totals one petabyte.

Obviously, our culture has gone overboard with lawsuits in all directions. Stand aside, Internet Archive ... the lawyers are here! Read the full text of the article here.

One Lie to Rule Them All

2005-12-20T18:02:00.000-06:00

On surfing the Net, I found this page on One World Religion, and I had to give it coolness points for cleverness and nice design on a popular theme.

http://www.harpazo.net/One.html

Parsed Greek NT and Septuagint online

2005-12-09T22:34:00.000-06:00

I ran across these web links recently and want to spread the surprise around.

The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament done by the Jewish people in the 2nd or 3rd century B.C. It is the "Bible" that the apostles and leaders of the early church used, and is quoted often in the New Testament, differing somewhat from a literal quote of the Old Testament in Hebrew.

Here is a link to the New English Translation of the Septuagint, still in progress.

Even better, the page at http://www.zhubert.com/bible offers the Septuagint (Greek OT) and the Greek New Testament, with full parsing, live, online. If you can grok Greek, go there!!

At Hubert's page, hover the mouse over any Greek word in the text. Notice how the lexical form and complete parsing comes up. Click on the word, and you will switch to a "Word Details" page, showing word frequency and much more statistical data of how often that word (or forms of it) appear in the Scripture. Hit the back button when done reading. Then on the navigation bar to the left, select the "Greek" language and one of the Old Testament books, and you will see parsing in the Septuagint, also.

The only thing that's not "live" here is a parsed Hebrew Old Testament, but I'm sure that it's coming. What a great page for poor online Greek students!

Oldest church in Israel discovered

2005-12-01T14:01:00.000-06:00

According to this article from Reuters news service, dated Nov. 6, 2005, Israeli archaeologists have discovered what they believe is "the oldest Christian church" in Israel. The location was found while doing excavation to expand a prison. The remains of the structure is tentatively dated at around A.D. 250 to A.D. 320 (mid-third to early fourth century).

The church "was built in the style of a hall, and its mosaic floor contains geometric designs and an image of a fish." But more importantly for Christian theology, the floor also has "inscriptions in ancient Greek containing a reference to ‘the God Jesus Christ’ " (emphasis added).

This stands as one more proof that the belief in the deity of Jesus Christ is traceable to the earliest known Christian communities.

What is Universism?

2005-11-18T18:08:00.000-06:00

A description on their home page reads, "Uniting atheist, deist, agnostic, pantheist, and transcendentalist philosophy to create the world's first Rational Religion." Universism is the new chic way of being "spiritual" without being overly religious. As a religion of rationality, Universism stand against anything that calls for "faith" or precommitment to abstract, intangible realities.

Therefore, one should not assert that God/gods/angels or other invisible beings definitely exist. According to an article in the Birmingham News released on September 9, the Universist movement claims about 8,000 adherents who decry the idea of certainty and assurance in spiritual matters. They may be atheists or freethinkers, but the common ground they stand on is that there are no universal spiritual truths. (Yes, that's a self-stultifying argument. I know it already.) Their religion is one of flex, tolerance, ambiguity, and denial of absolute truth in spiritual matters. Their only dogma is the promotion of doubt and nonbelief.

Universism should not be confused with Universalism (the belief that all people will be saved or will go to heaven) nor with Unitarian-Universalism (a merger of two liberal 18th and 19th century denominations, which in some ways is similar to Universism). However, the Unitarian-Universalists deny the Trinity and affirm universalism, and for the Universist, that's probably going too far.

Founded by Ford Vox, a medical student at the University of Alabama, the Universist movement appeals to people who want some kind of religious expression, providing a sense of community that intends to help others, and an appeal for each person to "arrive at their beliefs through reason and personal experience" (from the short FAQ). Just don't come to any conclusions that apply to anyone else, because the ultimate booby prize is dogmatism.

Will Universism amount to much overall? It appears to strike a chord with those who want discussion and freewheeling conversation in an accepting, tolerant atmosphere. But without a coherent system of truth, they don't seem to have anything of substance to pass on to a future generation. Eternal skepticism will eventually have to give way to people who can offer hope for tomorrow, and who can base their hope on the living God who acts in history.

Anne Rice turns from vampires to Christ

2005-11-18T15:13:00.000-06:00

Anne Rice, prolific author of some 25 novels on witches, lust, and vampires (including the more famous Interview with the Vampire), has written a book showing a new direction in her life. On November 1, she released Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf), a fictional account of the life of Jesus between the ages of 7 and 12. It has received very positive reviews, and more importantly, it announces Rice's abandonment of the vampire/blood/death narratives which comprised much of her career.

Though Anne Rice, 64, says she has "no regrets" about writing her last vampire novel in 2003, she now says "I wanted to write only for Jesus Christ," and intends her new book to be part of a series. In fact, she says, "I feel Christ the Lord is the finest book I've ever written, and it represents the culmination of a long personal journey..."

The turning point for her came in 1998, according to some interviews. Rice also includes a lengthy "Author's Note" in the back of Christ the Lord, explaining some details about her new perspective. Answering common questions on her website, Rice explains that though she is now Roman Catholic, she believes the Catholic church and other churches "need to open their arms and their doors to gay believers."

I'm grateful to God for the growth in Rice's life, and how she seems to have made a remarkable conversion toward the Lord Jesus. We will have to differ on the matter of homosexuals in this respect: the good father of the Prodigal Son did open his arms to the returning young man, who had squandered his fortune with wild living. The text of Scripture says the son "came to his senses," which presumably includes realizing the damaging results of living in lust and sensuality.

Christans should pray for Anne, and though some of us can think of various ways in which she "ought" to grow or think, we should all be grateful for the profound shift toward God that has occurred in her life, and for the opportunity this will give to many people to consider the life and work of Jesus Christ in a new way.

Can Intelligent Design be falsified?

2005-11-15T14:13:00.000-06:00

In recent conversations, I have heard dismissive remarks about Intelligent Design because (allegedly) intelligent design "cannot be falsified." I agree that positions which cannot be proven false, not even in principle, are metaphysical assertions or presuppositions. The argument against intelligent design (ID) proceeds as follows: Falsifiability is essential to a scientific hypothesis, and ID lacks such falsifiability; therefore ID should not be given serious consideration by anyone claiming to support science.

I want to argue that Intelligent Design can be falsified, and indeed that it even begins and end with falsification. The ID claim is categorically different from certain religious movements in which no evidence imaginable could falsify their religion. (For example, for some Buddhists, it would make no difference at all if Gautama Buddha never existed, whereas for evangelical Christians, our faith would be falsified or disproved if someone could produce the body of Jesus Christ.)

My first encounter with ID came from reading The Design Inference (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), by William A. Dembski. In this book, Dembski explores the basic question of how humans detect the activity of deliberate events (or philosophically, "agent causation") as opposed to accidental or natural causation. Discerning "intent" runs through our lives since childhood. Did Tommy knock me down "on purpose"? How did the upraised tack on my chair get there from the bulletin board 20 feet away? Does this stream of binary data from a pulsar contain an encrypted or encoded message? Was this insurance claim filed to cover an accidental fire, or was the fire set intentionally?

Dembski presents an "explanatory filter" or sieve, a set of four questions which we put to an event or an object to determine whether the event occurred by intelligent design or by natural causes. If questions #1, #2, or #4 are deemed to be true, then "intelligent design" is falsified (that is, we can attribute the event to natural causes). If question #3 is deemed to be true, then "intelligent design" is validated (that is, we are justified in assuming intentionality). Let's look at these briefly. The illustrations are my own invention.

First, does the event occur through natural laws or law-like forces? Newton's apple falls to the ground because of gravity, not because of intelligent action. The needle on my compass points to the north because of Earth's magnetic poles, not because of angels pushing it with their invisible fingers.

Second, can the event be ascribed to the normal range of the laws of probability? If I toss a coin 10 times in a row and come up with "heads" seven or eight times, that's still within the realm of probability. Those heads should be ascribed to chance, rather than to being caused by supernatural intervention. If I get heads 10 times in a row, I might check to see if it's a weighted, trick coin, and if it is, then the law of gravity (test #1) would account for this row of 10 heads. If the coin is not weighted, a run of 10 heads is still within the realm of probability (specifically, 1/2¹⁰, or 1 out of 1024 chances). Thus, "intelligent design" can be falsified, since random chance is sufficient to permit this occurrence, however striking it might appear to be.

Third, does the event fit the scenario of both small probability and specified complexity? The subtitle of Dembski's book is "Eliminating Chance Through Small Probability" and small probability is the subject of Dembski's Ph.D. thesis from the University of Chicago. Consider this illustration: Suppose I ask you to pick up a stone out of anywhere in California at random. So you spend a day hiking through a very remote mountain range with billions of rocks, out of a state which has hundreds of trillions of stones and rocks. You pick up one rock and bring it back to me. (At this point, you have met the criterion of small probability.)

Then I give you a hammer and ask you to break the stone apart. You do so, and inside is a small piece of rolled up paper with your name, my name, and today's date on it. At this stage we also have "specified complexity" and you would be fully justified in thinking that this stone did not get into your hand by accident, but was instead the product of "intelligent design." Maybe I palmed the stone when you weren't looking, maybe I hypnotized you to pick a stone I pre-selected, or maybe something else happened. But whatever the explanation (even if you cannot come up with one), the presence of both small probability and the complexity of the personal message on the hidden paper gives us sufficient grounds to say, "This was not an accident."

Fourth, is there small probability without specified complexity? Let's suppose that the next day, you are dumbfounded about what just happened the day before. You go hiking in the California mountains once more, return to that same colossal rock pile, and retrieve one single rock out of the billions or trillions of other rocks. (You now have small probability once again.) You get out your own hammer, crack the rock in half with it, and this time find nothing significant inside. Since there is no specified complexity, we cannot attribute this event or object to intelligent design (hence, intelligent design is falsified), and by default we must write off this unremarkable rock as an occurrence of small probability.

Personally, I think this explanatory filter make sense, and that it does represent a valid means to determine whether an event occurred by chance or by someone's deliberate act (that is, "by design"). The ID movement fills out the implications in greater or lesser detail, and the ballyhoo over applying this logic in the science classroom is really over whether this filter ought to be applied to biological organisms.

In fact, the same science teacher who squawks about applying this explanatory filter to micro-organisms will readily apply this explanatory filter in looking for plagiarism! When two student papers look suspiciously alike, the combination of both small probability and specified complexity alerts most of us to the fact that one student has copied from another (or maybe, both students copied from the encyclopedia). Ironically, the same logical system which works to inform the teacher of plagiarism is excluded by the teacher from being applied to other areas of investigation.

No one objects to the principle of seeking intelligent purpose in the racist exclusion of minorities in hiring, or seeking intelligent purpose in how my credit card number wound up paying for John Doe's trip to Paris (hmmm.... probably not an accident). Stratified social groups and and individual people are clearly biological entities. I see no reason why ID should not be applied to other areas of investigation as well.

Your feedback is welcome.

How to link to a single Usenet message

2005-11-10T08:47:00.000-06:00

Usenet is a flowing river of information, with hundreds of thousands of messages posted daily, and sorted into tens of thousands of discussion areas in a sort of dotted hierarchy beginning with a general term (e.g., alt., comp., rec., soc., sci., and so forth) and then progressing into finer degrees of specificity, such as alt.religion.mormonism.fellowship.

Each message posted to Usenet contains a unique message ID, buried in the headers, like so:

Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: need a Unicode compatible Editor for Perl
Date: 7 Nov 2005 10:26:43 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <1131388003.052492.193900@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
References: 
NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.185.252.134

Using Google groups, you can link directly to that message using the following URL technique:

For the message alone:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=messageID

For the message in its threaded context:
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=messageID

So, for example, you can click these:

Sample single message or this sample threaded message

Nice little shortcut, eh?

Open Office 2.0 released last week

2005-11-01T11:46:00.000-06:00

Don't know how I missed it, but Open Office 2.0 was officially released on October 20. (I wonder if that was intentional? version 2.0 on october 20?) Open Office is a suite of programs that effectively replaces Microsoft Office. If you don't have Microsoft Office installed already, you can get virtually the same functionality of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access with o.o. Writer, Impress, Calc, and Base.

That doesn't mean that your Word macros and Powerpoint presentations will import flawlessly, since Microsoft doesn't publish the format for its document (.DOC) files. That said, to a large measure you can import Office files without pain and use them immediately. On a biweekly basis, I use Calc to open large Excel files (1000 rows, 40 columns), add things, search, and export them to other formats without any problems. Most of my experience has been with Open Office 1.9.95, so it's time for me to upgrade.

Open Office files are technically saved as XML format. Unlike Microsoft documents, the o.o. document format is an "open document" format, which means that programmers and external applications can read them. Open Office won't cost you a dime. Give it a whirl.

Why Time Travel is Impossible

2005-10-31T01:53:00.000-06:00

An interesting paper entitled Physics Has Its Principles explains why Time Travel, the Big Bang, multiple dimensions in the split second after the Big Bang, and creation ex nihilo are impossible ... or at least unlikely. The author is not a Christian and doesn't believe in any sort of creation, yet he is also a physicist who rejects the classic Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Worth scanning if you grok math and physics.

He's probably right about time travel being a physical impossibility, but that sure takes the steam out of a lot of fascinating movies, books, and "Twilight Zone" episodes . . .

D. A. Carson discusses the Emergent Church

2005-10-31T01:13:00.000-06:00

For those interested in the Emergent Church movement (shown by Brian McLaren et al.), professor D. A. Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School discusses this movement on Issues Etc. I've listened to the first portion and it's well-conceived and worth listening to.

Part 1 (Windows Media Audio; starts at 31:02)

Part 2 (Windows Media Audio)

Web searchers overconfident, underskilled

2005-10-24T10:59:00.000-05:00

According to an article published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, only 38% of the people who use search engines are even aware that there is a difference between search results and paid advertising, and only 18% of search engine users can always tell the difference between search results and paid advertising.

Now the scary part: 92% of Internet users feel "confident" about their skills in doing Internet searches, and over 50% of Internet searchers rated themselves "very confident" in their search skills. Ouch! Full details here (PDF).

Internet Addiction

2005-10-24T10:35:00.000-05:00

I knew there were Net addicts, but I didn't know that it had seriously been identified as a psychological disease. But here it is: Internet Addiction Disorder. You can also google for this term.

I also recall reading that in a recent poll of computer users, when asked if they would rather keep their web browser and lose every other application on their computer, or keep all their programs and applications but lose their web browser, most people would prefer to keep their browser and lose everything else. (Maybe it's because the geeks know that if you have a browser, you can also run an editor, a spreadsheet, games, listen to music, etc.) If I find the URL, I'll post it.

Proof that 1 = 2

2005-10-21T15:49:00.000-05:00

This is for my son, John. See if you can find the mistake:

         a  = b
         a² = ab
  a² - b²   = ab - b²
 (a+b)(a-b) = b(a-b)
       a+b  = b
       b+b  = b
        2b  = b
         2  = 1

So where's the mistake?

Paper-thin display released Oct. 19

2005-10-21T14:58:00.000-05:00

The Philips Corporation in Japan demonstrated the production of a paper-thin display. The display surface measures about 8½-×5½ inches (the size of a half-sheet of normal typing paper). The flexible display packs 100 pixels/inch (more than a Mac!) and is about as thick as construction paper. Oh, I'll let them say it:

Less than 300 microns thick, the paper-white display is as thin and flexible as construction paper. With a 10.1" diagonal, the prototype achieves SVGA (600x800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with 4 levels of grayscale.

That's pretty thin. For more details, see this press release, or these photos — they've even got them working in color!

Homer Simpson becomes Omar Shamshoon

2005-10-21T10:38:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's slashdot carried this story of The Simpsons being reinvented for an Arab audience. They are now Al Shamshoon. Homer Simpson becomes "Omar Shamshoon," obnoxious Bart becomes "Badr", and so on. Instead of drinking Duff Beer (good Muslims don't drink alcohol at all), Omar drinks soda pop. He gets glazy-eyed over Egyptian kahk cookies instead of donuts. And of course, Moe doesn't own a tavern. Here's the full story from the Independent (a U.K. newspaper).

The dialogue and dubbing is all in Arabic, but the Shamshoons still live in Springfield in the U.S. I wonder if they'll have Marge wearing a veil?