We went to the NCSU Hill Library to study yesterday as normal. Lorena went shopping, then came back to pick us up at about 3:30 PM. We drove home, passing a restaurant at about 3:45 on South Saunders St. that was destroyed–completely flattened–by a tornado at 4:00. We did not know that anything was even happening until the elder from our church called us (along with everyone else–thank you Tom) to see if we were OK. You can check out some video of the damage here.
Month: April 2011
I stayed home from work Tuesday through Thursday so the same bug that fell our whole family would not fell everyone in the office at work. The flu is a real pain in the neck. In the middle of all that I needed to get my taxes out. After working like a maniac to get it all done, I found they are not due this year until April 18. The normal day, April 15, is an obscure holiday in Washington D.C. this year, so the whole country gets a three day reprieve. Well, now it is out of the way and I do not have to worry about it.
My plan for this weekend was to prepare and send out our taxes. That did not happen. Now I have to make time for that this week. Really, I have it ready to print out as soon as I get one more number from last years documents. I just need to pull them out and do it. Kelly did some babysitting last week and picked up some kind of a bug. Kelly was on the back end of a bad cold on the weekend, but Lorena and Christian got hit pretty hard with the same bug. We spent the weekend recovering from that. I have not been hit yet, but I am expecting it soon. In the meantime, I continue to work on the BleAx program. I have it far enough along now, that Kelly can start generating comic strip files for the restart of Betty Blonde. We are still a couple of months away from that, but we are already better off than we were before in terms of infrastructure.
There are now only three weeks left in the semester. The kids will be doing nothing but study between now and Cinco de Mayo.
William Lane Craig debated Sam Harris last night on the topic: “Is Good From God?” You can listen to the debate audio here. We were hoping for a better debate this week after the Craig-Krauss debate last week when Krauss showed up with neither arguments nor coherency. I would like to say that Harris did any better, but, if anything, he was worse. Harris has a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA and, supposedly, he has an undergraduate Philosophy degree from Stanford, too. If that is all true, there are a couple of things of which I am thoroughly convinced after that debate. There is no way I would pay for my kids to get a degree in Philosophy from Stanford and for any questions I have about the brain, I will ask Michael Egnor!
I continue to have a lot of time to work on my BleAx program lately because the kids are in the midst of their last round of midterms, semester research reports, and preparation for finals. BleAx is the program Kelly uses to accumulate her Betty Blonde comic strips. I have made a lot of progress on the program, adding new functionality, and making it easier to use. Posting here will continue to be light until I have finished the release version of BleAx. I also need to rebuild the Betty Blonde website. It is very much a mess right now. I plan to use the ComicPress theme in a WordPress blog, then add functionality to post newly accumulated strips from BleAx right to the blog along with some commentary. After we get Kelly drawing her strip again, we need to do a bunch of how-to documentation and videos on how to use BleAx. I will still post here now and again, but will bias my efforts more toward finishing these projects until they are complete.
We listened to the live stream of the debate Wednesday night between Lawrence Krauss and William Lane Craig while Kelly and Christian did their homework. Craig was his usual self: articulate, ordered in his arguments, gracious, and vastly knowledgeable. Krauss was wildly under prepared. Craig actually had to correct him a good number of times on issues of physics. Krauss really made no cogent arguments about anything, much less a lack of evidence for God. He made lots of statements about stuff that Craig has addressed in previous debates, but Craig had such a target rich environment that he could not get to them all. Craig, in his usual style, had a list of five positive arguments for his side of the debate question. He explained them thoroughly and listed the reasons they were true. Krauss basically said, “That is false” to a couple of the arguments and ignored the rest. He gave no disernable reasons for the falsity. It is always a joy to listen to Craig, but debates are always a lot more interesting if you are not debating a buffoon.
Thankful there is another debate on Saturday night at 7:00 PM EDT between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig at Notre Dame University. We are going to break out the popcorn and pizza again. I am hoping for a better debate, but after reading a little about Sam Harris, I am a little skeptical. I think he might even be as ill-equipped for this type of debate as Krauss. We will see. The only link I kind find to the debate so fare is on facebook here. The debate is supposed to be live streamed so I will put up the link on this post as soon as (and if) I find it.