I'm getting closer and closer to putting K4JSU back on the air. My friend Joe, WA4ONV, told me about the relatively new Straight Key Century Club. We are definitely talking "retro" here. But when all the lights go off, the satellites get shot down, the hard drives fried, there will still be CW, "continuous wave", to keep us all in touch.
I know that's a great relief to all of you.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
No Sympathy in this Quarter for Microsoft
Yesterday, the WSJ had a front page article on the icy reception that the European Union's anti-trust chief, Neelie Kroes, is giving to Microsoft's announcement that it is sharing a good bit of its code on the internet.
I have no brief for the EU and its unelected bureacracy generally, but in this case I have no sympathy for Microsoft. (Does anyone, really?) I have to deal with its clunky, complicated, and crash-prone (at least 3 times a day) software each business day. In addition to being difficult to use directly, it does not play well with other software, especially the core contact software we use, TimeMatters. It's really junk, really, really junk.
Go to it, Mrs. Kroes.
I have no brief for the EU and its unelected bureacracy generally, but in this case I have no sympathy for Microsoft. (Does anyone, really?) I have to deal with its clunky, complicated, and crash-prone (at least 3 times a day) software each business day. In addition to being difficult to use directly, it does not play well with other software, especially the core contact software we use, TimeMatters. It's really junk, really, really junk.
Go to it, Mrs. Kroes.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Recent Moments in Honor's Life
Here she is pretending to be "Doctor Honor". She is so copying exactly what her big brother does with the stethoscope. Maybe she'll grow up to be like Aunt Mary!
In these two pics she is dressed up in her party dress because she's hanging out at her little friend Paisley's first birthday party!
And here is a photo of her precious little shoes before she gets them all scuffed up. They look so "there's no place like home", don't you think?
And lastlty you see a picture that really captures her spirit. What a feisty and fun young lady she is!
Wow, Obama's Good!
Look at the exchange of letters between Obama and McCain about a bipartisan effort for election finance reform. Does this not sound a bit like the old nasty McCain and the smooth, unflappable, articulate Obama? The Repubs really have a fight on their hands!
Oh, Marvin, Give Us a Break!
World Magazine has gone to twice monthly issues instead of weekly issues, as of January 1. The idea is to cut down on postage costs while delivering a larger magazine. I think the editorial quality may have an increased as well, if for no other reason than that the editors must range a little further into the World to get their content and some diversity is added. As a reader of the magazine, I see it as a good change.
But Marvin Olasky, the Editor in Chief and a Huckabee supporter, is still Marvin Olasky. In reviewing Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, he questions, among other things, how
broadly [the author] defines evangelicals . . . it's not clear if and how many of his leaders put Christ above kudos. For example, his Bush-related list includes Karen Hughes, an elder in the decidedly unevangelical Presbyterian Church USA.
Mrs. Hughes is a member of Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin.
But Marvin Olasky, the Editor in Chief and a Huckabee supporter, is still Marvin Olasky. In reviewing Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, he questions, among other things, how
broadly [the author] defines evangelicals . . . it's not clear if and how many of his leaders put Christ above kudos. For example, his Bush-related list includes Karen Hughes, an elder in the decidedly unevangelical Presbyterian Church USA.
Mrs. Hughes is a member of Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
"Clay Jars Bearing Christ"
Carol and I were in Austin last weekend and we attended the Sunday Morning 9:30AM service at Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church with Walter and Morgan (Macon's family was recuperating at home).
Peter Haas, an associate minister whom we met last year at the PGF meeting in Houston, delivered the sermon. It was very, very good. The church posts recordings of its ministers' sermons, and this one is up. Peter does a fine job of explicating the scripture in question, 2 Corin. 4: 7 - 12, and then he follows on with readings from entries in his journal that he made during a week of his ministry several years ago. Those readings moved me powerfully.
Yesterday at our Men's Breakfast downtown, Austin asked me to outline Peter's sermon, and we had a lively discussion of the scripture.
Peter Haas, an associate minister whom we met last year at the PGF meeting in Houston, delivered the sermon. It was very, very good. The church posts recordings of its ministers' sermons, and this one is up. Peter does a fine job of explicating the scripture in question, 2 Corin. 4: 7 - 12, and then he follows on with readings from entries in his journal that he made during a week of his ministry several years ago. Those readings moved me powerfully.
Yesterday at our Men's Breakfast downtown, Austin asked me to outline Peter's sermon, and we had a lively discussion of the scripture.
Harbinger
The House of Representatives refused to extend the Foreign Espionage Act, provoking a letter from the Attorney General stating that the country "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers failed to act.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Democrats denounced the letter, saying the administration is "further politicizing the debate" even as it refuses to allow the extension of existing authority while the House and Senate work out differences on a complex new bill.
The Senate had passed the Bill in question, 68 to 29. McCain voted for that Bill. Obama and Clinton did not vote. (Florida's Democratic Senator Bill Nelson voted for it.)
The main issue seems to be whether to confer retroactive immunity from lawsuits on telephone companies who cooperate with the government. The Senate version confers that immunity.
A day or two before the Senate vote, Senators Dodd and Feingold presented an amendment to strip the Bill of the retroactive immunity provision. That amendment was defeated, but Obama voted for it. Clinton did not vote.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Democrats denounced the letter, saying the administration is "further politicizing the debate" even as it refuses to allow the extension of existing authority while the House and Senate work out differences on a complex new bill.
The Senate had passed the Bill in question, 68 to 29. McCain voted for that Bill. Obama and Clinton did not vote. (Florida's Democratic Senator Bill Nelson voted for it.)
The main issue seems to be whether to confer retroactive immunity from lawsuits on telephone companies who cooperate with the government. The Senate version confers that immunity.
A day or two before the Senate vote, Senators Dodd and Feingold presented an amendment to strip the Bill of the retroactive immunity provision. That amendment was defeated, but Obama voted for it. Clinton did not vote.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Francis Collins at Stanford
Frances Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, spoke at an InterVarsity sponsored event at Stanford recently.
“As we study the DNA of our organisms, we are looking at the language of God,” Dr. Collins said. You may care to read the whole thing.
Regarding Collins' religious views, this is from the Wiki bio, to which I link in the first link above:
In Collins' book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (published in July 2006), he considers scientific discoveries an "opportunity to worship." In his book Collins examines and subsequently rejects creationism and Intelligent Design. His own belief system is Theistic Evolution (TE) which he prefers to term BioLogos. BioLogos rests on the following premises: (1) The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago, (2) Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life, (3) While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time, (4) Once evolution got under way no special supernatural intervention was required, (5) Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes, (6) But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
We've looked at this before, especially by means of the link to the article by Cardinal Dulles, wherein he writes, in part:
Catholics who are expert in the biological sciences take several different positions on evolution. As I have indicated, one group, while explaining evolution in terms of random mutations and survival of the fittest, accepts the Darwinist account as accurate on the scientific level but rejects Darwinism as a philosophical system. This first group holds that God, eternally foreseeing all the products of evolution, uses the natural process of evolution to work out his creative plan. Following Fred Hoyle, some members of this group speak of the “anthropic principle,” meaning that the universe was “fine-tuned” from the first moment of creation to allow the emergence of human life.
A recent example of this point of view may be found in Francis S. Collins’ 2006 book, The Language of God. Collins, a world-renowned expert on genetics and microbiology, was reared without any religious belief and became a Christian after finishing his education in chemistry, biology, and medicine. His professional knowledge in these fields convinced him that the beauty and symmetry of human genes and genomes strongly testifies in favor of a wise and loving Creator. But God, he believes, does not need to intervene in the process of bodily evolution. Collins holds for a theory of theistic evolutionism that he designates as the BioLogos position.
Although Collins is not a Catholic, he approvingly refers to the views of John Paul II on evolution in the 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He builds on the work of the Anglican priest Arthur Peacock, who has written a book with the title Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith. He quotes with satisfaction the words of President Bill Clinton, who declared at a White House celebration of the Human Genome Project in June 2000: “Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”
Theistic evolutionism, like classical Darwinism, refrains from asserting any divine intervention in the process of evolution. It concedes that the emergence of living bodies, including the human, can be accounted for on the empirical level by random mutations and survival of the fittest.
But theistic evolutionism rejects the atheistic conclusions of Dawkins and his cohorts. The physical sciences, it maintains, are not the sole acceptable source of truth and certitude. Science has a real though limited competence. It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole. Far from being able to replace religion, it cannot begin to tell us what brought the world into existence, nor why the world exists, nor what our ultimate destiny is, nor how we should act in order to be the kind of persons we ought to be.
“As we study the DNA of our organisms, we are looking at the language of God,” Dr. Collins said. You may care to read the whole thing.
Regarding Collins' religious views, this is from the Wiki bio, to which I link in the first link above:
In Collins' book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (published in July 2006), he considers scientific discoveries an "opportunity to worship." In his book Collins examines and subsequently rejects creationism and Intelligent Design. His own belief system is Theistic Evolution (TE) which he prefers to term BioLogos. BioLogos rests on the following premises: (1) The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago, (2) Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life, (3) While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time, (4) Once evolution got under way no special supernatural intervention was required, (5) Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes, (6) But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
We've looked at this before, especially by means of the link to the article by Cardinal Dulles, wherein he writes, in part:
Catholics who are expert in the biological sciences take several different positions on evolution. As I have indicated, one group, while explaining evolution in terms of random mutations and survival of the fittest, accepts the Darwinist account as accurate on the scientific level but rejects Darwinism as a philosophical system. This first group holds that God, eternally foreseeing all the products of evolution, uses the natural process of evolution to work out his creative plan. Following Fred Hoyle, some members of this group speak of the “anthropic principle,” meaning that the universe was “fine-tuned” from the first moment of creation to allow the emergence of human life.
A recent example of this point of view may be found in Francis S. Collins’ 2006 book, The Language of God. Collins, a world-renowned expert on genetics and microbiology, was reared without any religious belief and became a Christian after finishing his education in chemistry, biology, and medicine. His professional knowledge in these fields convinced him that the beauty and symmetry of human genes and genomes strongly testifies in favor of a wise and loving Creator. But God, he believes, does not need to intervene in the process of bodily evolution. Collins holds for a theory of theistic evolutionism that he designates as the BioLogos position.
Although Collins is not a Catholic, he approvingly refers to the views of John Paul II on evolution in the 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He builds on the work of the Anglican priest Arthur Peacock, who has written a book with the title Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith. He quotes with satisfaction the words of President Bill Clinton, who declared at a White House celebration of the Human Genome Project in June 2000: “Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”
Theistic evolutionism, like classical Darwinism, refrains from asserting any divine intervention in the process of evolution. It concedes that the emergence of living bodies, including the human, can be accounted for on the empirical level by random mutations and survival of the fittest.
But theistic evolutionism rejects the atheistic conclusions of Dawkins and his cohorts. The physical sciences, it maintains, are not the sole acceptable source of truth and certitude. Science has a real though limited competence. It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole. Far from being able to replace religion, it cannot begin to tell us what brought the world into existence, nor why the world exists, nor what our ultimate destiny is, nor how we should act in order to be the kind of persons we ought to be.
Monday, February 18, 2008
So long, and thanks for all the help!
Mom and Dad just left Austin for the M-I-A-Yo. We were sad to see them go, as they were so very helpful with Honor. Especially since I've been sick for what seems like months between allergies and colds.
So, thanks very much Mom and Dad!
We're so grateful for our folks: first Kellsey's mom helped with week 1, and my folks for week 2.
(And now, Dana will be arriving to help us make it through week three post Appendectomy.)
So, thanks very much Mom and Dad!
We're so grateful for our folks: first Kellsey's mom helped with week 1, and my folks for week 2.
(And now, Dana will be arriving to help us make it through week three post Appendectomy.)
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