Category: General Page 14 of 116

Some of Kelly’s Chinese friends invited her to participate on their team in the intercollegiate statistical competition called Datafest. Kelly jumped at the chance. They are having a great time. Most of the teams tried to give themselves edgy names like Regression Session and I Regress, but Kelly’s team has, by far the best name, LoveData, picked by the Chinese girls. They asked her if it was OK and, of course, she told them it was fabulous.

She has two really big tests coming up next week.  In fact, both the NCSU teams have big tests, so they are ping-ponging back and forth between studying for the tests and working on the competition.  The other NCSU has all seniors and one junior.  Kelly’s team only has one senior, but he is not a statistics major.  He is kind of a ringer though because he has serious SAS skills, so LoveData is quite a bit of an underdog, but could surprise some people.

The other really big thing about this competition is that all the competitors get FREE FOOD all weekend long.  And I thought Kelly was in it for her love of statistics!

Day 579 of 1000

Lorena flies to Monterrey to see Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita.  I was thinking I would finally get a chance to drive the Fiesta, but Kelly needs to practice her driving for when she goes off to her internship this summer, so I got stuck again in the drivers seat.

Christian and I are reinstalling Windows 7 on a computer for Kelly in the NCSU Undergraduate Math Lounge in SAS Hall.  When we first visited SAS Hall, we kind of made fun of the lounge.  It seemed like a place nobody would use, but boy were we wrong about that.  Christian is here most days because it is so convenient.  You have to be a math major for your student ID card to open the door.

Meanwhile, Kelly studies for tests and participates in the Datafest statistical analysis competition with her team upstairs in this same building.  I hope to have some pictures of that here later today.

It is only just my opinion, but I honestly believe Mexican pizza feature the worst combination of ingredients of an pizza I have ever eaten.  I have been married to a Mexican woman for over twenty years.  She is the best cook I have ever met.  She does great Chinese food, great Greek food, great Korean food–you name it, she does it and she does it extremely well.

She even does great Italian food, except when it comes to pizza.  Well, that is not exactly correct.  She even makes great pizza if someone else picks the ingredients.  I am not saying the pizza in the picture is bad, but I don’t know that many Gringos who would make a pepperoni, mushroom, and pineapple pizza.

That is not even the worst of it.  In Mexico, I have eaten pizza with boiled egg slices and bologna on it.  I have even had a hot dog and marshmellow pizza.  It is somehow just wrong.  I wonder how this one goes down.  Actually, right now it is smelling pretty good.  I must be REALLY hungry.

Kelly is competing in Datafest 2013 this year.  I hope to get some updates aw the fun-filled “big data” weekend progresses.  Here is what it is all about from the Datafest web site:

It’s time for DataFest 2013! DataFest is a data analysis competition where teams of up to five undergraduates have a weekend to attack a large and complex dataset. Your job is to represent your school by finding and communicating insights into these data. The teams that impress the judges will win prizes as well as glory for their school. Everyone else will have a great experience, lots of food, and fun!

This is the second DataFest at Duke, and this year the event will be even bigger than last year, with participants from Duke, UNC, and NCSU. We’ll start the event on neutral grounds at SAMSI (transportation will be provided, see the schedule for more details), and return at the end of the competition for presentations and judging. This is a great opportunity to meet students from neighboring campuses with similar academic and intellectual interests, and get experience working with real world data.

This year DataFest celebrates the International Year of Statistics. Click here for a full list of Statistics2013 activities.

Day 578 of 1000

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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When we first started to think about college for the kids, we thought of a small, Christian, liberal arts college not too far from us.  We went to visit them and, based on test scores and a few other things, we were told Kelly could get a scholarship that would bring her tuition down to about the level of what she would pay if she went to North Carolina State University.  We thought that sounded great, but after further investigation, found there were some issues.  In addition to some hidden costs, we found that there were really no small, liberal arts colleges of any stripe that could provide the breadth of a large, national research university in the areas of hard science the kids wanted to study.

So our next option was to look at the local, national research universities in area.  We are fortunate in that there are three of those within driving distance of our house:  North Carolina State University, Duke University, and University of North Carolina.  Duke was out of our price range, so that left NCSU and UNC.  Christian wanted to be able to take engineering classes and UNC’s only engineering program is Biomedical Engineering which it does jointly with NCSU, so NCSU became the obvious choice.

We considered trying to put the kids directly into NCSU, but it seemed pretty overwhelming to drop a 14 year old and a 16 year old straight out of homeschool into a huge state university.  We are confident they could have handled it academically, but there were a lot of social challenges that made us decide to try the local community college for a semester or two before making that leap.  Our local community college, Wake Tech, is only five miles from our house, so we ran down there one afternoon to figure out what we had to do.

At first, we wanted to try to enroll them as dual enrolled students attending Wake Tech part time while we continued with homeschool classes.  We quickly found out that was not going to work so well.  Dual enrolled students had a very limited selection of classes they could take. We talked to other homeschoolers who had dual enrolled and they said it was actually pretty difficult for a homeschooled kid to get a dual enrollment class because, even if the school policy did not state it, the government school kids got first pick for what was available. In addition, if a student under 16 years old is dual enrolled, he has to have a parent sitting with him in all the classes he takes.  This would have precluded Christian from taking any classes.  Fully enrolled students under age 16 do not need such a chaperone.

All this lead us to the decision to enroll the kids full time.  This benefited us greatly in the following ways:

• The  Wake Tech tuition cost was roughly half that of NCSU.
• There was no chaperone requirement for students under age 16.
• All of the classes for which the kids met the prerequisites were available to the kids.
• Fully enrolled students register for classes before dual-enrolled classes so the problem of classes filling up before the kids got to them was diminshed.
• Wake Tech was a seven minute drive from the house while NCSU is a 30 minute drive.
• Professional teachers as opposed to research professors and grad students taught the classes at the community college¹
• The kids were continually told that Wake Tech STEM graduates performed better at NCSU than students who spent all for years at NCSU²
• The kids made good friends that transfered with them to NCSU and professors with whom they remain in contact

One of the big worries for both of the kids was about how accepting graduate schools would be of their attendance at a community college.  Now that they are both actively talking to tier one graduate schools, we have found those fears to be unfounded.

1. Purely anecdotal, but certainly true in my experience.  The kids had truely stellar teachers in Math, Biology, and Physics.  This was somewhat mitigated by really bad English and Art Appreciation instructors, but they also had excellent liberal arts class instructors in History, Speech, New Testament, and Literature.
2. Purely anecdotal.

Kelly took a class in Agricultural Marketing this semester.  It has turned out to be a great course.  There have been a bunch of free market guest lecturers, Kelly got to interview our friend Al Tripp about his life as a sales professional, and today, she is scheduled to give a talk about one of the best television advertisements I have ever seen.  The video speaks for itself.

I got an email asking me if I wanted to post an infographic they had made of some positive benefits that might be derived from the judicious use of a television.  I went back and looked at my old post here.  I was even more drawn to a comment by our old Sonlight friend, Luke Holzman who blogs here.  Luke represented that Facebook and Twitter are just tools.  The comment was a thoughtful one about which I am pretty agnositic right now.  I honestly believe the harm of a television in the home so far out weighs the benefits, I encourge people–especially people with children–to “Kill Their Television“.

I have to admit, though, that I am on the fence with Facebook.  I had an open Facebook account (I hear you can never really erase them) for a period of two or three weeks several years ago.  I hated it.  It certainly did not bring out the best in me.  Even further, I have to admit that I check out Lorena, my wife’s Facebook at least once per week to see what family and friends are up to.  I am also agnostic about Instagram and Twitter.  I have them even less figured out than Facebook.

So what am I saying here?  I am wondering if anyone could tell me how to use Facebook in a way that is comfortable.  How often should I read it?  How often should I write something?  What is appropriate/inappropriate for people of different ages in terms of what they do on it?  There are lots of different questions that could be asked.  I guess the real answer I am looking for is whether there is a way I could have and use a Facebook account as a tool in a way that is not creepy.  Is there a way I can use Facebook in a way that comports with my worldview and accrues to a positive good great enough to bother with the effort?

I really do not know the answer to these questions.  I am sure the answers are different for everyone.  I really do want to know the answer.

Then there is Pinterest.  Can a real man really have a pinterest account?…

Day 576 of 1000

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Christian’s entrance into college after the eight grade at 14 years old was a result of his performance on three tests.

• Test 1:  A friend told us about the Duke TIP program where the ACT or SAT college entrance exams are given to high performing seventh graders to determine whether they are good candidates for early entry into college.  We checked with the North Carolina Department of Non-public Education and found that the ACT is one of the tests accepted as a yearly, nationally normed, standardized test for homeschoolers.  Christian took the ACT as a seventh grader and received a 23 composite score.  A lot of people scored higher than Christian, but it was still pretty good–sufficient to earn him state-wide honors in all the test categories and a medal from the TIP program.  This score was high enough for him to enter Wake Tech Community College.  It gave us the confidence that Christian was getting close to the place where he could perform well in college.
• Test 2:  When Christian took the ACT mid-way through his eighth grade year, his composite score jumped up to 27.  This was good enough to get him into North Carolina State University if he wanted to go there.  We thought he was a little too young to think about that when he was in the ninth grade, but he had the option.

After the second good ACT, Lorena and I decided we would go ahead and put Christian into Wake Technical Community College as a dual enrolled student.  The plan was to put Kelly there full time as she had gotten a smoking good score on the ACT.  When we checked with the school, we found that students under the age of 16 had to have a parent with them, actually sitting with them everyday in class, if they were dual enrolled in the community college and high school at the same time.  We were very frustrated trying to figure out how to do that when we decided to find out if a full enrolled student had to have such a chaperone.  They did not, so we used Christian’s CLEP score, made up a transcript of his homeschool work, and enrolled him full time.

• Test 3:  The school required new students to take a math placement test.  Christian was only half way through his Precalculus studies at the time he took the placement test, but he got a high enough score to place him into first semester Calculus.

This was huge for both Kelly and Christian because it meant that they could take their math classes together.  We did not know it at the time, but it turned out to be a huge social benefit to the both of them.  They made several good friends including to Venzuelans, an Iraq war vet, and an amazing math professor in their math classes.  It also allowed Christian to get through all the math sequences he needed without any summer classes and still graduate on schedule in four years.  Since Christian was now a fully enrolled student, we decided to get him a light, but full time schedule of 13 credits.  He did well enough on those 13 credits that we let him keep going.  At the time of this writing, Christian is a 17 year old senior in Applied Mathematics with a minor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NCSU.  He is still scheduled to graduate on schedule in the Spring of 2014 when he is 18.

I want to reiterate that we honestly do not believe Christian got to where he is because of any special talents unless you count tenacity as a talent.  We helped him build his early reading, writing, and math skills, then helped him with the early parts of the planning for his degree.  We rarely do anything for him any more with respect to his school other then help him pay bills and drive him a few places.  He does all the class planning, meetings with advisors. undergraduate research, graduate school planning, and graduation planning.

Day 575 of 1000

This is the third in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Kelly’s path to college started when she was 13 years old and she took her first CLEP test.  She got a 68 on the Freshman College Composition test.  A 50 is required to receive college credit.  I have written a series of posts on how we used CLEP to organize and assure good depth of coverage for some of our homeschool classes.  At the time, we did not really think of these tests as something that might contribute to Kelly’s early entrance into college.  That did not happen until we enrolled her in the local community college full time at age sixteen.  We found that the 44 hours of CLEP credit accepted by the community college meant she only needed one more semester to graduate with a college transfer Associate of Science degree.

We could have graduated here from community college and sent her straight on to NCSU where she could have graduated 3½ years early, but only if she wanted a liberal arts degree.  There were several reasons we did not do that.  First, she was young and the community college environment was not so overwhelming as the much larger NCSU.  Kelly and Christian entered Wake Tech Community College at the same time and took most of their classes together so they were not completely on their own.

Second, we wanted Kelly to get a hard degree rather than just a liberal arts or business degree.  Our thinking was that since she was so young, she could get a masters degree in liberal arts or continue with something harder after she finished her undergraduate degree.  A hard, math-oriented degree is a better base for almost everything.  The problem with the hard degree is that she did not have the prerequisites she needed to get through the degree as fast as she could get through a liberal arts degree.  That is why we decided to leave Kelly in Wake Tech with Christian for the full two years even though she could have graduated after one semester.

We continued with a few homeschool classes in combination with the community college classes and used Kelly’s graduation with her Associate degree as her high school graduation.  She continued to take the ACT college entrance exam each year to remain in compliance with North Carolina law that requires yearly, nationally normed, standardized tests.  The last time she took the ACT before she applied to NCSU, she received a 34.  The 34 was a very high score that helped her win the Dean’s Scholarship for the Physical and Mathematical Sciences department when she was accepted there as a Statistics major.  Christian did well on the ACT, but nowhere close to a 34 as he was only an eighth grader when he took his final ACT exam.

Kelly is scheduled to graduate from NCSU in spring of 2014.  This is about a year and a half later than would have been possible if she wanted to leave with a weaker degree and spend most of her school time on her own.  We believe it was a very good move for Kelly to spread out her college over six years rather than just four.  She almost certainly would not have gotten a scholarship, but more importantly she is getting a broader education and will finish with a degree that pays more than average and for which there are a lot of jobs.  She will have many more credit hours than are required to graduate and will be well prepared to go on to a graduate degree in either statistics or a specialization area.

She should be able to complete all this two years earlier than the normal trajectory she would have followed had she stayed in a traditional school.  We have no illusions that we are are smarter than other people nor do we believe that we work harder.  We did not even plan particularly well.  We probably could have gotten her through more quickly with higher educational achievement, but that would have been at the expense of some loneliness and family time that we value so highly.  We are pleased with the way this all went particularly because Kelly and Christian shared the time together, made friends together, and were a great support to each other during the whole process.

The success of our plan probably had to do with tenacity and being the tortoise rather than the hare in the execution of our plan over many years.  It had almost nothing to do with any brilliance of planning, parental guidance, or brilliant execution.

Why would anyone ever want to go to a college where cows never wander around on campus?  Kelly took both of the pictures below in the Brickyard at NCSU today.  If they do n0t have an Ag school, it is highly likely they are not studying anything important.

Day 574 of 1000

This is the second in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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[Next post in series]

Our kids both skipped high school, but they took different paths to do it.  It would be nice to be able to say we planned those paths based on the kids’ abilities, desires, and needs, but that would not be anywhere close to the truth.  The reality is that, when we started our homeschool, one of the furthest things from our minds was the idea that it might be a good thing to skip high school.  We did plan some of the stuff that allowed the kids to get ahead, but a lot of things happened serendipitously to bump us along toward that end.  We did not realize that a move to college out of junior high might be a worthy goal until college was already upon us.

It is interesting that the kids had such different trajectories.  I think all of this started when Kelly passed here first CLEP test for college credit at age 13.  I have written a series of posts about how to use CLEP testing both for college credit and to assure the coverage of the homeschool course material is sufficient for future performance in college.  We used CLEP testing extensively with Kelly, but sparingly with Christian, the reason having mostly to do with timing that I will discuss in future posts on the trajectory of each of them.  The upshot is that Kelly received 44 credit hours for 10 CLEP tests when she entered the community college while Christian only received 18 credit hours.  When they entered Big State U (NCSU in this case), Kelly received credit for 23 hours plus foreign language proficiency waiver based on her ACT and CLEP tests while Christian received no credit for CLEP, but got the foreign language proficiency waiver.

The 23 credit hours Kelly received gave her a huge leg up going into both Wake Tech Community College and NCSU.  She was able to schedule more elective courses and take light loads that allowed her to do other things.  Christian had to focus hard just to get all the classes he needed.  In the end, Kelly took a little extra time to get her degree, but was able to win one of the prestigious Dean’s scholarships at NCSU and came out with a broader educational experience and an Associate of Science degree from the Community College.

A second thing that happened was Christian’s participation in the Duke TIP testing.  As part of that program he took the ACT (college entrance exam) when he was in the seventh grade.  He could have taken the SAT, but the ACT was accepted by the North Carolina Department of Non-public Education as a nationally normed standardized test with respect to homeschool.  Christian did well on the test.  He got a 22 which was sufficient for statewide honors.  That would not have been good enough to get him into NCSU, but he was only in seventh grade at the time, so it got us to at least think about the concept of putting him into college a couple years after that.

We are very happy with both of these paths.  I do not believe Kelly would have prospered as much if she would have followed a path similar to the one taken by Christian.  The same thing is true for Christian.  It would have been a mistake for him to follow Kelly’s trajectory.  I will try to explain why I think this is true en the next couple of posts in this series about the different paths each took.

Tom is a really nice guy, but that is part of the problem. I had my whole family convinced (and it’s true) that Wendy’s is truly fine dining.  We made the really big mistake of leaving our kids with Tom and his wife, Sharon, for a weekend.  They wrecked 15 years of hard work by taking them to a gourmet pizza house and some snooty sushi place.  Now the whole family is wrecked.

It would not be so bad if the guy was not so tall and handsome.  Every time I see his full head of hair it makes me want to gag.  Today he took us to a French restaurant to eat Quiche Lorraine, Monte Cristo sandwiches, and Beignet pastries.  They were really good, but there is no way I am going to admit that in public.

Day 573 of 1000

We bought tickets for Lorena to visit her father and mother in Monterrey for a week at the end of the month.  Her grandmother Rosenda (Lauro’s mother) is 96 years old and Lorena needs to see her.  We would all like to go, but we cannot afford to miss the work and school.  We hope to get some pictures of all the cousins, aunts, and uncles.

The rest of us will stay here and hang out with our good friends from Indiana.  We are fans of homeschool, but really appreciate this family who we belive really does it right.  I am sure my blog posts for the weeks following will be heavily influenced by the conversations we have.

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.