Seeing In A World Full of Vision

Last Saturday, being the all-consuming celebration of freedom that it was, saw our group of friends parked on the beach all day.  We grilled, played games, threw the frisbee, and generally had a day of it until the darkness overcame our game of Cosmic Encounter and the fireworks began.  We also utterly failed at putting up a self-designed tent.  On the third, my visiting brother and I, decrying the evils of an E-Z up (the primary evil being its $120 price tag), declared our independence from such frivolities and journeyed to Home Depot to purchase materials used in construction of our own version of the snap-up shelter.  Made from PVC, fishing line, drip line stakes, and a tarp, this beacon of freedom would rally our partygoers in shared pursuit of the glory of thrift.  We’d get shade, we’d support the ideals of individualism, and we’d feel pretty dang awesome about our ability to back-yard engineer.  Nothing could go wrong.

Justice! Retribution! Pizza Rolls!

The other day, we had some friends over for lunch. Somewhere among the conversation, laughter, and food, it suddenly occured to me that there is a grave injustice in our society.  One which has gone unnoticed and unresolved for far too long.  Every day, hundreds of men, women, and children are put in a horrible dilemma where there simply is no right course of action.  Each of the two options has a negative outcome, and the victim of this Sophie’s Choice cannot help but suffer as he or she delibitates: Do I take the last party snack on the tray or do I leave it for others to eat?

And The Winner Is…

…VirtualBox.  Yes, I know this isn’t what you were expecting right after I promised you a rundown of my processes for choosing a GNU/Linux distro.  I actually played around with several different distributions while in Michigan, but was stymied in almost every attempt by VMWare Workstation or possibly by Vista itself (as opposed to, say, my own incompetence; at least that’s the story I’m sticking to)  due to some problems in allowing the guest OS to recognize and accept and use the NAT internet bridge.  Consequently I burned through five distributions in one week (I know, sounds horrible and negligent at best).

The order of business was as follows (yes, I’m aware that it’s GNU/Linux instead of just Linux.  Just pretend that’s what I’m saying every time.):

The Philosophy of Physical Science: Chapter 1

Currently Reading: The Philosophy of Physical Science by Arthur Eddington.

I think it was probably back all the way in December when I said I was going to start reading this book; it obviously never happened.  I got halfway through the first chapter, got called away on some silly errand and never got back to it during the Christmas break, then I had to go back to school.  I have picked it up again with the intention of working through it and posting some thoughts here.

Today: Chapter I – Scientific Epistemology

MSU, NSCL, M-35

For the next week, I’ll be in Michigan with my professor and research group working at the NSCL to do some data analysis and other research-y work.  We got in yesterday at about 4.30 pm, after which we drove from Detroit to East Lansing where MSU is located, moved in to our temporary abode at Marriot town suites, went out for dinner, shopped at Meijer for food, came back and watched the first episode of Firefly.  We are hard at work.

There’s No Place Like…

Well, finals are finally finished.  Today consisted of cleaning up residents’ messes (apparently a minority of people know how to read “remove all personal belongings from public areas”, so Armington repossessed quite a few things today) and driving back to Fresno, where I am now seated in front of a clunky old Dell PC typing this brief update.

As might be expected, post-fire Westmont is radically different from pre-fire Westmont, and the last bit of the semester was exceptionally challenging on many levels.  I might get into that here at some later point, but this post’s purpose is to put it in writing that this Christmas break I intend to to the following things..

Causality of Casualties

A brief update to my most recent post:

I am taking Old Testament this semester, so a lot of my thoughts have been directed toward those books and stories.  After the fire and the evacuation and everything else, I found myself thinking about the Israelites after being given the law, and specifically about holy war as described in Deuteronomy 20.  It gives an outline for how to conduct war – ostensibly if Israel followed God’s battle plan, he would win the battle for them.

I started thinking about the actual battle procedure though; even though God often won battles for the Israelites, is that to say that he did it without allowing Israel to incur loss?  It’s difficult to imagine that throughout all the fighting not a single Israelite died.  Then I read the following passage from Judges 20.  It concerns a series of battles between Israel and the tribe of Benjamin:

Fire

In case anyone has been living under a rock (not a bad place to be right now) lately, let me point you to http://www.westmont.edu/teafire.  Our campus was hit Thursday night by a fire, and while every person at Westmont is unharmed, we have sustained significant building loss and damage.  Anything I could say about the fire itself would be old news by this point, so please click over to the Westmont website to see what’s happened, what’s happening, and what’s going to happen.

Quick Blurb: Creationism / Evolution Debate

This post is basically a link to this website, wherein a debate is recorded between Karl Giberson and Ken Ham.

I stole this link from Alex’s blog, so thanks there also.

Cheers,

-M

Solitude, Bonhoeffer, and John 18

[Note: I wrote this before September 1st, but didn't finish it until today, October 13th]

As I said in my previous post, time to update has been scarce lately.  Owing both to Imprint, the backpacking sojourn into Mineral King which the Residence Life staff and RAs took a few weeks ago (already?), as well as to the rigidly organized and jam (or preserves, if you prefer)- packed training regimen of the past fourteen days.  There has hardly been time to stop and think, much less crank out a coherent set of paragraphs on any particular subject.