Year: 2016 Page 4 of 13

Christian heads home

By Dad

On Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Grauate text about Functional Analysis It pains me when I say Christian is headed home, not so much because he is going there, but that, after two years of graduate school away from our home–that of Lorena and I, his home is really his own and not ours. That is always a good thing, but leaves most parents with feelings of melancholy. We had a great time during his 21^st birthday visit. We ate a lot of good food, discussed life and its trials vigorously and saw our now grown son in a different light than before. He is his own man. We look forward to his next visit, probably Thanksgiving and have plans to do more of the same–hang out, talk, eat and enjoy our children as adults.

The book at the right was from one of his classes, Functional Analysis in the Math Department. He studied pretty hard while he was here in Texas. His other class is a hard, graduate level physics class, Quantum Physics in the Physics Department. We asked him why he took such hard classes. He no longer has to do that if he does not want to, but believes taking easy classes are a waste of time–if they are easy, he can learn the material from a book.

Parents of adult children — Christian’s 21st birthday

By Dad

On Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Christian's 21st birthday -- Labor Day 2016 Lorena and I are now, officially and with no caveats, the parents of adult children. We have pretty much been that for a couple of years now at least as the kids have been out of the house and on their own since they finished their undergraduate degrees, but it took us a couple of years to realize it all an now they are both adults with all the rights the law bestows and responsibilities the law demands. It seems like things are different now in a good buy melancholic way.

We are grateful Christian flew out to see us. We had a great time with him. He did not have to do it–there was a lot going on with friends in Arizona and Oregon the he missed to be here. We did some of the stuff we did when he was a little kid–went to the zoo and a museum–and a had a great time. It is fun to be at those kind of venues (although, it still seems creepy that they stuffed Trigger and have him on display), the best part being the chance to visit along the way.

Then, last night, we took him out to dinner and today he will be on his way home. His home. That is a good thing.

Bird’s of Prey at the Ft. Worth Zoo

By Dad

On Saturday, September 3, 2016

Lorena, Christian and I had a GREAT experience today at the Ft. Worth Zoo today. We say lions, tigers, gorillas, bonobos, alligators, crocodiles, penguins and only made it half way through the zoo. We highly, highly, highly recommend the Ft. Worth Zoo. The most amazing thing we saw, though was a small bird stalking–slowly and very, very cautiously sneaking, step by slow, slow step–a dragon fly. Christian captured the sequence through a very dirty glass window with the wrong lens and no filter. It still came out pretty good. The fourth picture is a close-up, right after the catch.The dragonfly is small in the image, but you can see it well right before the step in the log toward the left of the image.

Dragonfly stalk 0

Dragonfly stalk 1

Dragonfly stalk 2

Dragonfly stalk 3

Dragonfly stalk 4

Dragonfly stalk 5

The homework never ends

By Dad

On Friday, September 2, 2016

Christian's last weekend as a twenty year old Christian got on an airplane a little after midnight on Wednesday to arrive here in Texas at five in the morning yesterday. He is here to celebrate his last weekend as a twenty year old. He got now sleep last night, but had a homework assignment due at three (Texas time), so he did not get to go to bed until yesterday afternoon. The crazy part is that, the problem he was required to solve assumed some things that were not stated in the problem and that mathematicians can never assume. He ended up writing a note to the professor to say how he just did not know how to solve the problem “generally.” The professor wrote back and said he never intended for the problem to be solved generally, just in some important cases. So Christian, in the time-honored tradition of graduate students everywhere, got to waste a night solving a problem that was unsolvable based on the incomplete information provided in the problem statement.

Social status and Tom Wolfe’s take on Chomsky and Darwin

By Dad

On Wednesday, August 31, 2016

In culture, Science

I wonder whether I would really like Tom Wolfe very much in real life. I have always suspected I might not, but I very well could be wrong. My take on his writing is that he finds subjects that people out of vogue have screamed about for years, then very cleverly writes about those “insightful” things and gets many public accolades and lots of money. Don’t get me wrong, I think he is providing a great service and it is a good gig if you can get it. He started doing this with Radical Chic and has had many successes leading up to his latest take on the self-satisfied Noam Chomsky’s ownership of the “right” way to think about linguistics. David Klinghoffer does a stellar job of explaining it all in his post at ENV titled In The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe Tells the Story of Evolution’s Epic Tumble. My favorite part of the article explains Wolfe’s game, seemingly every time he plays it–and it is a good game–exposing the pretensions of pretentious people:

Wolfe frames his story in terms of two pairs of rivals or doppelgängers — Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, on one hand, and linguists Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett on the other. As in every other book of his that I’ve read, Wolfe is sharply attuned to matters of status, rank, class — which explain so much not only in fashion or politics but in the history of ideas. In both of these pairs of scientists, one is the established figure, the man of rank and prestige (Darwin, Chomsky), while he was overtaken and nearly knocked from his pedestal by a field researcher of lesser cachet (Wallace, Everett), a “flycatcher” in Wolfe’s phrase.

Chomsky and Darwin “won” the game of science, not because they were right but because they had social, pop cultural cachet. I think that is exactly right. I think Wolfe has earned his place in society partly because he is such an engaging writer, but even more so because he, too, has the social, pop cultural cachet to not only say the emperor has no clothes, but to get people to actually listen to and consider the idea. That is something a lot of people knew all along. They are mostly people who live in fly-over country and attended Big State U. as opposed to one of the Ivys.

Beaglebone Black development — Bringing up a website

By Dad

On Monday, August 29, 2016

In Software, Technology

I got my we GaugeCam development site, http://gaugecam-dev.duckdns.org/, that I run from my home office on the BBB up and going again. You can see it here. It is pretty rudimentary right now, but I will start moving the new GaugeCam software there as I get it written. I am, again, putting up a list of the things I did to get there for my own self so I can duplicate it again and when I get to the next project. This post is going to be a list of links to a couple of videos and the stellar duckdns site that provides free dynamic DNS services for hobby and volunteer projects like this. So here is the list that got me up and running:

Beaglebone Black (HD) – Wired Internet Connection through the Ethernet Port There is another tutorial by the same guy that demonstrates how to do this wirelessly, too.
Beaglebone Black – Web Server Tutorial There are a couple of additional links in the video to how to great little tutorials on how to start from ground zero and setup up your Beaglebone Black.
DuckDNS Free dynamic DNS service with instructions on how to set up the service and links to how to set up your router to get to the outside world.

Lauro, a passion for art and Daniel Silva

By Dad

On Friday, August 26, 2016

In Art

Lorena’s oldest brother Lauro is a passionate painter. He spends every spare minute painting. We were in Mexico one year when he got sent to Paris by his company for leadership training for a week. While everyone else went out and partied after the daily meetings, Lauro went wherever he could find impressionist paintings. He eventually made is way down to an area frequented by impressionists. They set up their easels there on the sidewalks and paint. He spent hours watching and talking to them. Eventually, he bought a couple of small paintings that he brought back with him to Mexico.

I love Lauro’s passion for his art. I have been meaning to tell him about some novels I am reading where his kind of art and passion for art play a big role in the plots of virtually every book in a fairly large series. To do that, I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures is to ready spy and mystery novels. Several months ago I ran into a recommendation for one of the novels by Marvin Olasky in an old article in World Magazine:

Here’s my unconventional reading recommendation for high-school seniors: Daniel Silva’s The Heist (HarperCollins, 2014). It’s real: starts with the murder of a fallen British spy involved in the theft of great paintings. It’s a page-turner: continues with the efforts of Silva’s great hero, Israeli spy (and art restorer) Gabriel Allon, and a brave young woman who survived a Syrian massacre. It’s a proven reader-pleaser: This is the 14th novel in a series that repeatedly hits No. 1 on bestseller lists. And The Heist is 2/3 satisfactory regarding the “bad stuff”: no bad language or sex. Some violence—remember, it has spies and Syrian bad guys—but nothing grossly graphic.

And did you twice read the word “Syrian” in my last paragraph—a tipoff that The Heist will also teach students some current events and recent history? They’ll learn about 44 years of mass murder and mega-theft by the upwardly mobile Assad family that has ascended from peasantry to a $25 billion fortune, according to some estimates. Students will learn about bank secrecy in Austria. They’ll gain sympathy for Israel, a nation still largely aloof from God (sigh) but one deserving support because its citizens built and maintain a tidy small house—although one with broken windows—on a rough street of big mansions with loaded howitzers and unchained pit bulls.

Olasky’s must have similar tastes to my own as I have never been lead astray by his recommendations. There is a lot to like about these novel. I think Lauro would love them, not only because they are thrilling, page-turner, spy novels, but because the author is holds the same kind of passion for art as Lauro. One of the novels is even centered on Lauro’s favorite artist, Vincent Van Gogh. The author’s name is Daniel Silva and I was very surprised to see that his American. You will understand that statement when you have finished the first novel. The first book in the Gabriel Allon series is titled The Kill Artist.

Update: Lorena sent me the following picture from last night while I was reading Daniel Silva’s latest novel on my $33 Kindle with the help of Kiwi the remaining twin cat sister.
Kiwi and Dad read a Daniel Silva novel on the $33 Kindle

Impossible People

By Dad

On Wednesday, August 24, 2016

In Christianity

Impossible People by Os Guinness Os Guinness wrote a book titled Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization about what Christians should do in a world that has changed dramatically and mostly for the worse. Eric Metaxas lays it all out in an article to describe the change and why Guinness used the term Impossible People. He starts out by saying this:

In the opening scene of the 2001 film adaptation of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel whispers hauntingly, “The world has changed. I can feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it.”

Western Christians in 2016 can relate. Something has shifted. The world we inhabit seems to have become disenchanted, and so many of those around us have entered a state in some ways worse than atheism—a state of indifference toward God and the supernatural.

Then he goes on to explain in brief what Christians can, and I would say must, do. The answer is a refusal to conform and I think that is exactly right. The eleventh century stand taken by a fellow named Peter Damian is worthy of emulation and a very interesting read. What is required is not comfortable, but it is required if we want to both be right and have any hope for cultural redemption.

Update: I guess I should not be amazed that Marvin Olasky wrote an article a week back that could be a companion to the one written by Metaxas. It gives another example of what to do when caught in a culture that is diametrically opposed to your world view in very bad ways. You can read it here.

Last first day of class for Christian

By Dad

On Monday, August 22, 2016

Kelly and Christian NC State Day One Seeing all the little kids starting out in kindergarten and first grade on Facebook and Instagram, we started feeling a little melancholy when we realized Christian starts back to class today for what might be his last formal year of classes in the school year forever. Christian was sixteen and Kelly was eighteen at the time. We found this old picture of Kelly and Christian’s first day of school (their Junior year there after two years at Wake Technical Community College) at NC State. Christian is taking classes in Quantum Physics and Functional Analysis (Math) this semester.

I cannot believe I am a cat pictures guy

By Dad

On Monday, August 22, 2016

Kiwi monopolizes the office chair I think I have a very good excuse for not getting much done this weekend. Every time I wanted to sit down to the computer to get something done, Kiwi was already in place. The thing I realized when I first took this picture that with respect to the Internet, I am part of the problem. I cannot deny that I love to post cat pictures. Actually, it was a very nice hiatus from technology for a weekend. All I did was eat, read and do a pretty serious workout on Saturday. I am not at Lorena’s level nor do I ever expect to get there, but she is definitely shaming me into pushing a little harder. She did it again today and is well on her way to the next level.

In the meantime, I have new side projects stacking up everywhere. Now that I have my code running and a plan to get it pushed over to a BeagleBone Black and up on the Internet, I need to not let my other side projects get in the way so I can mark at least one more thing as done. I hope Kiwi does not steal my chair again next weekend.

Scientism and and the canards of evolutionsim

By Dad

On Saturday, August 20, 2016

Barbara King’s advocacy of the old canard that rejection of neo-Darwinism is equivalent to belief in a literal six day creation is a very tired meme. Her ignorance and intransigence on the topic surely appears to be willful, too, as evidenced by a couple interesting push-back articles. An article at Evolution News and Views (ENV) gets to the crux of the issue when they call her out for not acknowledging the real and growing scientific controversy about the veracity of our current understanding of neo-Darwinism:

She does not bother to rebut intelligent design. After quoting responses that talk about the freedom to believe and about learning all of the evidence, she notes, “So in response to these remarks and others like them, let me say it loud and clear: Freedom to believe anything one wants in the religious sphere is incredibly important.” But she goes on to state: “Science isn’t about belief.” King buys into the simplistic equation of science, whatever it may say at the moment, with “truth.” She accordingly dismisses the scientific controversy over neo-Darwinism.

There is another article at pjmedia discussed and linked in the ENV article that is also worth a read. King whiffs badly when tries to address the pjmedia article by ignoring the meat of the objections and talking around the edges. Both the pjmedia and the ENV articles are worth a read. In the meantime, it was great to get a timely reminder of the fact that there are huge swaths of knowledge and truth for which science cannot account (h.t. Stand to Reason and William Lane Craig):

Logical and mathematical truths – science presupposes logic and math.
Metaphysical truths – e.g., the idea that the external world is real.
Ethical truths – e.g., you can’t prove by science that the Nazis were wrong to experiment on Jews.
Aesthetic truths – beauty can’t be scientifically proven.
Science itself – science can’t be justified by the scientific method.

Homeschool continues to grow as the culture (and government schools) coarsen

By Dad

On Friday, August 19, 2016

In culture, Education

From an article titled Pressed By Common Core And LGBT Agenda, More Families Homeschool at The Federalist:

One major reason families homeschool is for academic quality. The United States spends roughly $12,000 per student on education, which is more than every other country in the world except Lichtenstein. While our math and science scores have improved slightly over the last few years, we still rank in the middle of the global pack.

In addition, LGBTQ activists have successfully inundated schools with their approved ideology inside sex education that starts now as early as kindergarten. With these problems in public schools and many families unwilling or unable to afford the cost of private schooling, more and more families are choosing homeschooling as an alternative. This ensures they can avoid educational indolence and moral apathy while picking and choosing what learning method, curriculum, and schedule works best for their family.

Every year my own homeschool circle increases and there are waiting lists for the cooperative classes we participate in—and I live in a state that boasts some of the wealthiest counties and highest-praised public school systems in the country. Data released last year from the U.S. Department of Education shows that “between 2003-2012, the number of American children between ages 5 to 17 who are homeschooled has risen 61.8 percent, and that the percentage homeschooled in that age range has increased from 2.2 to 3.4 percent.” Parents are pursuing a style of education they can control that will enrich their children, now with very little fear of the stigma that used to surround it.

This is a great article in that it talks about the normalization of homeschool and the reasons it can be a great way to educate one’s children and not just the reasons to remove them from the caustic government school environment that delivers a bad education. I think this article is just another manifestation of what people are trying to do to fight a morally and spiritually bankrupt culture like the one described in the post before this one.

Why America cannot be fixed through government/politics

By Dad

On Friday, August 19, 2016

In Christianity, culture

I just read a short review of a book that tells a specific story about the helplessness and hopelessness of growing up poor in rural America with a drug-addicted, single mother. The book titled A Hillbilly Eulogy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance sounds like it is a painful but truly enlightening read. This post is not about the book–it is now on my reading list, but I have not read it yet. It was something that was said in the review that captured a truth of which many people with a similar world view to my own have been reminded due to the trajectory of culture, politics and government today in America. It is about the source of our current problems and the direction from which the only hope for a solution can come:

The book demonstrates in spades that there is no simple statist solution to the so-called “plight of the working poor.” Vance’s experience shows that the problems in these communities lie far beyond the reach of the nanny state. Rather, broken people produce broken cultures and social pathologies. The only way to fix the culture and eliminate the pathologies is to fix the people. And that is the primary conflict of the book. Can people really change? Indeed, Vance’s own doubt about whether he himself could truly escape the demons of his past is one of the most poignant aspects of this story. It is clear that the problems he describes are primarily moral/spiritual in nature, and therefore so are the solutions.

The article has motivated me to make the effort to read a book that is sure to be a painful but worthy exercise. The review article will give you a sense for what you might be getting yourself into.

Nothing comes from Nothing. Something NEVER comes from nothing.

By Dad

On Thursday, August 18, 2016

Lots has been made about activist atheist Lawrence Krauss’s attempt to equate a quantum vacuum with nothing. Krauss was not mentioned by name in a post on a blog that is new to me named Popular Science in English and Divulgación de la Ciencia in Spanish. The author seems to be quite an impressive man with a long, very technical career as well as authorship of technical articles, musical pieces, poetry and even children’s literature. I am absolutely adding him to my list of blogs of interest. Here is his quote from the the article on “something” coming from “nothing”:

[Out] of nothing one can create nothing. Nothing does not exist, as we know since the time of Parmenides. As usual, nothing is confused with the vacuum. A vacuum is not nothing, because it has several qualities (space, time, energy, existence) that nothing does not have. Our current theories about quantum vacuum cannot be wholly correct, for they predict that the energy of the vacuum is infinite. Physicists solve this problem by a mathematical procedure called renormalization, a process that essentially involves dividing by infinity (which is forbidden by mathematics), equivalent to hiding the problem under the carpet.

Update: An insightful comment a day later from a blog that discussed the above post–

Even more basic, the quantum vacuum presumes quantum theory which is not nothing. In fact, all physical theories including quantum mechanics presume an existent universe of things. Physics is just accounting. It accounts for the correlation between things now and things later (or previously). It can not account for the things itself.

Live webcam app with OpenCV and Wt libraries

By Dad

On Wednesday, August 17, 2016

In Software, Technology

The purpose of this video is to show the status of my work on an application to process live video in real time from a webcam (or other camera) using OpenCV and the Wt libraries. I will try to get this up and running live on the Internet from my BeagleBone Black in the next few days.

Concept 2 rowing machine: Lorena passes the 11k mark on the way to 12k in one hour

By Dad

On Monday, August 15, 2016

In Exercise, Health

Must be the Olympics have her inspired.
Lorena Concept 2 rower: 11K in one hour

Pushback on Christian’s latest blog post

By Dad

On Monday, August 15, 2016

In Education, Software

Christian recently wrote a technical post on his blog about demosaicing of images captured with Fujifilms new X-trans sensor. He tested some methods to perform the demosaicing, wrote a first pass of his own demosaicing code and then posted about it all on the blog. That kind of thing is pretty interesting to guys who work in that area and/or have cameras. He got a couple of nice comments on the blog post itself, but what boggled my mind was that some guy wrote this over on Hacker News where his article got some coverage:

[sic] someone is wasting a [sic] phd scholarship to solve a problem that only [sic] exist because people keep dumping money on a company that damages their own product by now releasing source or specs?

What a tool. That is like saying people are wasting McDonald’s, Amazon’s or the local donut shop’s money to solve a problem just because the guy solving the problem happens to work for that company. PhD scholarship students are not slaves. Some of their time is their own. Beside that, Christian is not on scholarship. He is a Research Fellow and A Dean’s Fellow, so he is an employee, just like if he were working at McDonald’s, Amazon or the local donut shop. And who cares how the problem was caused. People have the problem and it an interesting problem. Why not solve it? What kind of a waste of oxygen writes a comment like that?

CoffeeSig web GUI

By Dad

On Saturday, August 13, 2016

In Software, Technology

CoffeeSig single camera GUI start I spent much of the day today trying to figure out how to use CSS to control the way the web pages look in the Wt application I am writing. This is the one I hope to use to learn how to capture images from 1-n cameras to the web with analysis in real-time. It is fun, interesting and frustrating all at the same time. The funny deal is the frustrating part is that it is difficult to get all browser types to behave the same way. I have decided I will just aim at Firefox and Chrome because they are the most ubiquitous in my little world. The companies that make those browsers have, in my humble opinion, very sketchy reputations, but that is another story for another time.

The next step will be to start hooking up the camera. I think I might go back to the license plate reader as my first application for this thing, but I am not sure yet. When I get a camera hooked up that is controllable from my local network with a browser, I will port it over to the little BeagleBone Black I have been running as a web server that does not do much from the apartment for quite awhile now. My buddy John H. from Arizona is helping with this whole thing. He will be a big help because we will be getting into some pretty serious 3d/time domain image processing here as we get past the one camera application.

Chronological snobbery and biblical archeology

By Dad

On Friday, August 12, 2016

In Christianity, culture, Education

"House of David" inscription Just a day after I wrote a post on The Veracity of the Bible which included links to articles about fairly recent archaeological discoveries that confirm the biblical record, Eric Metaxas wrote an article that describes the blinders worn by much of academia when they evaluate these kinds of new evidences. In the article, titled A Flood of Evidence, Chronological Snobbery and Archeology, he describes a concept using terms first coined by C.S. Lewis. The article starts out like this:

In his conversion story, “Surprised by Joy,” C. S. Lewis explains how his close friend, Owen Barfield, demolished his “chronological snobbery.” Lewis defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

In Lewis’s time, much of academia was already convinced that every past generation formed a staircase of progress, leading (of course) to enlightened modernity. And since Lewis’s death, many intellectuals have only become more convinced of their own perch at the pinnacle of history. These days, we barely even notice the snobbery.

Metaxas goes on to list some relatively recent discoveries with links to some great articles about what they mean with respect to the veracity of the biblical record. An example of one of the discoveries is described in a post on the same site about confirmation that King David was an actual, living breathing person (the famous Tel Dan Stele). There are additional links in and after the story to additional confirmations. Then he goes on to describe the silliness of chronological snobbery and how it dampens the acquisition of a better understanding of ancient history.

Balloon chasing

By Dad

On Thursday, August 11, 2016

In Entertainment

My buddy Bryan out chasing balloons this morning. I texted him way to early in the morning for him to be up, but he was out having fun. It is a great time of year to be up early in the Willamette Valley. Nothing like it. Envious.
bryan balloon 0 bryan balloon 1 bryan balloon 2

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