Year: 2013 Page 13 of 16

The drive down from Prescott to Phoenix was absolutely gorgeous this morning. And when I got close to Phoenix hotair balloons were everywhere. It was beautiful!

Day 571 of 1000

I will spend the whole day traveling today.  This has been quite a productive trip to Prescott, but I cannot wait to see my family again in Raleigh.

Day 567 of 1000

We had one of those company events that, on one level is enjoyable.  We had the chance to spend some time with the people with whom we rub shoulders all day, but for whom you have no idea how they live their non-work lives.  I work with some genuinely nice people and generally enjoyed myself.  At the same time, the venue of the event was a little out of my comfort zone.  The odd and interesting part was that, after dinner, one of my colleagues (and a pretty good guy) began to emphatically explain his ideas about “christianity”.  The reason I did not capitalize the word Christianity and put the scare quotes around it, is because his ideas were so far removed from generally accepted knowledge, even for most liberal scholars, that I was aghast.

The idea was that the so-called Gnostic gospels were contemporary with the New Testament canon and that neither the canon nor the doctrines of Christianity were established until the Nicene Council of 325 A.D.  The sad part is that Kelly and Christian ran into this same kind of nonsense in one of their (of all things) English classes in college.  It does not take a whole lot of investigation to realize that, using the most charitable take on this possible, these are fringe views held by fringe scholars.  It was a lively discussion and I promised to send him some references.  This was really not so much a discussion about Christianity, but a discussion about what we know from history about Christianity.  The following is an excerpt from a Tim Keller article about the DaVinci Code novel that gets the idea across:

Helmut Koester of Harvard has argued that the Nag Hammadi Gnostic-Jesus texts were written very early, almost as early as the Biblical gospels themselves. And Elaine Pagels, who did a doctorate under Koester at Harvard, has popularized this view in The Gnostic Gospels and the more recent Beyond Belief:The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

But this is very much a minority view across the field of scholarship. N.T.Wright says, “It has long been the received wisdom among students of early Christianity that the Gospel of Thomas…found at Nag Hammadi…is a comparatively late stage in the development of Christianity.” (New Testament and the People of God, p.436) The great majority of scholars believe the Gnostic-Jesus texts to have been written 100-200 years after the Biblical gospels, which all were written within the first 30-60 years after Jesus’ death.Why this consensus?

As N.T.Wright points out in The Resurrection of the Son of God, the early Christians were all Jews. Jews had a thoroughly different world-view than that of the Greeks or the gnostics. They believed firmly that this material world was made good (see Genesis!) and that despite sin God was going to renew it and resurrect our bodies (Daniel 12:1-2.) Jews had no hope (or concept) of disembodied souls living apart from the body.What does this mean? We know from the Pauline letters, some written only 13 years after Jesus’ death, that all the early Christians claimed to have met Jesus and that he was still alive. But it would have been impossible for Jewish believers to claim “Jesus is alive” without also believing he was raised physically from the dead.

Helmut Koester and others posit that the first Christians believed, as the gnostics, that Jesus was only ‘spiritually risen’ and decades later the idea of a bodily resurrection developed. But N.T.Wright shows that Christianity could never have arisen as a movement among Jews unless the original believers knew Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead.This means in turn that the attempt to create a Gnostic-Jesus must have been much later.The writings could not have represented an early but repressed true version of Jesus-faith.Wright asks: “Which Roman emperor would persecute anyone for reading the Gospel of Thomas [since it so closely reflected Greek thinking]?….It should be clear that the talk about a spiritual ‘resurrection’ in the sense used by [the gnostic writings] could not be anything other than a late, drastic modification of Christian language.” (Resurrection, p.550.) There is far, far more that could be said in criticism of the thesis that the Gnostic-Jesus is older than the Biblical Jesus. But I’ll stop here.

I will probably send him a couple scholarly volumes by NT Wright on what we know about this historically.  I think they might actually get read.

It is snowing hard and the wind is blowing here in Prescott.  It sounds like there will be a good amount of accumulation tonight and nasty driving conditions through the weekend.  From the National Weather Service:

Strong Winter Storm System to affect Northern Arizona today through Saturday.

A strong Pacific storm system will move across northern Arizona with periods of heavy rain and heavy snow through Saturday. Snow levels will continue to lower through this event. The Heaviest accumulations will be above 5500 feet with lighter accumulations as low as 4000 feet by Saturday afternoon. Expect winter driving conditions with slick roadways and low visibilities due to snow and blowing snow.

Winter Storm Warning remains in effect until 6 pm MST Saturday above 5500 feet.

Winter Weather Advisory remains in effect until 6 pm MST Saturday between 4500 and 5500 feet.

Timing: snow showers will continue in the mountains with snow levels lowering through the afternoon. Rain is expected to change over to snow in the Prescott Area mid to late afternoon. The period of heaviest precipitation is expected through mid evening. Lighter snow intensity is expected Saturday.
Snow accumulations: 10 to 15 inches above 6000 feet, 5 to 10 inches between 5500 and 6000 feet, and 1 to 5 inches between 4500 and 5500 feet. Locally greater amounts are possible.
Other impacts: slick roadways and severely reduced visibilities due to snow and blowing snow.

Day 564 of 1000

One of the silliest statements made about the first chapters of Genesis is that it is just a creation myth.  A blog that I read regularly reviewed a book titled The Bible Among the Myths that (pun intended) dispels that myth.  The review is worth a read and I plan to order the book.  Here is the section of the article that hooked me:

The Bible Among the Myths extends the question: how could they have been so utterly different from every other culture in history? For the contrasts are great. Oswalt identifies these common (if not universal) features of myth, in contrast to the biblical view of

• Cyclical time: there is a lack of definite beginning and no clear direction to reality (with no one to give it direction). The Bible speaks of history with a beginning, with progress, and with a destination.
• Nature symbolizing the divine. The Bible specifically rejects this.
• The significance of magic, specifically the use of ritual and/or manipulations of matter to cause predictable results in the realm of deity. This, too, is nowhere to be found in biblical religion.
• Obsession with fertility and potency, often expressed in religious (temple-based, even) prostitution of every base description. God is not sexual, nor is the religion he revealed.
• Polytheism: obviously not the case for biblical theism.
• The use of images in worship: expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
• Eternity of chaotic matter: see above; not so in the Bible.
• Low view of the gods, who are more powerful than humans but no better ethically; the Bible depicts God as perfectly holy, just, loving, and righteous.

There is considerably more: I would rather leave you wanting to know more than thinking you had the gist of it covered here. These differences in substance obtain in spite of certain similarities of form between the Bible’s account and others.

I have heard the myth goofiness a number of times, but I really never had a good response.

It was pretty painful when I had a close, non-Christian relative dismissively tell me, “Everyone knows the first chapters of Genesis are myth.  They fit the category.  Scholarship is clear on that.”

I did not have an answer then, but even in this short blog post, it is very clear the first chapters of Genesis do NOT fall into any reasonable definition of the category of myth.  I highly recommend the book review and plan to review the book itself here when I finish reading it.

Day 563 of 1000

I have always been an avid reader and a little bit of a news junky.  I read the newspaper at breakfast every day when I grew up in Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah’s house.  I think I must have started in about the third grade because we moved to Klamath Falls in the middle of my fourth grade year and I remember feeling a sense of stability after the move because I could still read the Oregonian.  I think it was a pretty good newspaper back then.  When Lorena and I moved back from Florida to Oregon, it was excited about being able to read the Oregonian again.  I was very sorely disappointed.  We signed up for an inexpensive three month trial because we were new in town.  Whatever we paid it was not worth it.  We found that, just like the NPR news shows, almost everything reported in the Oregonian was unreliable and had a hard left wing bias, so we quit taking the paper.

After that, I read the Wall Street Journal over lunch every day at work.  I also listened to the local news radio station and talk radio.  Of course, we did not have a television, so that did not fit into the picture.  When news become more accessible on the internet, I started reading that a lot, too.  In the early 2000’s, we moved to Albany, Oregon where there was quite a good small town daily newspaper.  It was really nice to have a broadsheet newspaper to hold in our hands or lay on the table while we read it every day, but when we moved away from Oregon to North Carolina, that was no longer available.  The newspaper here in Raleigh is truly abysmal–at the same level of incompetence and bias as the Oregonian and that is saying a lot, so we are paperless again.

Something really good happened after this last election.  Leading up to the election, I was consuming news at an elevated pace as is my usual course.  When the election was over it dawned on me that the vast bulk of the time I had invested in following all the election events was wasted.  Ninety percent of the “news” I consumed was trash talk between highly partisan factions of my own party with only ten percent real information that described what was going on.  At that point, I decided I was going to quit investing so much time on trying to figure out who thinks what about the news–they were ALL wrong on both sides of the political divide this election.

That decision improved my life dramatically.  It made me think about my stated world view and rethink (again) what is important in that light.  It has been great not to get worked up about the latest political outrage.  I still keep up on the news every day.  I even read two or three political blogs of the people I find most trustworthy and interesting, but I only do that once or twice per week.  My life is the better for it.

Day 562 of 1000

Kelly “the beloved” (she is always loved, but not always “the beloved”) was an absolute champion over the last couple of days helping her mother prepare for a Western Civilization I class.  She helped Lorena make flashcards, practice essays, memorize answers, and everything necessary for her to do well on the test.  She was also a BIG cheerleader.  We appreciate it a lot.  Lorena thinks she did really well on the test.  After the test they all went down to the YMCA to work out, then ran down to Starbucks to celebrate their hardwork.  I wish I could have been there.

I saw one of the most ridiculous bumper stickers I have ever seen on the way into work this morning.  It said, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”  My thoughts immediately went to Mary the mother of Jesus, Florence Nightingale, and Mother Theresa.  The statement does not apply to men either.  I think well-behaved people are the only ones who make any kind of history worth making.  I suppose it depends on to whom one conforms their behavior.  If the conformance is not to God, it is bad behavior.  I looked up the author of the quote.  The “scholar” who made the quote is a Harvard History professor who characterizes herself as an active feminist and Mormon.  It follows.

Day 561 of 1000

When I checked into the Marriott Residence Inn, they told me I had acheived “elite” status.  Now I am silver.  In two or three more trips, I will be gold and should hit platinum sometime this summer.  They did not have my previous room so they give me a MUCH bigger room with two beds.  Pretty amazing.  If I have to be away from home, this is not a bad place to be.

Day 560 of 1000

I drove up to Prescott this morning after arriving in Phoenix on an evening flight. It does not feel good to be away from the family, but we do good work and we expect to make significant progress ove the next couple of weeks. The kids are at home for all of spring break this year because I have to work and Lorena’s spring break is different from the kids. That is OK. Kelly has some excellent projects in mind and Christian can devote some time to his undergraduate research project. The reality is that they have been going to bed between one and two AM every morning for quite awhile. This is probably the toughest semester of their undergraduate careers. What the really need is to rest, get some exercise, and recharge their batteries.

Day 559 of 1000

The best Statistics columns in print and on the internet are currently written by a guy named Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal.  Both Kelly and my buddy Andrew pointed me to this article titled Data Crunchers Now the Cool Kids on Campus where one of Kelly’s classmates from NCSU was interviewed.  Some times Kelly has some trepidation about whether she started in the right major.  The further she goes the more that fear is allayed.  She loves statistics and she really is “getting” the material.  I think whichever summer internship she takes will reinforce this even more.

Day 558 of 1000

There is a lot I like about Steven Crowder.  Both the content and the style of his commentaries are just right.  He wrote an article that captures my sentiments about my wife. Fellow Oregon expatriate Smitty over at the Other McCain blog pointed out Crowder’s Fox News article and made some worth comments about it himself.  I highly recommend that men and boys read and abide by what is written in these articles.  I hit the lottery when I married Lorena and I want everyone to know that I appreciate her.  A lot.  It would never be a good thing to in any way diminish the profound improvements in my life that are solely due to her moderating influence and encouragement.  Every married guy in America should embrace this message for their own sake if not for that of their wife.

Day 557 of 1000

This is day 11 of not driving the new car.

Kelly and I went to lunch at Subway today. We talked to the owner of the Subway shop, a very interesting Persian guy that was a Mechanical Engineer who owned a fairly big, high-tech computer networking company that went under during the dot-com bubble. He started over with some Subway shops and it sounds as it is going great. He talked about his kids and how hard he and his wife work to give them a great education.  Both of them were at least a couple of years ahead in school.

Yesterday, we had some other of our friends from Oregon contact us about what to do to preserve your kid’s chances for a scholarship even though they would earn an Associate Degree from the community college.  They have done an excellent job getting their kids ready for college.  It is so encouraging to see people making these kinds of efforts and it is very fun to be their fan-boy!

The picture is of Kelly talking to a couple of people at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory about a summer statistics internship.  It sounds like a great job, but it is very competitive.  She could directly put the stuff she is learining right now to work in the real world.  They have a small statistical team that helps the engineers with experimental design, regression analysis, the use of SAS,and all things statistical.  There would even be opportunity to go on to do a (paid for) Masters degree or PhD.  We are keeping our fingers crossed.

I have been working with QT in combination with OpenCV for several years now.  I recently had the opportunity to download the new QT 5.0.1 toolchain and QT Creator IDE.  The latest stable release of OpenCV at this writing is OpenCV 2.4.3 which I already had installed on my computer.  I generally use the prebuilt binaries whenever I can and that is what I did this time, too.  I loaded up one of my work projects, but the stuff would not work together nicely.  Builds would run just fine outside the debugger, but I gdb blew up inside QT Creator.  I had never really had that problem before and expected to get it fixed pretty quickly, but struggled for quite awhile.

In the end, as is often the case, it was something pretty trivial.  It turns out that the prebuilt binaries for OpenCV 2.4.3 use a different MinGW exception handling library (dw2) than QT 5.0.1 (sjlj).  The upshot is that I rebuilt the OpenCV libraries from the source using this specific MinGW toolchain–the one used to build QT 5.0.1.  Of course you will also need CMake to do this, but after that everything worked like a champ.

Day 556 of 1000

This is day 10 of not driving the new car.

I read Isaiah 45 today.  The prophecy of Cyrus there is amazing.  I spent some time looking at the history of all this.  The finding of the complete text of Isaiah amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls dealt a further blow to those who have tried to ascribe authorship to several authors, at least one of which would have post-dated Cyrus.  This liberal theory is based primarily on the idea that it is not possible to prophecy the future and secondary on stylistic differences.  You can see images of The Great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIs^a on this page.  After having studied it some, the multiple author theory does not make a whole lot of sense to me.  Here is a pretty good, concise breakdown of the competing theories and why the single author theory makes the most sense.

James Goodnight, the founder of SAS has this to say about it:

I was accepted both here and Carolina, he said to a crowd that included N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall. “And thank God I came here, because they have real classes here.”

Day 555 of 1000

This is day 9 of not driving the new car.

Kelly’s summer internship opportunities continue to expand.  She has a phone interview with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University up in Maryland for a position that is all statistics all the time.  We frequently talk about the difference between engineering/science commodity jobs versus specialty jobs.  Specialty jobs are much better in a field that is expanding.  Even though are a gazillion mechanical engineering jobs out there for people who can design and build a widget, there are two gazillion good mechanical engineers that have experience and want the job.  On the other hand, if you are very specialized, there might be only 50 jobs in the entire for your skills.  Still, if there are only 25 people who are specialized in that area, you are in pretty good shape.

I have a very specialized career in something called machine vision.  I got into the field of machine vision when it was a brand new technology and have stayed there ever since.  I tell people that people rarely need what I do, but when they need it, the need can get pretty desparate because there are not many people who have deep experience in my specialization.  The entire field of analytics and statistics feels like machine vision in its early days.  I know that because I have started running into to problems that are very difficult to solve using deterministic or simple stochastic methods.  Answers need to be extracted from very large data sets using sophisticated statistcal techniques.  There are LOTS of these kinds of problems in every field imaginable.  There are not enough statisticians being graduated from universities.

I think Kelly is in a pretty good place right now.  This is fun to watch because Kelly is a statistician, but pretty painful in my day job when the deep statistical skills we need are not available.